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The New York Times reports that the “ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.” Will this gap narrow even more as the pace of technological innovations quickens – as we approach "The Singularity?"

Whether or not you agree with Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the Singularity, the evidence that the pace of technological innovation continues to accelerate is hard to deny. “An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view,” Kurzweil famously asserts. “So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The ‘returns,’ such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth.”

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MIT researchers have demonstrated the first laser built from germanium that can produce wavelengths of light useful for optical communication. It’s also the first germanium laser to operate at room temperature.

Unlike the materials typically used in lasers, germanium is easy to incorporate into existing processes for manufacturing silicon chips. So the result could prove an important step toward computers that move data -- and maybe even perform calculations -- using light instead of electricity. But more fundamentally, the researchers have shown that, contrary to prior belief, a class of materials called indirect-band-gap semiconductors can yield practical lasers.

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New research published in the New England Journal of Medicine seems set to revolutionise our medical, legal and ethical understanding of people who had previously been believed to be all but brain-dead – patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS).

Most health professionals do not recommend further treatment for patients who have spent a year in a vegetative state: official advice is that the chances of recovery are virtually zero, and such patients were believed to have no awareness or meaningful cognition – to be without "thoughts, memories, emotions and intentions of any kind". But now, one patient who had spent seven years showing no signs of consciousness after receiving a traumatic brain injury in a car accident has recently been able to communicate with his medical team by having his thoughts read by an MRI scanner monitoring his brain activity. Asked to imagine playing tennis to signal a positive response, the patient gave the correct answers to a series of "yes or no" questions about his family.

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Time travel may in fact be possible, but it wouldn't work like in Back to the Future. (For one thing, you don't have worry about your parents failing to create you—you already exist.)

People all have their own ideas of what a time machine would look like. If you are a fan of the 1960 movie version of H. G. Wells’s classic novel, it would be a steampunk sled with a red velvet chair, flashing lights, and a giant spinning wheel on the back. For those whose notions of time travel were formed in the 1980s, it would be a souped-up stainless steel sports car. Details of operation vary from model to model, but they all have one thing in common: When someone actually travels through time, the machine ostentatiously dematerializes, only to reappear many years in the past or future. And most people could tell you that such a time machine would never work, even if it looked like a DeLorean.

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"IN MONTH XI, 15th day, Venus in the west disappeared, 3 days in the sky it stayed away. In month XI, 18th day, Venus in the east became visible."

What's remarkable about these observations of Venus is that they were made about 3500 years ago, by Babylonian astrologers. We know about them because a clay tablet bearing a record of these ancient observations, called the Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa, was made 1000 years later and has survived largely intact. Today, it can be viewed at the British Museum in London.

We, of course, have knowledge undreamt of by the Babylonians. We don't just peek at Venus from afar, we have sent spacecraft there. Our astronomers now observe planets round alien suns and peer across vast chasms of space and time, back to the beginning of the universe itself. Our industrialists are transforming sand and oil into ever smaller and more intricate machines, a form of alchemy more wondrous than anything any alchemist ever dreamed of. Our biologists are tinkering with the very recipes for life itself, gaining powers once attributed to gods.

Yet even as we are acquiring ever more extraordinary knowledge, we are storing it in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms. If our civilisation runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive?

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