Looks like someone’s working on one of Ray Kurzweil’s many futurist projects…Kwabena Boahen, an associate professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University, leads a research group that is trying to mimic the functions of the brain’s complex neural system using silicon chips.

In Nature magazine’s free on-and-offline edition about scientific computing, you can read an article by Vernor Vinge which examines the impact of MMORPGs and other ‘virtual worlds’ on the way we think, work and play. The material resonates nicely with his forthcoming novel, ‘Rainbows End’.

Nanoscientists at the University of Tokyo have unveiled the first two-part molecular machine, which moves under the influence of exposure to alternating UV and visible light. The light causes a chemical bond to kink or unkink, producing a flipper-like motion in the two prongs of the molecule.

It’s not been a good week for the ‘life on Mars’ lobby. Now it seems that scientists re-examining the ‘macro-molecular carbon’ (MMC) in the meteorite ‘Allan Hills 84001’ have determined that it probably wasn’t created by biological methods, despite being an essentially organic substance.

A great essay has been posted over at Worldchanging.com, discussing the ways our advances in technology are improving our ability to produce augmented realities, virtual worlds and simulations, and how building these capabilities into our ‘real’ world may help us make it a better place for everyone and everything. It’s impossible to sum it up in a paragraph, so just trust me and go take a look.