Army of smartphone chips could emulate the human brainSteve Furber, a professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, is attempting to model the synaptic weights and coordinated votage spikes of the human brain in a 1-billion-neuron silicon brain… Continued here:  The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (5/05)

John C. View original here:  The Human Species: "Recycling the Big Bang"

The Great Toruk from Avatar? Not quite: A Reddit.com user by the name of Biophilia_curiosus posted a photos that he took in Indonesia. View original here:  Miniature Precursor to Pandora’s Toruk Found in Indonesia

We’re featuring our top five posts of 2009, each of  which received over 100,000 views. Continued here:  The Daily Galaxy Top Posts of ’09

Although It has taken  homo sapiens  several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. Here is the original: Stephen Hawking: "The Human Species Has Entered a New Stage of Evolution" – The Daily Galaxy Top Story of 2009

Few of us like to dwell on the fact our human cells are vastly outnumbered (10X) by microbes in our bodies’ cellular cities. If we went by cellular per capita, rather than size of cell, we’d be more microbe than man. In fact, various microbes have colonized nearly every conceivable part of our bodies, from the inside out Continued here: Clues Sought to Unknown Human-Microbe Life Colonies

This week the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding its first major conference on astrobiology, convened on private Vatican grounds in the elegant Casina Pio IV, formerly the pope’s villa. The gathering of prominent scientists and religious leaders from around the world suggests that some of the most tradition-bound faiths are seriously contemplating the possibility that life exists in many forms beyond Earth.  The five-day conference is chaired by the religious leader [...]

  “It’s a repair and maintenance approach to extending the functional life span of a human body. It’s just like maintaining the functional life span of a classic car, or a house. We know — because people do it — that there is no limit to how long you can do that. Go here to read the rest: Is Aging Becoming an Option? A Galaxy Classic

The Woman Without A Pulse isn’t a trashy zombie movie or a cut Star Trek episode, but instead a new kind of cyborg with a totally mechanical heart which fundamentally alters the human design.  Which still sounds like a movie, but at least it’s science-fiction instead of horror. More: Vulcan Science? The Woman Without A Pulse!

“Robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, but they don’t catch the public imagination in the same way, and they don’t spread the human race into space, which I’m arguing should be our long-term strategy. See the original post here:  Stephen Hawking: Manned Space Missions Key to Future