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Some interesting reads 150 years after H. G. Wells and 50 years after Star Trek.

Some cheating involved

Reminds me a bit of optical tweezers - although the principle seems somewhat different. Could the optical tweezers principle be applied through sound? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers

FuturICT, another of these nonsense-flagships. Marek: after having read about this, I understand that BlueBrain is not the only flagship proposal that sucks. Long live the dream of cybernetics, or, apparently people never learn anything...

The others: http://www.ga-project.eu/ - "Guardian Angels for a Smarter Planet" http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/ http://www.itfom.eu/ http://www.robotcompanions.eu/ One doesn't have a website (graphene). The message from their presentation was more or less: everyone else does intensive research in this and the Europe should not stay behind. Full list of flagship proposals including short descriptions here: http://www.fet11.eu/about/fet-flagships

A critical view on Prof. Markram's Blue Brain project (in German).

As far as I know it's sort of like "Let's construct an enormous dynamical system and see what happens"... i.e. a waste of taxpayer's money... Able to heal Alzheimer... Yeah... Actually I was on the conference the author is mentioning (FET 2011) and I have seen the presentations of all 6 flagship proposals. Following that I had a discussion with one of my colleagues about the existence of limits of the amount of bullshit politicians are willing to buy from scientists. Will there be a point at which politicians, despite their total ignorance, will realise that scientists simply don't deliver anything they promise? How long will we (scientists) be stuck in the viscous circle of have-to-promise-more-than-predecessors in order to get money? Will we face a situation when we'll be forced to revert to promises which are realistic? To be honest none of the 6 presentations convinced me of their scientific merit (apart from the one on graphene where I have absolutely no expertise to tell). Apparently a huge amount of money is about to be wasted.

It's not just "Let's construct an enormous dynamical system and see what happens", it's worse! Also the simulation of the cosmological evolution is/was a little bit of this type, still the results are very interesting and useful. Why? Neither the whole cosmos nor the human brain at the level of single neurons can be modelled on a computer, that would last aeons on a "yet-to-be-invented-extra-super-computer". Thus one has to make assumptions and simplifications. In cosmology we have working theories of gravitation, thermodynamics, electrodynamics etc. at hand; starting from these theories we can make reasonable assumptions and (more or less) justified simplifications. The result is valuable since it provides insight into a complex system under given, explicit and understood assumptions. Nothing similar seems to exist in neuroscience. There is no theory of the human brain and apparently nobody has the slightest idea which simplifications can be made without harm. Of course, Mr. Markram remains completely unaffected of ''details'' like this. Finally, Marek, money is not wasted, we ''build networks of excellence'' and ''select the brightest of the brightest'' to make them study and work at our ''elite institutions'' :-). I lively remember the stage of one of these "bestofthebest" from Ivy League at the ACT...

can we contribute in any way to this - or alternatively benefit from this research already now?

that bad! wow ....

You know me, I'm the bullshitter... You remember Kurzweil and his Singularity-nonsense. In a way this was very similar. Though I think Kurzweil and Markram are very different characters (The Singularity essentially is a religion, I can't see anything like that in Markram's claims) they seem to share an important point: they are both complete nerds that apparently never spent a single thought on the limits of science (in its English meaning) in general nor of their particular research field in specific. One may find this excusable, I don't. But even then, they make claims that the nerdest nerd must know that they are completely unrealistic and thus I just have to assume that they claim their nonsense on purpose. The reason in Markram's case clearly seems to be money. But all this does not mean that these nerds cannot produce valuable results.

Another futuristic view on flying by Airbus. To make it more sexy it also includes some biomimetics...

"The cabin electrical system can be compared to the human brain, with a network of intelligence pulsating through the cabin.". Oh, come on, ...