peter diamandis

As people come to terms with the limits of the Earth's natural resources, startup company Planetary Resources is eyeing another source: space.

The company, founded by XPrize Foundation CEO Peter Diamandis and aerospace engineer Eric Anderson, will launch at the Museum of Flight in Seattle later today. Its list of advisers includes Google CEO Larry Page, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, filmmaker James Cameron, and the former Microsoft chief software architect and space tourist Charles Simonyi. Other advisers are Google board member and investor Ram Shriram and Ross Perot Jr., son of the former presidential candidate.

Planetary Resources' goal … Read more

The "Star Trek" universe may be beloved by millions, but it's entirely fictional. Yet one element of Gene Rodenberry's timeless creation may actually help people with their health care decisions in real life.

The problem faced by millions of people around the world, especially in the third world, and in rural areas of the first world, is that there's not always a doctor around to help figure out what's wrong with you--and sometimes, one isn't even necessary. Sometimes, the right technology could help us determine what's going on in our bodies.

That'… Read more

The time has come to jettison the traditional chemical rocket propulsion system and move to one powered by beamed microwaves, say a group of researchers.

For decades, even as rockets have gotten lighter and more powerful, the basic system for putting them in space hasn't changed. A combustion chamber is loaded with propellants, which are put through a chemical reaction, causing hot gases to accelerate and be ejected through a nozzle at very high velocity, which in turn, provides momentum to the rocket's engine.

But a team led by 25-year-old CalTech Ph.D. student Dmitriy Tseliakhovich thinks that … Read more

Can you come up with the ideal solution for cleaning up the BP oil spill? If so, millions of dollars in prize money could be yours.

The X Prize Foundation on Tuesday said that its new Oil Cleanup X Challenge will dare people to devise the most innovative ways to clean up oil spills, dangling a prize purse of millions of dollars as an incentive. The challenge is designed to inspire entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists around the world to create quick, creative, and efficient ways of capturing crude oil from the surface of the ocean, according to the foundation.

Full … Read more

At a gala charity event Saturday night featuring "Avatar" director James Cameron, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and a who's who of tech industry luminaries, the X Prize Foundation laid out its vision for the next five years.

Already in 2004, the foundation has paid out $10 million in prize money for the winner of the Ansari X Prize, which in 2004 went to the first non-governmental team to launch a vehicle into space twice in two weeks. The prize winners were Burt Rutan and the Paul Allen-backed team that built SpaceShipOne.

The foundation offers … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--For Rob Nail, Saturday was a bonanza of opportunity.

Over dinner that night in building 20 at the NASA Ames Research Center here, Nail found himself discussing 3D printing and housing with X Prize CEO Peter Diamandis. Already, Nail had been considering buying some farming land in Northern California and had been interested in the nascent concept of 3D printed buildings. He told Diamandis that he wanted to try that on the land.

"He says," Nail recalled, "I want to make this introduction," and grabbed Nail, pulling him a few tables over to … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Having already set private space travel in motion, the organizers of the X Prize are ready to unveil the future of the cutting-edge competitions.

On May 15, at a gala fundraising event to be held at George Lucas' Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco, X Prize Foundation Chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis, along with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and "Avatar" director James Cameron will unveil their five-year vision for the famous awards.

The X Prize first gained fame for its promise of a $10 million prize to the first private team … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--While I'm sure that many of the people in the room were familiar with prediction markets, I wonder how many of them had ever seen an active one up close and personal before.

Providing that sense of deep immersion, of course, was exactly the point of an exercise run Monday during a session of Singularity University's executive program by Melanie Swan, a Silicon Valley hedge fund manager. Swan, the principal of MS Futures Group, had tasked small groups of students with coming up with world-changing product ideas and then simultaneously had the students vote in … Read more

The "Singularity" is that postulated point in time when technological progress, led by machine intelligences designing their own replacements at an ever-increasing rate, becomes so rapid that we mere humans can no longer comprehend or control it.

It's a popular concept in science fiction. Some people believe that this point will eventually be reached in the real world. I think that those people are drastically underestimating the other limits to progress, such as bandwidth limits for data gathering, the difficulty of comprehension, and the inverse relationship of speed to reliability in data analysis.

They're also confusing … Read more