Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Jersey scientists find a possible key to autism. Scientists at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey have found that children with autism are unable to metabolize "good" fatty acids due to the absence of a key gene, called GSTM1. The potential treatment is a kind of "therapeutic... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 3:14:11 PM      Google It!.

Recording Your Entire Life. Scientific American has an article on Gordon Bell's 9-year-long experiment of recording great swaths of his life on digital media. The idea harks back to an article by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, which arguably presaged hypertext and the Web as well. Bell, the father of the VAX computer and now with Microsoft Research, first published a paper on his experiment in CACM in 2001. The goal is to record "all of Bell's communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits." Storage requirements are estimated at a modest 18 GB a year, 1.1 TB over a 60-year span. Not a lot if the article's projection comes to pass [~] that we will all be walking around with 1 TB of storage in our portable devices by 2015. The article is co-authored by Jim Gemmell, who wrote the software for the MyLifeBits project.[Slashdot] 3:02:06 PM      Google It!.