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An immune-suppressing drug called rapamycin could possibly treat Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome (HGPS), a rare genetic disease that causes premature aging, and advance biological understanding of the normal aging process, according to researchers from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Maryland and Massachusetts General Hospital. Progeria is a genetic disorder characterized by dramatic premature aging. "Progerin that causes progeria also accumulates, although in very small amounts, in normal aging," said Dimitri Krainc, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. "However, if rapamycin proves to have beneficial effects in lifespan in humans it is safe to assume that it will not be just because it may clear progerin from cells, but also because it clears other toxic products that accumulate during aging." Ref.: Francis S. Collins, et al., Rapamycin Reverses Cellular Phenotypes and Enhances Mutant Protein Clearance in Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome Cells, Science, 2011; [DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3002346]

Under just the right conditions-which involve an ultra-high-intensity laser beam and a two-mile-long particle accelerator-it could be possible to create something out of nothing, according to University of Michigan researchers.

"Quantum Computing Playground is a browser-based WebGL Chrome Experiment. It features a GPU-accelerated quantum computer with a simple IDE interface, and its own scripting language with debugging and 3D quantum state visualization features. Quantum Computing Playground can efficiently simulate quantum registers up to 22 qubits, run Grover's and Shor's algorithms, and has a variety of quantum gates built into the scripting language itself."

The Intelligence in Wikipedia Project aims to accelerate the extraction of Wikipedia knowledge, e.g. with construction of infoboxes, and link the resulting schemata together to form a knowledge base of outstanding size. Not only will this `semantified Wikipedia' be an even more valuable resource for AI, but it will support Faceted browsing and simple forms of inference that may increase the recall of question-answering systems.

Using entire galaxies as lenses to look at other galaxies, researchers have a newly precise way to measure the size and age of the universe and how rapidly it is expanding, on a par with other techniques. The measurement determines a value for the Hubble constant, which indicates the size of the universe, and confirms the age of the universe as 13.75 billion years old, within 170 million years. The results also confirm the strength of dark energy, responsible for accelerating the expansion of the universe.

Researchers at Biodesign Institute have revved the engine of biological evolution to unheard of speed, creating completely new proteins in an infinitesimal fraction of the time it took nature to do the same thing.

I wish everyone would watch this presentation by Ray at the Killer App Expo in Fort Wayne, Indiana. There's a natural skepticism people feel when they first hear or read about the predictions made by Ray's Law of Accelerating Returns, but when you listen to him explain how it has worked and will work, you can't help but take him seriously.

You've all heard the metaphor, right? Boiling a frog? Gradually increasing the temperature of the water so the frog gets used to it until it's hot enough to boil? Yes, that one. Apart from the sad conclusion of the analogy, the idea of gradual change not being very noticeable fits the way that accelerating technological change will be accepted by humans.