The new age we are now entering, The Shift Age, will be a time of great transformation.  One of the areas that will undergo the greatest transformation is health and medicine.  It is expected that nanotechnology will bring great changes in both medical treatments and life expectancy.  The miniaturization of computer and chip technology will finally initiate the era of the bionic human to some degree.  There will breakthroughs in pharmacology and discoveries that will basically be unintended consequences of research into the treatment and cures of many diseases.

One such incredible discovery was reported last week by researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego.  They reported that they had found two drugs that increased muscle endurance without exercise.  The two drugs, Alcar and GW1516 increased the endurance of ‘couch potato mice” dramatically.  Alcar increased the mice’s endurance by 44% after just four weeks of treatment.  GW1516 increased endurance by 75% but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.

Across the country the sound of overweight couch potatoes clapping their remotes together was positively deafening.  On Wall Street, the price of publicly traded health club chains plummeted as sellers shorted the stocks.  Kidding on both accounts.

This discovery is analogous to eating meals without calories or smoking cigarettes without any negative health consequences. The “no pain, no gain” mantra spoken by thousands of personal trainers nation-wide might thankfully be retired.

There are some serious immediate positive possibilities for these drugs.  Health conditions such as obesity and diabetes which …

In the 60 year history of computers, there has been a constant improvement of computational speed.  Ever faster has always been one of the driving metrics of the industry.  Moore’s Law has been manifested with desktops and laptops to the point where the computers we use are as fast as we need.  The machines we use today are incredibly faster that those we used at the turn of the century.  The power of these machines however is dwarfed by the super computers now being developed.

It is in the arena of super computers that both the outer and inner reaches of reality can be explored.  The advanced computer modeling and the running of complex scenarios and of course the ability to beat a human chess grandmaster is the realm of super computers.

The world’s fastest computer is being built and installed at the Argonne National Laboratory in the western suburbs of Chicago. IBM Corp. and the Department of Energy, which owns Argonne, have contracted for a new supercomputer that is now being installed with a peak capability of 445 teraflops, or 445 trillion calculations per second. The current record-holder is the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which has an IBM Blue Gene/L with a peak capability of about 360 teraflops.Read the rest of this entry »