After a three year hiatus, George Dvorsky has rekindled his futurist-themed podcast, Sentient Developments. The show serves as a counterpart to his blog of the same name and covers similar topics, often in more detail and with accompanying clips and interviews for added depth and insight.

The book's author, Jill Price, has a condition called "hyperthymestic syndrome" -- the continuous, automatic and perfect recollection of the minutiae of every day life. Price claims to be able to remember virtually every detail of her life since the age of 14.

Are you interested in writing for H+ Magazine? We are now seeking interns who are interested in writing thought provoking articles 3 times a month. You would be covering topics related to Transhumanism and interviewing scientists who are currently working to advance humanity.

People are seeking to become cyborgs whether through fashion, medical improvement, or any of the areas in between. As more and more people enhance themselves we notice that humanity is becoming something greater than we ever thought possible. We are evolving into a new species.

Our knowledge of how the human brain works is rapidly increasing and some people will use that knowledge to enhance their minds – to make themselves more intelligent, to feel permanently happy or to choose different aspirations. This will challenge the existing political order in many ways: Hyper-intelligent people will find it easy to dominate their relatively dim fellows.

With over 150,000 people dying every day, I hope governments would respond to the animal experiments by accelerating our journey to escape velocity through massively increasing funding for longevity medical research, because the cost of dying this year goes way up if it causes you to just miss out on the chance to live long enough to live forever.

Selfishness used to be a virtue. It was a way to advance ourselves in capitalist society. We were supposed to put ourselves before other people and this was supposed to be the gateway to success. Yet this was not the way of the future and many of us were in for quite a surprise.

Most of our holidays celebrate past events, or cyclical processes of nature – why not have a holiday to celebrate the future?

An overview of science news from the last week, and some older news items of interest. Includes news on nanotechnology, regenerative medicine, stem cells, and metamaterials.

Very small embryonic like stem cells (VSELs) are purified from adult tissues and are potential sources of stem cells for application in regenerative medicine and stem cell therapies. In contrast to embryonic stem cells (ESCs) their derivation does not require destruction of embryos and thus are non-controversial from an ethical point of view.

As computers begin to reach a human level of intelligence, some consideration must be given as to their concept of ethics. Appropriately aligning moral values will mean the difference between a contributing member of society and a sociopath.

Through the due exercise of reason, human thought processes can approximate rational thinking. Rationality skills are a prerequisite for humans to understand how the world works and in order to be able to make better decisions about how to act in the world. Progress in science and technology would not have been possible without the human ability for rational reasoning.

Contemporary biotechnologies, and especially emergent technologies, are taking art into wet yet nimble associations with science fiction, science fraction and science fact. Bioart and its subsets are working with genetics, cloning and hybridization, and its practitioners are “co-creators” alongside the gods, stirring up moral issues, and portraying the role of lab-technician, scalpel in hand.

The question of boosting the intelligence of animals other than humans, to the level of self-awareness and consciousness, is one that cannot be considered in isolation from the general process at work in the social and speculative movement known as Transhumanism.

Thousands of scientific studies have examined the possible genetic causes underlying brain/mind disorders such as schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, violence and criminality, and psychopathy. The more positive side of human behavior, with aspects such as altruism and empathy, has been studied much less – even though these are obviously much more valued from both transhumanist and typical humanist perspectives.

Are we on the verge of totally new social and economic paradigm brought about by the increasing power of computation in our machines?

This week has brought several interesting articles about human enhancement. Although much of this technology is still in the research phase, some tech is beginning to make it to the market.

As Claude Lévi-Strauss famously stated, “animals are good to think.” For the last ten years, scholars have been thinking about animals very seriously, particularly about the place of non-human creatures vis-à-vis the “posthumanities”.

The universal forces of evolution have acted on organisms to create e.g. metazoan multicelluarity and its attendant specialization of cells, tissues, and organs. Similarly, human social roles are differentiated, and there are many specialized human "organs".

When I first heard that the entire left was selling products under the Occupy name my natural reaction was disgust. I am very critical of liberals because I have experienced their hypocrisy on a firsthand basis.