Dubbed the most-complex structure in the universe, perhaps nothing is more mysterious, more enduringly elusive, than the human brain.  In the 19th century the ‘new science’ of phrenology promised to unlock the secrets of the human brain by studying the shape of a person’s head. A century later researchers started to look inside the skull for answers; the National Institutes of Health declared the 1990s the “Decade of the Brain” and federal money gushed into research grants, creating a renaissance in neuroscience. The results of that renaissance are just starting to emerge:  today’s brain imaging techniques allow scientists to map the neural circuitry of the human brain to within 50 nanometers; advances in brain-machine interfaces suggest a cyborg-like future may be closer to fact than fiction; and perhaps most importantly, modern paradigms of consciousness and behavior are emerging that suggest new insights into what makes us uniquely human. This week’s Friday Five looks at a small handful of projects and perspectives revealing the future of the brain.

Brainbow

The pictures look like stunning pieces of abstract art: vibrant multi-colored tendrils forming delicate branches of trees and tendrils.  Rather than an impressionist art exhibit, however, these pictures reveal brilliant bouquets of brain cells and are the highest resolution images of the brain available today.  Last year Dr. Jeff Lichtman and his team at the Harvard Brain Center developed transgenic mice with multicolored neurons using a new method that “paints” brain cells with a fluorescent protein, making visible individual neurons and their vast networks of connections.  Pictures of those mouse neurons, what Lichtman calls “Brainbows“, reveal an ethereal combination of technology and nature on the frontier of neuroscience. By color-coding neural circuits, researchers hope to create a complete a “wiring diagram” of the brain that will help identify the cause of neural disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s.  In this NPR interview, Lichtman describes the significance of brainbows for the future of neuroscience; for more eye candy, see this Wired gallery.

Augmented Cognition: DARPA goes Hollywood

DARPA’s Augmented Cognition program (”AugCog”) explores pathways to enhance human cognitive processes, particularly in the areas of attention and memory - a future-critical skill in a world increasingly characterized by information overload.   Most of the studies the agency funds have impenetrable-sounding titles, such as “Experience-Based Narrative Memory”.  But in this case, DARPA turned to Hollywood to bring the potential of augmented cognition technology to life.  The Future of Augmented Cognition is a short film directed by veteran filmmaker Alexander Singer that depicts DARPA’s vision of “AugCog” technologies in 2030.  Set in a command center tasked with monitoring cyberspace activities for anomalies that could threaten the global (and largely digital) economy, the film aims to provide both an entertaining and informative overview of the role AugCog technology could play in everyday life in the future.

Brain-machine interface

In 2001, electrician Jesse Sullivan accidentally touched a live cable, electrocuting him with 7,500 volts of electricity. As a result, both his arms were amputated at the shoulder. In the process of fitting him for artificial limbs surgeons took the severed ends of the nerves that once controlled Sullivan’s arm and rerouted them to the muscles in his chest. Unexpectedly, the nerves grew into the muscles and the procedure made Jesse Sullivan the first person to receive a nerve-muscle graft and use it to control an artificial limb. While there are numerous stories in the news today about the potential of brain-machine interfaces, this video from Pop!Tech 2005 tells one of the most remarkable and inspiring stories in neuroscience.

Promise and Peril: The Future of the Brain

The title says it all.  Most books about the future of the brain tend to be either science-heavy or buried in a deep layer of philosophical theory covering the dualism vs. holism debate.  Scientist and author Steven Rose balances the approach in Promise and Peril: The Future of the Brain, an ethically-aware, pop-sci look at how developments in neuroscience (including smart pills, brain repair and mind-reading devices) will change our understanding of what it means to be human in the future. 

Blue Brain 

The human brain is often described as a biological supercomputer, and the holy grail of computing has long been to make a machine that functions with the speed, accuracy and complexity of a human brain. But can a brain be built from a bunch of circuit boards and microchips?  IBM and Swiss research lab EPFL say yes: they’ve teamed up to create the Blue Brain project, described as the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain.  Blue Brain, as the supercomputer is called, consists of 2,000 microchips, each of which has been programmed to act like a neuron in a human brain and which together replicate “with shocking precision” the cellular events unfolding inside a mind. This SEED magazine article by science writer Jonah Lehrer offers an in-depth look at road to building Blue Brain, from the eccentric personalities (including project leader Henry Markam) to the technical hurdles (such as an estimated annual $3 billion electric bill).

I’m in DC this week, arguably the command center for the world’s most powerful military, the epicenter of geopolitical power (for now), a city where “war” is just another word for Monday morning. Like it or not, our cultural (some would say human) fascination with war is endless. While the average American would likely be hard pressed to name 10 elements in the periodic table, thanks to the US media and recent election cycle, most could easily tell you that we’re spending $10 billion per month to fund the war in Iraq and that General Petraeus likes oatmeal for breakfast. Now that we’ve elected a new Commander in Chief, what sort of wars will the leader-elect of the free world have to contend with? For better or worse, this week’s Friday Five covers different visions of the future of war.

Mind Wars

War has always been a boom time for science.  Since WWII when the military establishment and academia first got cozy, scientific advancements have flourished in the wake of war.  Government support of science has led to breakthroughs in war technologies (think: sonar and the atomic bomb) but also benevolent ones, such as penicillin and the Internet.  In Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense, Jonathan Moreno explores the military applications of neuroscience, providing a tour through some of the most provocative research that’s making the brain the most popular object of national security attention, including:  wearable robotics, smart drugs, “neural prostheses” and “rapid onset brain-targeted bioweapons.” Moreno covers both near and long-term technologies, painting a broad picture of how future wars may be fought, and importantly gives focused attention to the ethical dilemmas that these new technologies will create.

CyberWars

In May, seven NATO nations backed a new cyber defense center in Estonia, the ex-Soviet state which last year faced weeks of denial of service attacks on its internet infrastructure. The move marks new territory for NATO; as cyber-skirmishes increase, geo-political alliances must write new rules to deal with these emerging forms of conflict.  The playbook is wide open: should cyber-bullets be considered weapons of mass destruction? What constitutes collateral damage online? This New Scientist article takes a look the battleground of the future: cyberspace.  

Non-Lethal Weapons

Is the term “non-lethal weapon” an oxymoron on the battlefield?  Wired.com’s “Danger Room” blog reports on the development of a combination sonic  blaster/laser weapon that when deployed, would blast off a deafening and blinding combination of light and sound, or in military contractor lingo, a “psycho-acoustical event.” A new wave of such non-lethal weapons which ‘distract and disorient’ are on the horizon, touted by military experts as essential tools in peacekeeping missions and civilian-heavy battle zones.  Check out the Danger Room blog for more on ‘what’s next in national security’.  

War of the Nerds

In 2005 the secretary of the Air Force penned a vision statement for the future in which he vowed that the Air Force would “fly and fight in air, space and cyberspace.”  That statement was the force (no pun intended) behind the establishment of the service’s newly-formed Cyber Command, and its chief, Brig. General William Lord, is looking for a few good geeks to recruit. This Wired article (“Welcome to Cyber Country, USA”) offers a behind-the-scenes look at the new command whose mission is to prepare for a future where computers are weapons.  Says Lord: “We have to change the way we think about warriors of the future.  So if they can’t run three miles with a pack on their backs but they can shut down a SCADA system, we need to have a culture where they can fit in.”

Water Wars

India.  China. Pakistan.  Uruguay. Turkey. Iraq. Nevada. This is just a short list of the places that are hotspots for future (and in some cases, current) water conflicts, the threat of which has been heralded by academics and policymakers for years. Blue Gold: World Water Wars takes a different look at the source of these future conflicts. Based on the book, this documentary film looks at the privatization and commoditization of the world’s water sources by both corporations and countries.  Following the fight for water rights around the world, the film asks: is water a commodity or a human right? The answer today, of course, is both.  But by 2025, when more than two billion people are expected to live in water-stressed countries, perhaps the more relevant question is: what will it be in the future?  

Last year we highlighted five extraordinary women in the Pop!Tech community.  Well, the idea was such a good one we decided to do it again.  This week’s Friday Five looks at some of the amazing women that made Pop!Tech 2008 special.

Photo by Kris Krug

HEATHER FLEMING, Catapult Design

Some speakers use animated graphics to make their point; others rely on high-tech demos (or in the case of Kelly Dobson, repurposed home appliances).  True to her spirit of ingenuity, however, Heather Fleming introduced the Pop!Tech audience to the Hippo Project with the help of a naked Barbie.  Fleming, a 2008 Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow, told the audience that she followed what she thought was a straight-forward career path: she got a degree in engineering, dutifully worked for a design firm creating “stuff”, all the while patiently waiting for Martin Fisher to call and offer her job so she could do work that really mattered to her.  She never received that call, so instead she founded Catapult Design, where she’s using her engineering expertise to solve problems for the developing world such as low-cost wind turbines and innovative cookstoves.

Photo: Sheila Kennedy

SHEILA KENNEDY, Portable Light Project

Sheila Kennedy is an architect and associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She was a speaker Pop!Tech ‘07, where she first introduced the Portable Light Project: a non-profit initiative that’s creating new ways to deliver renewable power and light to the developing world by embedding flexible photovoltaic materials, digital electronics and solid state lighting in textiles, enabling people in the developing world to create and own energy harvesting textile blankets, bags and clothing.  I had a chance to catch up with Sheila, see the latest prototype (shown above) and hear the good news: that the Portable Light project was selected as one of 25 laureates in this year’s Tech Awards sponsored by the Tech Museum of Innovation.  (Side note: another one of my favorite projects, the Solar Electric Light Fund, led by two-time Pop!Tech speaker Bob Freling, is also a nominee).

Photo by Kris Krug

MARIAN BANTJES, Artist

I’m not sure how to describe Marian Bantjes.  She’s a graphic designer, an artist, a typographer, a writer … maybe a better word would be a modern day “graphicographer”.  The definition is fitting for one whose work defies convention, for an artistdesignergraphictypographer who brings letters to life, creating as one person described “thoughtful art and artful thought.”  She left the field of graphic design because she “didn’t want to spend her life making landfill.” That’s bad news for landfills, which will most surely never see the beautiful, inspiring and provocative works she does today.

Photo by Kris Krug

SUZANNE SEGGERMAN, Games for Change

Suzanne Seggerman thinks that digital games and teenagers have a lot in common:  both are just growing up and they are often misunderstood.  While 97% percent of all teenagers play video games, contrary to popular belief the two most popular are puzzle and racing games - not violent games as most would assume.  Seggerman is president and co-founder of Games for Change (G4C), an umbrella organization which supports individuals and organizations using digital games for social change. The website is a virtual encyclopedia of games that tackle social issues such as human rights, poverty, environment, global conflict and politics. Games like Peacemaker which challenges players create a workable solution for peace in the Middle East by becoming one of the leaders in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or Food Force, a game that helps players understand the challenges of dispensing emergency aid in war zones. Seggerman is steadfast in her belief that video games can change the world for the better by creating environments that teach young people to see complex social issues from multiple perspectives. 

Photo by Kris Krug

PRITI RADHAKRISHNAN, I-MAK

Priti Radhakrishnan is looking for a fight.  And not just any fight: the Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow is a patent lawyer who’s taking on some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies and demanding that they make their drugs affordable to developing nations.  Radhakrishnan is the co-director of I-MAK, a non-profit team of lawyers and scientists working to strengthen patent systems and encourage innovation in new medicines by challenging unsound patent systems globally. I-MAK (which stands for Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge) reviews pharmaceutical patents to strengthen patent examination, and selectively exposes unmerited pharmaceutical patents - which drive up the cost of essential drugs and prevent them from ever being accessible in less developed countries for poor patients. Radhaskrishnan’s team is working to create technical analyses of 100 critical medicines and patents, which will help preempt the granting of unmerited patents, increase accountability and ultimately make lifesaving drugs more affordable.

Perhaps it’s the constant ringing you hear - in your pocket, on your hip, in the car.  Or the fact that even a cursory look at the local mall or a city street seems to indicate that humans have mysteriously developed a new appendage, one complete with a dial tone.  Or maybe it’s the haunting realization that the way to your teenage daughter’s heart appears to be through an iPhone.  You may not have heard, but your surely intuit, that the world recently reached a tipping point. There is now one cellphone for every two people on the planet.

The mobile phone has been hailed as the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history.  As with any technology of this magnitude and reach, what follows is revolution - social revolution, to be exact. From fish farmers in India to mobile financing in Africa, the ability of the mobile phone to effect social change is one of the most exciting and important stories being written today.  This week’s Friday Five highlights just a few examples of the growing trend of “mobile activism.”  

Texting for Social Change - FrontlineSMS

In many developing countries mobile phones are not only far more ubiquitous than computers and landlines, in many cases they are the only means of communication.  Organizations such as NGOs rely on tools like text messaging to reach out to the communities they work with. FrontlineSMS is a text messaging system that allows a user with a laptop and a GSM mobile phone the ability to send a large number of text (SMS) messages; because it depends on cellular networks instead of the Internet, it will work in any country on any GSM network. In the first two years since its release, FrontlineSMS has been used by NGOs in 41 countries for a wide range of activities including monitoring elections and disease outbreaks, blood donor recruitment and the exchange of market price information for vegetable and coffee growers.

Mobile Phone Reporters - Voices of Africa

Launched in May 2007, the Voices of Africa project is creating a cadre of “mobile reporters.”  Armed with mobile phones, the reporters are known as ‘camjos’ (short for ‘camera’ and ‘journalist’) who use mobile phones to write, takes photos and makes videos about daily life in Africa on subjects they find newsworthy. Using the mobile phone as the reporting platform is critical, as many journalists don’t have access to the Internet to file their stories. According to the project site, Voices of Africa aims aims to “put Africans in a much better position to take part in discussions that have been taking place about their continent  for centuries without their knowledge and participation.”

Environmental Monitoring - MESSAGE on a Bike

This New Scientist article reports that cellphones used by bicycle couriers are monitoring air pollution in Cambridge, UK, and beaming the data back to a research lab. The project, called MESSAGE, is developing low cost sensors to provide data for the planning and management of environmental impacts in urban areas. Sensors are embedded on vehicles and people to act as “mobile, real-time environmental probes, sensing transport and non-transport related pollutants and hazards.” One very practical application: working with doctors to correlate their patient’s asthma symptoms with the air pollution around them. (thanks to Changeist for the heads up)

Mobile Acitivism = MobileActive

MobileActive is a global network of people (and their tools, projects, and resources) focused on the use of mobile phones in civil society. It’s without a doubt one of the most comprehensive and connected sites on the web documenting the use of mobile phones for activism and advocacy, featuring hundreds of examples, case studies and resources (see this Boston Globe article for a sample). Most importantly, MobileActive taps into activists around the world, connecting a community that is literally creating social change one cell phone at a time.  For anyone interested in following the emerging trend of mobile activism from the ground up, the organization’s news aggregator and del.icio.us feeds are must-reads.

“Socially Networked Consumption” - CarrotMob

What if the most important step you could take to help solve the world’s most challenging problems was to drop into the corner store on a certain week and buy a certain brand of toothbrush? This is the question posed by Carrotmob, a new non-profit that organizes consumers to make purchases that reward companies who make environmentally friendly choices.  At its initial launch Carrotmob organized 300+ people for a few hours of shopping at a local market in San Francisco. The company, K&D Market, pledged to allocate 22% of gross revenue from Carrotmobbers towards energy-saving measures. The big idea, according to founder Brent Schulkin, is to improve the world by helping companies embrace socially responsible choices, leveraging the power of “socially networked consumption”* to do so.  

*4/22/08 update: Stephanie Gerson, a student at UC Berkley, wrote to tell me that she coined the term “socially networked consumption”; while the term isn’t explained in detail on her blog (only: “peer consumption via consumer networking sites”), according to her email she’s writing a thesis on the topic.

We like to think of the FringeHog Friday Five as a weekly starter-kit to the future: each week we feature five perspectives on “the future of” a particular theme from food to design to yes, boxes.  The science behind choosing the topics is simple: satisfy our insatiable curiosity about how to world is changing in both profound and minute ways. This week is a brief look back at some of our favorites.

Have an idea for a future Friday Five?  Drop us an email.

Five Things to do with your Genome

Genes are becoming the Legos of life, a super-size carton of biological toys that can be endlessly combined, cut, spliced and reengineered.   The average human has about 25,000 genes - that’s a lot of A, C,T & P’s floating around. Scientists are still clueless about what to do with most of them, so here’s a few ideas for putting your spare genome to good use (including hang it on a wall and use it as musical inspiration).

Future Cities

Does the world seem a little more crowded these days? If so, it might be because on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 a subtle but significant tipping point occurred: for the first time in human history, the world’s population became more urban than rural.  On that day say researchers, the global urban population exceeded that of the global rural population by 125,849 people. The after-shocks of this seismic shift are just starting to reverberate in cities throughout the world. This Friday Five features cities of the future, including megacities, “smart” cities and the increasingly popular carbon-neutral city.

The Future of Water

While more than 1 billion people on Earth - about one sixth of the global population - lack access to dependable, safe drinking water, yet industrialized countries readily pay a small fortune to drink tap water out of a bottle. Here at five views about the future of water, one of the most critical - and contentious - issues facing the humankind in the coming decade. 

Super Size Innovation

What will inspire the next world-changing innovation?  It just might be money.  The X-Prize Foundation calls it “revolution through competition”; I call it Super-Size Innovation. What it is: cash prizes to solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges. A new crop of public “innovation challenges” have emerged, all offering large cash prizes for armchair innovators who are able to solve some of our most pressing problems: global warming, space travel, clean water, to name just a few.

The Future of Robots

For nearly fifty years, robots have captured our collective imagination.  From Rosie, the arthritic robo-housekeeper in the Jetson’s to Robin William’s emotionally available Bicennential Man to every guy’s favorite cyborg assassin, the media has played to our fascination with all things humanoid. Here we look at the increasingly social role robots will play in the future, from violin-playing androids who care for our elderly to, um, sexbots.  

How do we visualize cyberspace?  For all of the serendipitous surprises the web has to offer, it’s ironic that the traditional metaphors for cyberspace are about as appealing as a rush-hour traffic jam (”information superhighway” anyone?).  Ah, but the web is so much more than an electronic pileup of bits and bytes!  Looking for a little visual pick-me-up, this week’s Friday Five sent us spelunking for some of the more interesting and entertaining visualizations on the web.  Enjoy!
 

Packet Garden

One of my all-time favorite web apps, Packet Garden allows you to harvest your IP traffic and grow your own personal Internet garden.  As the website explains “To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an ‘HTTP plant’ is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a ‘Peer to Peer plant’ is grown, and so on.” A world based on your digital data is born.

Flight Patterns

Whatever else you do today, watch this video.  It’s simply one of the most mesmerizing visualizations you’ll ever see.  Digital artist Aaron Koblin used FAA flight tracking data of aircraft traveling across the United States to create this visually stunning interpretation of globalization.

 Universe

I’ve said in the past that I’m the (unofficial) president of the (unofficial) Jonathan Harris Fan Club, and here’s another reason why.  “Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe  presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from DayLife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world - a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place - and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.”  Like all of Harris’ work, it’s beautifully rendered and brilliantly thought-provoking.

TwitterVision 3D

Sometimes it feels that Twitter has turned the world into an “endlessly chattering global family.” The micro-blogging site has nearly quadrupled its user base in the last nine months, registering over 900,000 members.  Where are all those Tweets coming from? The 3D version of TwitterVision gives you a pretty good idea: it visualizes random Twitter posts from around the world in all of their profound and mundane glory.  Created by Dave Troy, Twittervision is part of the new MoMA exhibit Design and the Elastic Mind.

3D Mailbox

OK, this one’s just for fun. 3D Mailbox has a seemingly impossible mission: Make email fun.  The program turns your email program into a simulation of LAX airport traffic. From the site: “Every email you send or receive is represented by a jumbo jet. New email comes to the arrivals terminal, or to custom hangars (mailboxes) that you define… departing mails leave via the departures terminal. Based on the origin or destination of your mail, each message is depicted by any of over 80 world airlines. Get a message from the UK, it comes by Virgin, British Airways. Send a message to Italy, it goes out on Alitalia or EuroFly. Emails with attachments are carried by the couriers: FedEx, UPS, DHL, and CargoLux.” While the program has gotten its share of mixed reviews (primarily from tech analysts who perhaps take email a bit too seriously), the video trailer alone is worth a look.  And yes, that’s “Spam Air” in the picture above.

If you think a new web app comes out nearly every day, you’d be partly right - it’s actually closer to about five per day. Google has popularized the practice of crowd-sourcing product development by releasing “beta” versions of unfinished products into the world for its customers to play with.  I admit to being a bit of a beta geek; the lure of being the first kid on the block to know about the coolest new web toy is irresistible to a futurist who loves to see around the corner to the future.  There are thousands of betas in the marketplace, which made finding a handful of them to feature for this week’s Friday Five more than a little difficult.  That said, here are five products in beta that we think are worth keeping an eye on.

Grand Central

Grand Central seeks to solve an increasing problem in the mobile age - converging multiple points of contact into one. The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.”  The service provides a single number tied not to a phone or location, but to you.  According to the website, with GrandCentral “you can be reached with a single number, answer a call at any phone you want, seamlessly switch phones in the middle of a call, as well as check messages by phone, email or online.”

(Thomas Friedman’s talk at Pop!Tech, subtitled in Kiswahili)

dotSUB

dotSUB is quietly staging a revolution on the web. Its mission:  to make online video content accessible to the millions of non-English speakers by offering open-source translation services. The idea is deceptively simple: think YouTube meets Wikipedia: users can upload videos, films (even TV programs) for either the rest of the world or dotSUB’s team to translate. Translation services are either “closed” (utilizing dotSUB’s team of freelancers) or “open” (posting a video on the site and letting volunteers translate it for free, wiki-style).  For a great example of the service in action, check out Pop!Tech speaker talks (called Pop!Casts) which are translated via dotSUB into nine languages.   

MetaNotes

MetaNotes is “social graph paper” on which users can paste stickynotes containing text, images, videos, and widgets, creating scrapbooks to track and remember any topic.  It won the top “Experimental” website at the 2008 SXSW Interactive Awards last week, the category which tracks “cutting-edge and trend-setting destinations that are pushing the envelope and challenging our perceptions of the web.” While it still has a ways to go (i.e., it really needs private spaces for users to post notes); MetaNotes’ intuitive interface is familiar and user-friendly. And: it plays well with others, integrating with sites like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Pownce, and Photobucket.

Google’s Experimental Search

Courtesy of the brainiacs at Google Labs comes the Experimental Search project which offers new visualizations of search results including a timeline, map, or in context of other information types. With these views, G-Tech (the ambiguous but patent-pending-sounding term for “Google Technology”) extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view results in multiple dimensions. Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Info view shows all the data found for each result, to help you select the best choice.

Museum of Modern Betas (MoMB)

Aptly named, the Museum of Modern Betas is the go-to place to check out and track web apps that are in beta.  In fact, we think it should be called the Motherload of Modern Betas - since it opened in two years ago its listed over 4000 sites that are in beta, helpfully organizing them into categories such as Top 100, Most Anticipated, Recently Added and by Language.  The large number of sites it tracks makes getting in-depth information about each one difficult, but active links are provided.  The MoMB is a like a giant playground for the future of the web, perfect for those who don’t want to wait for the new ‘new thing’ to arrive.

P.S. - Last but not least, here’s a bonus track: keep Wello Horld on your watch list; it’s still in alpha and very hush-hush, but I want to go on record as being (one of) the first to say “I told you so!” when it launches.  

P.S.S. - If you’re wondering why I didn’t include PMOG as a beta to watch, stay tuned.  It’s so cool it deserves it’s own blog post.

If you could have one superhuman power, what would it be? 

Admit it: we’ve all harbored some fantasy about what it would be like if we could fly or walk through walls or move objects just by looking at them. The wildly popular tv show Heroes taps into our inner superhuman desires, telling the stories of ordinary people who discover that they have superhuman abilities (including a cop who can read minds and a cheerleader who can heal herself). How closely does fantasy mimic reality?  Turns out pretty closely, in some cases.  The heroes on the show gained their powers via a genetic mutation, but several superhuman abilities are within reach, mainly thanks to some well-funded military research. This week’s Friday Five explores future superpowers we can look forward to, and what they might mean for society.

Bionic Eyes

This Discover article reports that engineers at the University of Washington are developing contact lenses that contain electronic circuits that would allow wearers to see information superimposed over their view of the world in front of them (such as driving control panels and immersive virtual games) and “surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.”  Someday, the lenses might also offer tele/microscopic vision, the ability to see infrared frequencies, or the ability to take pictures and videos.

Super Strength

From the Incredible Hulk to Superman, the ability to pick up large objects (such as cars and meteoroids) seems to be the most common attribute of superheroes.  So it’s no surprise the military is investing heavily in giving its soldiers super human strength.  Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is first in line, developing an exoskeleton - a frame that fits over the body designed to help soldiers move faster and farther, carrying heavier loads and weaponry.  The key?  The robotic frame contains miniature internal combustion engines moving each powered joint.  This New Scientist article provides an update on the research, which is expected out sometime this year.

New Limbs

This much-watch video from IEEE Spectrum showcases Dean Kamen’s “Luke Arm”, a robotic arm named after Luke Skywalker’s mechanical hand in Star Wars.  It’s amazing footage of a emerging vison of next-generation limb prostheses that are fully functional, neurologically controlled, and have normal sensory capabilities.  More than that, it’s also incredibly inspiring: the soldiers featured testing the arm (some of whom are double amputees) talk about the feelings of liberation and independence the arm is giving them.

Mind Reading

Perhaps the most potent (and the most controversial) of future superpowers is the ability to read minds.  Psychics claim that this is an inherent ability, but science is taking another approach: last year researchers used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future.  While the ability to truly read minds is likely still decades away, the brain scan technology is also driving developments in human-computer interfaces such as mind-controlled computers that would allow people to operate email and the internet using thought alone.  Check out this Guardian article for more.

Super Humans

Joel Garreau’s best-selling book Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human discusses the implications of human enhancement.  In the future, how will “Natural” and “Enhanced” children compete in school?  In life? I’ve argued that we’re on the verge of a socially fracturing debate about what it means to be human; Garreau explores how this debate will affect us at every level. It’s a great read, one that will change what you thought you knew about the future.

Note: Our usual end of the week gig, the FringeHog Friday Five is back after a brief interruption. My new year’s resolution to travel less worked fabulously until exactly the first week of February, at which point back-to-back road trips derailed the semi-normalcy I was just becoming accustomed to.  But we should be back on schedule.  Almost.

FringeHog Friday Five: Future Bestsellers

I like to think of FringeHog as a mental whiteboard; a space to play with ideas that may not be ready for prime time and a way to indulge my inner writer.  And apparently I’m not the only one: a growing share of bloggers are using their blogs as drafting boards for their upcoming books.  Why blog your book?  Lots of reasons: to mark your intellectual territory; to translate mindshare into market share when the book hits the stores; or in Jeff Howe’s case, to prove your point.

Watching these future atoms start out as neo-bytes is a voyeuristic dream. It’s another example of making the invisible visible: we’re offered a glimpse (although sometimes not a pretty one) into the writer’s thought process.  So if you’re the type of person who shows up to the movies early just to watch the trailers, then this post is for you, because this week’s Friday Five looks at future books-in-the-making.  Will any of these be The Next Big Idea?  You decide.  (Thanks to Bruno G. for the suggestions)

Chris Anderson: FREE (Due out: mid-2008)

In this follow up to The Long Tail, Chris Anderson (editor of Wired) takes a look the many ways to make money by giving things away for free.  The book is aptly titled FREE (subtitles under consideration include: FREE: How companies get rich by charging nothing). Blog posts tagged with the title include a rich assortment of “free” experiments including: music , books and even cars.  Anderson even gets in on the gig himself, with some not-too-shabby free publicity, compliments of this month’s cover story in Wired. 

Charles Leadbeater: We-Think (Due out: March 2008 in the UK)

Charles Leadbeater’s thesis is that “new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work.” Leadbeater puts the theory to the test in his new book, We-Think: The Power of Mass Creativity, which charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation from science and open source software, to computer games and political campaigning. With the support of his publisher, Leadbeater is releasing the book in its entirety online (prior to formal publication) so that “people can comment upon the text, add to it, disagree with it.” Each chapter is profiled, and next to it a running list of comments by readers. 

Kevin Kelly:  The Technium  (Due Out: ??)

Kevin Kelly describes the Technium as “a word I’ve reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology - one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.” Since November 2004 he’s been blogging about the Technium; his posts are thought-provoking and far-reaching, from Humans are the sex organs of technology to the inevitability of lifelogging, to the four stages in the Internet of things. All explore Kelly’s view of the Technium as an extended face of technology, as a whole system with its own dynamics. It will be interesting to see how he ties these together into a book but in the meantime, watching it unfold from Kelly’s mind reminds me of the television series Lost; the plot is complex and overlapping, often paradoxical and filled with unforgettable narrative.

Jeff Howe: Crowdsourcing (Due out: July 2008)

If veteran writer Charles Leadbeater is the Pro, then first-time author Jeff Howe is the Amateur.  Which makes it all the more interesting to see how the two authors approach the same topic.  What Leadbeater refers to as “We Think”, Howe more descriptively calls “Crowdsourcing.” His book, Crowdsourcing:  Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, is an extension of his June 2006 article in Wired in which he described the rise of mass collaboration as an economic tipping point.  In a nod to the editorial wisdom of crowds, selections of Howe’s book are (also) being released online for review and he promises to publish the “most salient, witty or astute remarks” as an appendix in the final chapter. The first chapter to be released can be found here.

Mobile Novelists: It ws bst f tms, it ws wrst f tms…

In Japan, writing a novel on a blog has become positively passé.   Just in case you missed the story, Japan’s biggest book distributor Tohan recently reported that of the 10 best-selling novels in 2007, five were originally “mobile novels” (”keitai shosetsu” in Japanese) - stories written for downloading on cell phones before being (re)published in book form.  Mobile novels (typically short stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging) have seen explosive growth: in 2003 sales of mobile novels were worth 1.8 billion yen; in 2006 the figure was 9.4 billion. Experts say the growth is due to a change in business models; when Japan’s mobile phone providers starting offering unlimited data for flat monthly rates, sales skyrocketed.  Download sites like Maho no-i-rando have hundreds of thousands of novels listed; increasingly many of those are finding their way into book form, putting the next bestseller, um, under your thumb.

I step off the plane and the first thing I think about is getting some juice. My blood sugar is fine, it’s the energy levels on my cell phone and laptop I’m worried about. As I search not-so-inconspicuously behind rows of plastic chairs, it occurs to me that I’ve turned into some sort of airport addict, wandering from gate to gate at metropolitan hubs, sniffing out electrical outlets like a crackhead looking for my next hit.  And I’m not alone: at JFK last month I saw a fistfight break out between two middle-aged suits, brawling over whose turn it was to plug in their cell phone.  

Despite all evidence to the contrary (including the fashion lovefest for Ugg boots and the inexplicable fact that there are eight full seasons of the television show Big Brother) we’re not, in fact, living in a free and democratic society. We may enjoy political freedom, but we‘re victims of a more insidious tyrant: the energy grid.  This is not some hippie/Greener rant: we’re shackled to the energy grid like a modern day Matrix.  Human beings can survive for more than a month without food and for five days without water, but the average man, it is said, can’t live more than six hours without plugging in.

Now fast forward to the future, say ten years from now.  Imagine a world in which energy is abundant, portable and ultimately, personal.  In this future electricity is disconnected from the power grid: no more sockets, no more wires. I was introduced to the concept of “personal energy” by my friend and futurist colleague Garry Golden, who loves to talk about two things: the future of energy and the Green Bay Packers.  Ok, make that one thing. ;-)  In this FringeHog podcast, Garry presents a compelling vision for the future in which “micro-packets” of electricity fuel our devices, our homes, our cars.  This week’s Friday Five takes a look at five technologies that could make an era of personal energy a reality.

Radio “free” Power

Question: how many chargers do you own for your so-called wireless devices?  If you’re like me, the ratio is about 2.4 plugs for every gadget. I have drawers full of orphaned chargers, little tangled ghosts from gadgets past.  Which makes Powercast the first in line to be My New Best (Tech) Friend.   It works like this: a transmitter plugs into your wall and sends out radio frequency signals which are picked up by receivers in a device (cell phone, iPod, etc) and converted to DC electricity - essentially, using the radio signals to power and charge your devices, sans wires. Check out this Podtech video interview with CEO John Shearer, who explains this potentially game-changing technology. 

DIY Solar Cells

The future looks bright for photovoltaics: Science Daily reports that researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets. According to lead researcher Dr. Somenath Mitra, “Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations.”

Human body network

Energy doesn’t get much more personal than this: in the future, your body could become its own computer network. The idea behind so-called “human body networks” is to tap into the body’s natural electrical field to carry data to personal devices, such as an iPod or cell phone.  Instead of using a cable to connect your camera to your computer, you could transfer pictures just by touching the PC while the camera is around your neck. Other useful scenarios: exchanging electronic business cards by shaking hands or swaping phone numbers just by kissing.  A handful of companies are pursuing the idea: in 2004 Microsoft was awarded a patent for a “method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body.” Although the technology hasn’t hit the mainstream market, this Guardian article provides an intriguing overview of future commercial applications featuring NTT’s “Red Tacton” technology.

Flick my cell phone

Smoking may be socially taboo these days, but Bic lighters - those neon-colored plastic icons of the ‘70s - are finding a new path in a politically-correct world. Bic, the undisputed king of disposable consumer goods, is reinventing its most famous product line: the company is designing disposable cartridges for fuel cells, which can be used to recharge personal devices like cell phones and media players. This Business Week article describes the innovative marriage of a new technology and an old brand.

Dancing Fuel

As humans, every movement we make generates energy.  What if that energy could be captured and used as a clean source of electricity?  That’s the idea behind Amsterdam’s Sustainable Dance Club which features an electricity-generating dance floor. The club’s floor is designed to capture the kinetic energy of dancing people and use it power the club’s music and lights, turning it into a giant (human-powered) generator.