Word: humaneness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...development of the kind of tools needed for this enterprise (microscopes, telescopes, thermometers, dividing engines and all the other instrumentation required for measuring the new data), disciplines split into subdisciplines and sub-subdisciplines. As a result, isolated in their intellectual silos, scientists and their technological sidekicks literally "reduced" human knowledge to myriad, mutually incomprehensible pinpoints of niche expertise. No matter how esoteric a matter might be today, somebody, somewhere has spent years getting a Ph.D...
This may soon become a thing of the past. As Ray Kurzweil observes in his essay (beginning on page 114), information technology may be on the verge of removing the nitty-gritty, time-wasting, reductionist noodling from the human diary, leaving us freer to indulge in what our connective brains are best at: using the information webs to run connective scenarios based on what options for change present themselves at any given time, deciding what direction we want to go in and leaving it to the reductionist programs of our machines to get on with...
...define an invention as something new, created by human ingenuity. It is not a discovery of a natural phenomenon that already exists. It is not merely a product of convergence, technology's latest buzz word used to describe the combining of existing technologies. Yet as our first two choices illustrate, the art of making two or more technologies work together often requires a new invention--even if it is just a complex line of computer code...
This isn't science fiction. The National Cancer Institute and NASA plan to spend $12 million a year for the next three years to develop nanosensors--devices less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair--that will scan the body for the molecular signatures of cancer--the aberrant proteins found on malignant cells, for instance--and map the locations and shapes of tumors. If engineered to carry drugs or genes, the sensors could treat cancers one cell at a time, attacking malignant cells but leaving healthy ones unharmed. The result: an end to the pharmaceutical carpet bombing...
SPEEDING UP THE GENE POOL INVENTORS: GAVIN MACBEATH AND STUART SCHREIBER Sequencing of the human genome may be the greatest breakthrough in human history, but it is just a beginning. To get to the good stuff, like gene therapy and hyperefficient drugs, scientists need to analyze the chemistry of 50,000-100,000 proteins encoded by our genes. But proteins are notoriously complex and finicky (a little heat or mishandling, and they break down like Scarlett O'Hara) and need to be treated gingerly in a process that was expected to take decades. Harvard biochemists MacBeath and Schreiber have found...