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When we speak of posthumanism we refer to the expansion of the “natural” faculties of the human being, and more concretely to the fusion between meat and digital technology …

According to Wikipedia a cyborg is an “organism that has restored function or enhanced abilities due to the integration of some artificial component or technology that relies on some sort of feedback”. For the essential author Donna Haraway “the cyborg is a figure born from the interface between the automaton and autonomy”. As blogger and author Plácida Ye-Yé explains for Haraway “the cyborg is at the same time what we are –carnality- and what we can be –future cyborg, emancipatory possibilities-” therefore “if our future depends on thinking differently, the cyborg offers us a transitory ontology for the present, an imagery that recognizes the process of constant redefinition that is going to suppose take on the new era”. Evidently this theories affect a large number of topics: technology, epistemology, politics, science, art, or feminism.

In reference to this hybridation between humans and communication machiens catalonian philosopher and UOC teacher Pau Alsina explains in his text “Humanism 2.0: Art, science, technology and society” that “the image of the body and the body itself are found in the impacts caused by the information and communication technologies, seeing themselves in this way propelled to the understanding of the new experiences that come to us”. This point of view includes –from the perspective of Derrick de Kerckhove – the creation of new types of human typologies identities, and sensorial experiences like: teleception, expansion, multiple personality or proprioception.

Continue reading “Towards a Posthuman Life” | >

What makes something red, or blue, or green? It’s all in the way light bounces off its surface. Something that primarily reflects light with shorter wavelengths will appear bluer, while something that reflects longer wavelengths will appear redder. By playing around with that principle, scientists have created a material that, much like soap bubbles and certain insect wings, displays a gorgeous iridescence—a shifting rainbow of colors they can tweak with the same surface.

Even more interestingly, the researchers made this material from common cellulose, the simple stuff that makes up paper and which can be extracted from wood, cotton, or other renewable sources. We’ve already mentioned scientists arranging cellulose fibers in a way that makes them appear incredibly white. But now instead of laying fibers, a team of physicists are molding cellulose films with tiny, regularly spaced impressions (like an upside-down Lego piece).

The outcome was a thin, single-centimeter iridescent film that reflects light based on the spacing of the dots, according to the paper published recently in Nature Photonics.

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“If you went to bed last night as an industrial company, you’re going to wake up this morning as a software and analytics company.” Jeff Immelt, former CEO of General Electric

The second wave of digitization is set to disrupt all spheres of economic life. As venture capital investor Marc Andreesen pointed out, “software is eating the world.” Yet, despite the unprecedented scope and momentum of digitization, many decision makers remain unsure how to cope, and turn to scholars for guidance on how to approach disruption.

The first thing they should know is that not all technological change is “disruptive.” It’s important to distinguish between different types of innovation, and the responses they require by firms. In a recent publication in the Journal of Product Innovation, we undertook a systematic review of 40 years (1975 to 2016) of innovation research. Using a natural language processing approach, we analyzed and organized 1,078 articles published on the topics of disruptive, architectural, breakthrough, competence-destroying, discontinuous, and radical innovation. We used a topic-modeling algorithm that attempts to determine the topics in a set of text documents. We quantitatively compared different models, which led us to select the model that best described the underlying text data. This model clustered text into 84 distinct topics. It performs best at explaining the variability of the data in assigning words to topics and topics to documents, minimizing noise in the data.

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You heard about the Anthropocene, a new geological era when what happens to the planet is determined by the activities of the human species. The Anthropocene started with agriculture 12,000 years ago or with the industrial revolution in the 1800s according to different opinions.

I propose that the Anthropocene will be over by the end of this century as what will happen to Earth is determined not by humans but by artificial intelligence (AI).

Amazon’s Alexa is a popular name for the personification of artificial intelligence, so I propose Alexacene as the name of this new era. Jeff Bezos picked a good name for their AI(exa) (he will prevail over you know who too). And Alexa is evolving fast; HackerEarth to Launch Virtual Artificial Intelligence Hackathon for Alexa.

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Researchers at the University of Notre Dame are developing a renewable energy approach for synthesizing ammonia, an essential component of fertilizers that support the world’s food production needs. The Haber-Bosch process developed in the early 1900s for producing ammonia relies on non-renewable fossil fuels and has limited applications for only large, centralized chemical plants.

The new process, published in Nature Catalysis, utilizes a plasma—an ionized gas—in combination with non-noble metal catalysts to generate at much milder conditions than is possible with Haber-Bosch. The energy in the plasma excites nitrogen molecules, one of the two components that go into making ammonia, allowing them to react more readily on the catalysts. Because the energy for the reaction comes from the plasma rather than high heat and intense pressure, the process can be carried out at small scale. This makes the new process well-suited for use with intermittent renewable sources and for distributed .

“Plasmas have been considered by many as a way to make ammonia that is not dependent on fossil fuels and had the potential to be applied in a less centralized way,” said William Schneider, H. Clifford and Evelyn A. Brosey Professor of Engineering, affiliated member of ND Energy and co-author of the study. “The real challenge has been to find the right combination of plasma and . By combining molecular models with results in the laboratory, we were able to focus in on combinations that had never been considered before.”

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Cutting calories by 15% may help protect us against age-related diseases, suggests a new report of a landmark calorie restriction trial with adults. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

The landmark CALERIE study reports that cutting calories by 15 percent slows down an aging metabolism and may help protect against age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, type 2 diabetes, cancer and other ailments. The researchers published their results on March 22 in the journal Cell Metabolism.

The researchers found that calorie restriction decreased systemic oxidative stress, one of the nine hallmarks of aging linked to age-related diseases.

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In the public imagination, the Amish are famous for renouncing modern technology. In truth, many Amish farms hum with machines: milk vats, mechanical agitators, diesel engines, and pneumatic belt sanders are all found in their barns and workshops.

The Amish don’t actually oppose technology. Rather, the community must vote on whether to adopt a given item. To do so, they must agree almost unanimously, says Jameson Wetmore, a social science researcher at Arizona State University. Whereas the outside world may see innovation as good until proven otherwise, the Amish first decide whether a new technology might erode the community values they’re trying to preserve. “It is not individual technologies the concern us,” one Amish minister told Wetmore, “but the total chain.”

It’s an idea that is resonating in Silicon Valley these days, where a debate over technology and its potential unintended consequences is cleaving the industry into rival camps—each with a tech titan as its figurehead.

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