Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden have found a direct connection between the mutation of mitochondrial DNA in animal cells and the process of aging. Mitochondria, the tiny engines of cells, produce oxidants that have been implicated in cell damage over time, and their DNA may bear the brunt of the oxidant assault.…

Samsung will release a 17-inch organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display in 2005. OLED technology consumes less power than LCD and is thinner and lighter. To date, OLED has shown up in much smaller formats for cell phones, car radio screens and digital cameras. Seiko Epson has built a 40-inch organic electroluminescence (OEL) display and plans…

Verizon Communications is launching bundled phone, data and video services [defunct link] using “fiber to the premises” technology in Keller, Texas. They plan to expand services to one million homes in nine states by the end of this year and another two million homes next year. The late 1990s saw fiber optics backbones being built…

Laser drills are the current cutting edge tools being used in some dentist’s offices today, but a new generation of technology is just around the corner. Wired has an article that follows the expected progression of technology over the next ten years, until the day when cavities are cured by a childhood vaccination and lost…

Britain has just opened the world’s first embryonic stem cell bank. This bank will supply stem cell lines to researchers looking for insight into and possible cures for various medical conditions. Federal funding for such research is prohibited in the United States by an executive order from President Bush. A few states such as New…

NVIDIA and ATI recently announced their next-generation graphic chips, the NV40 and the R420, respectively. Both are remarkable because they offer two times the power as the previous generation. According to the benchmarks, the ATI R420 holds a slight edge. Both chips will take advantage of the new PCI Express interface, the connection bridge that…

Social trends appear to be following the same path as technological progress. Today marks the first day that same-sex couples can get married in the first state to allow such marriages, Massachusetts. There are still hurdles ahead for the couples, not the least of which is the movement in Massachusetts to amend the state constitution…

You might be wondering what the hell is going on with the FrontierChannel.tv blog. Where is all the science and technology? This blog focuses primarily on the frontiers of science and technology, but these frontiers also intersect the frontiers of thought and society, among others. For example, now that gay couples can marry (for the…

A few years ago I coined the word “cybernudism” to describe the philosophy of giving up any privacy to combat security and privacy issues. If you have no secrets, nobody can hold anything against you. At its most literal, cybernudism labels the strange phenomenon of people using their webcams to document their lives down to…

The above entry is a great example of how video can sometimes convey an idea much more easily and dramatically than text. In the future, text, images, audio, video and other datatypes will merge into a multimedia whole that will be far more effective in conveying information than any previous technology. The exact balance of…

When you stir cornstarch it begins to thicken, unlike most liquids, due to the property of shear thickening. Physicist Robert Deegan of the University of Texas in Austin and other team members vibrated a tray of cornstarch and then blew holes in the surface with a straw. The holes remained intact at high enough accelerations.…

I maintain a spreadsheet of predictions based on Moore’s laws and the trends I see in computing technologies. Today I reviewed my predictions and made necessary adjustments: Increased hard drive capacity from 0.40 to .50 by 07/01/04 Decreased CPU speed from .0060 to .0040 by 07/01/04 Hard drive capacity is growing faster than I expected.…