At the just-concluded 2005 World Technology Network Annual Summit and Awards, whose purview ranges from space exploration to energy to biotechnology and more, I was struck by the fact that every presenter had an acceleration graph — an exponential curve of advances in each area.

Everything, it seems, is accelerating; even sociotechnological evolution itself, to the point that every generation is now born into a world significantly different from its parent’s. Few offspring of the baby boomers know what it’s like not to have television around. Today’s youngest generation may never know what it is like not to be in constant video touch with anyone, or not to be able to clone a beloved dog. (But if they can barely make sense of their parents’ world, how will they be able to understand history; and will it matter anyway if — to borrow from Yogi Berra — neither history nor the future ain’t what they used to be?)

Every generation is now also receding into a different twilight. For boomers, aging is not what it was for their parents, thanks to modern medicine; including, for some, genital reconstruction.

Apparently, the human brain is still evolving, too, though at nothing like the accelerating rate of sociotechnological evolution. Given the scale and complexity of the challenges we face, from global warming to the colonization of Mars, we may not have time to wait for biological evolution to gear our intellects up to the task. Accelerated evolution through bioengineering seems to be what we need right now, and there is plenty of evidence, in this single issue of the Digest alone, that accelerated evolution through bioengineering is just what we are getting.

Airplanes are accelerating, too. Japan has successfully flight-tested a scale model of a successor to the Concorde supersonic airliner. When it is in service in 15-20 years, the world will shrink by another order of magnitude. But why fly halfway around the world to see people, when (by then) we may be able to read each others minds over the Internet?

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A UPI wire story about the imminent ubiquity of cellular videophones had some interesting comments about the generational impact of accelerating technological innovation. “Most people living today,” the article begins, “do not remember a time before radio, television, and telephones. High school students cannot recall a time before personal computers, and kids entering first grade this September will not remember a time before mobile phones.”

“In a few years, people will be hard-pressed to remember the era before ‘video telephony’ — industry jargon for what most people refer to as video phone calls.”

“Indeed, we are on the cusp of a radical transformation in how people communicate; a revolution decades in the making, yet poised to sweep the world in the very near future.”

Aging Is Easier

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“High-tech fake hips and knees are among scores of medical advances in recent years that have made getting older a lot easier for millions of aging Americans,” says a Detroit News writer.

Among them:

• Cataract surgery, “now almost routine [and] the most frequently performed surgical procedure in the United States”
• Drugs and implanted chips to reduce the vision loss from macular degeneration
• Organ transplants, now much improved with advances in anti-rejection medication
• Programmable, digital hearing aids
• New tests and therapies for breast and prostate cancers. The five-year survival rate for men with cancer has gone from 43 percent to 64 percent since the late ’70s; for women, it has risen from 57 percent to 64 percent
• The fatality rates for all three major killers — heart disease, stroke and cancer — have dropped dramatically during the past 50 years

And “bigger advances [are] yet to come” from stem cell and gene therapies.

Superhealth, Sex-driven

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“While many women nationwide are having their breasts augmented, their faces injected with Botox, their tummies tucked and their bodies liposuctioned, an increasing number are exploring the brave new world of genital plastic surgery,” says a writer in the Detroit Free Press. “They are tightening vaginal walls, shortening and plumping the labia, removing fat from the groin for definition and restoring the hymen to fake virginity” — and more than half of those who seek such treatment are doing it for cosmetic and “sexual enhancement” reasons rather than for genuine medical, gynecological, reasons.

Evidence of its growing popularity can be seen in the growing number of vaginal rejuvenation ads in magazines and on Web sites. “We are not keeping statistics or monitoring this, but we will have to start,” the chairman of the emerging trends task force for the American Society of Plastic Surgeons told the Free Press.

Michigan has a “Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Institute” that “performs about a dozen reconstructions a month and fields at least 20 e-mail inquires daily” from “often desperate” women whose genitals “have led to embarrassment, low self-esteem, depression and, in some cases, divorce.” The Institute does not accept insurance, though insurers cover some procedures, that can cost up to US$9,000.

An ob/gyn doctor at the Detroit Medical Center’s Hutzel Women’s Hospital told the Free Press that selling such services is “morally and ethically unacceptable. To me, it’s genital mutilation.” But one woman whose “uterus felt like it was going to fall out” after the birth of her second child, and whose doctors suggested a hysterectomy, said she got “her life back” after undergoing vaginal reconstruction instead.

The Free Press points to two key drivers of this trend. First: “On any given night, viewers can tune into one of many reality television shows and watch people being radically transformed: ‘Extreme Makeover,’ ‘Dr. 90210,’ ‘Nip Tuck,’ ‘I Want a Famous Face.’ The result is a society numb to the extreme nature of plastic surgery and eager for more. The second driver is “the mainstreaming of pornography.”

Evolution

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Researchers have concluded that “new” variants of two genes that control brain development have “swept” through much of the human population during the last several thousand years(!), reports the New Scientist.

The researchers are now testing whether the “new” gene variants confer any cognitive advantage — bigger brains, faster thinking, different personalities, or lower susceptibility to neurological diseases.

Mind Reading

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University College London and University of California researchers have separately been able to tell, at a very crude level, what images people were looking at or what sounds they were listening to, by observing activity in their brains. The UCL researchers used fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to scan subjects’ visual cortex as they looked at two test images. The scans enabled the researchers to predict, reliably, which of the two images the subject was looking at. The US researchers first took readings from electrodes placed inside the auditory cortex of two surgical patients as they watched a clip of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” then used the data to accurately predict the fMRI signals from the brains of 11 healthy subjects who watched the same clip. The researchers could tell one part of a scene from another, and one type of sound from another.

The aim is to create a machine that can track a person’s consciousness second-by-second — “something like speech-recognition software, and look at which parts of the brain are specifically active in a person,” said a UCL researcher, while acknowledging that the current work was a very long way from creating a mind-reading machine.

More immediately, the findings could help develop or improve devices that enable paralyzed people to communicate through measurements of their brain activity (for example, the Braingate neural implant mentioned elsewhere in this issue.)

Cloned Dog

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The South Korean scientists who last year cloned human embryos from which they harvested embryonic stem cells for therapeutic use have now created the world’s first cloned dog. Dogs are technically the most challenging to clone because good quality eggs are hard to acquire and even then are extremely fragile. Since dogs share many similarities with humans, the work could help develop human therapies by helping reveal the root causes of canine diseases through dog genome projects and developing cell therapies for them — and eventually for humans.

Supersonic Passenger Rocket/Glider

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Japan has successfully tested a 1/3 scale model of the National Experimental Supersonic Transport (NEXST) airliner that would carry 300 passengers at twice the speed of sound. It was carried aloft on a rocket to 59,400 feet over Australia, and glided at Mach 2 (2,450 kilometres per hour, 1,522 miles per hour) for about 15 minutes before landing safely.

It is designed to fly twice the distance and seat three times the number of passengers as Concorde, with less pollution and noise, but it won’t be in production for 15 to 20 years. Further development will be conducted in collaboration with France.