Meeting notice: The 03.June.17 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. Suggested topic: NT and the Neotonic Society One of the obvious social trends of the last few decades has been the progressive infantilization of older and older age cohorts: for instance, the age at which alcohol can be bought and consumed has almost everywhere been raised to 21, and it is common to impose behavioral and cultural constraints on people even older than that. I.e., it is common nowadays for educational institutions to require students over 21 living on campus to seek permission to have any alcohol at all in their own refrigerator, with such permission, even if granted, limited to possession of not more than two six packs or (not and) two bottles of wine or one pint of hard liquor. Anyone on this list can supply other examples ad libitum. Biologists refer to this process as neotony: the retention of juvenile characteristics for longer and longer periods. Another trend, potentially related, is the steady increase in life expectancy -- on average, 1/3rd of a year per year for every year since 1900. In the last 100+ years life expectancy for men has risen from around 45 to nearly 80. The record for women is even better. Today people in their 40s are commonly referred to as young and people in their 60's, as being middle- aged. People aren't comfortable referring to others as old until they are over 80 and that line is visibly moving North as we speak. It's easy to see how these trends might be related. If you're young at 45, what does that make people who are 35? Or 25? Children, mewling babes, barely to be trusted to spend an unsupervised hour. This could not be more relevant to the central NT ambition of pushing life expectancy out to several thousand years or more. Imagine a society in which the median age is ten times that of our own. Will the society extend all the ages of man proportionately? It seems as though it might -- that you will need to be 160 to drive and 210 to drink, have to stay in high school until you are 180, then go to college for 40 years, and finally do another forty in graduate school. I don't even want to think about what prison sentences will be like... <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Breakthrough of the Week Dept: (From a bulletin on the South African news site news24.com) Ray Baughman of the University of Texas and colleagues, writing in Thursday's issue of Nature, say they have made carbon nanotube fibres at lengths of up to 100 meters at a rate of 70 centimetres per minute. They have already spun the fibres into cloth, making supercapacitors ... "Promising electronic-textile applications for these fibres, which are easy to weave and sew, include distributed sensors, electronic interconnects, electromagnetic shields, antennas and batteries," they write. More at: www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,,2-13-1443_1372079,00.html see also: www.sciencenews.org/20030614/fob3.asp <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Stuff to keep an eye on Dept.: In a few months, researchers at the University of Southern California will test the world's first prosthetic brain part. Biomedical engineer Theodore Berger has created a 2 mm-wide silicon chip that he hopes will one day substitute for damaged or diseased brain regions, holding promise for victims of Alzheimer's disease, stroke and other brain traumas. ... In the experiment, millions of neurons embedded in the tissue will transmit their electrical impulses to attached electrodes. If all goes according to plan, the electrodes should intercept the signals and reroute them to the chip, which fills in for the damaged neural circuits to process the data and shoot it back to other neurons... ... Berger sees potential commercial and military applications for the brain chip, which is partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. www.popsci.com/popsci/medicine/article/0,12543,456105,00.html <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon. -- Jules Verne, 1865 <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 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