Project Hieroglyph

Category: Hieroglyph

  • Featured Contributor: Kathryn Cramer

    Kathryn Cramer is an author, critic, artist and photographer, as well as a respected anthologist of short fiction, with a particular focus on hard science fiction. Kathryn is a co-editor for the Hieroglyph Project and our in-house expert on the mysterious worlds of genre fiction and publishing. Kathryn co-edited the Year’s Best Fantasy and Year’s…

  • Tower design: O3

    Tower design: O3

    Students at Arizona State University tackled the concept of a Tall Tower as a design challenge. Here is their take (developed independently of the engineering research Neal Stephenson, Keith Hjelmstad and others have been pursuing) . The text below is from the poster they produced. The Issue. For over a century, we have exploited nature…

  • Welcome to Hieroglyph

    Greetings and welcome to the new Hieroglyph website! We’ve spent a lot of time building a new platform for this project that we hope will be responsive, elegant and easy to use. The site has both public and private areas so contributors can work in small groups or share their thoughts with the public, as…

  • Featured Contributor: Paul Davies

    Paul Davies is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist and astrobiologist, and the director of the BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University. He is also the bestselling author of many books with shocking and provocative titles, including The Mind of God, How to Build a Time Machine and The Eerie Silence, which explores the…

  • Featured Contributor: Lawrence Krauss

    Lawrence Krauss is a cosmologist and theoretical physicist, a leading voice for science education and literacy and the author of acclaimed popular books including A Universe from Nothing and The Physics of Star Trek. Lawrence is Foundation Professor in Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department and Inaugural Director of the…

  • Featured Contributor: Bruce Sterling

    Bruce Sterling is a science fiction author, journalist, globetrotter, professor of Internet studies, design fiction maven and Visionary in Residence at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. Bruce was one of the chief instigators of the cyberpunk subgenre, and continues to be its most eloquent spokesperson. His book The Difference Engine, written…

  • Featured Contributor: Neal Stephenson

    Neal Stephenson is an author of historical and science fiction, a technology consultant, a video game designer and the principal provocateur behind Hieroglyph. Answering Arizona State University president Michael Crow’s challenge to create alternatives to the dystopian visions that pervade our stories about the future, Neal is helping us pioneer new methods of radical collaboration…

  • Thinking Big: Greetings from Neal Stephenson

    My life span encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions. At the age of 51—not even old!—I watched on a flat-panel screen as…

  • Cryonics resources (something in ASU's backyard)

    Cryonics does have a basis in science, and I’ve had my own arrangements for cryonic suspension with the Alcor Foundation since 1990, funded by life insurance. Cryonicists want to develop “medical time travel” or an ambulance ride across time to try to benefit from the better medical capabilities of future societies. Refer to: 1. General but **outdated** background information on the idea, mainly of historical interest now: <b>The Prospect of Immortality</b> (1964), by Robert Ettinger: <a href="http://www.cryonics.org/book1.html"></a> 2. “Cryopreservation of rat hippocampal slices by vitrification” (a peer-reviewed scientific paper): <a href="http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/hippo_published.pdf"></a> “Microscopic examination showed severe damage in frozen–thawed slices, but generally good to excellent ultrastructural and histological preservation after vitrification. Our results provide the first demonstration that both the viability and the structure of mature organized, complex neural networks can be well preserved by vitrification. These results may assist neuropsychiatric drug evaluation and development and the transplantation of integrated brain regions to correct brain disease or injury.” 3. Mike Darwin’s Chronosphere blog: <a href="http://chronopause.com"></a> Mike goes back nearly to the beginnings of cryonics in the late 1960’s, and his blog offers a metaphorical gold mine of information, including references to a lot of scientific papers, about the field and its current but probably surmountable problems. 4. The X PRIZE Foundation has a concept under consideration for a Cryopreservation X PRIZE: <a href="http://www.xprize.org/prize/cryopreservation-x-prize"></a> “This competition offers two benefits to humanity. First, the ability to increase the number and availability of transplantable organs for patients with organ failure; and second, the ability to move forward the science of human cryopreservation which offers the ability to preserve patients with incurable diseases until a time when medical science has sufficiently progressed to be able to treat the disease.” 5. MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung defends cryonic suspension as a feasible scientific-medical experiment in his book //Connectome//, and he will speak at Alcor’s conference in Scottsdale, AZ, next month: <a href="http://hebb.mit.edu/people/seung/"></a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Connectome-How-Brains-Wiring-Makes/dp/0547508182"></a> <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/100220308/Aschwin-de-Wolf-s-review-of-Connectome-by-Sebastian-Seung"></a> <a href="http://alcor.org/conferences/2012/index.html"></a>

  • Shine Anthology, positive SF since 2008

    The Shine anthology is a print anthology for Solaris Books: badass SF anthology for the good. Shine Anthology's website is intended to function as an open platform for optimistic SF. Hereby I invite everyone to post ideas, arguments, comments and links on this topic. Optimistic SF is like the future: a work in progress. <a href="http://shineanthology.wordpress.com/"> Shine Anthology</a> also positive twitter SF <a href="https://twitter.com/Outshine"> @Outshine</a>