Invisibility cloaks. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A Facebook for genes. These were just a few of the startling topics IFTF explored at our recent Technology Horizons Program conference on the "Future of Science." More than a dozen scientists from UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, Scripps Research Institute, SETI, and private industry shared their edgiest research driving transformations in science. MythBusters' Adam Savage weighed in on the future of science education. All of their presentations were signals supporting IFTF's new "Future of Science" forecast, laid out in a new map titled "A Multiverse of Exploration: The Future of Science 2021." The map focuses on six big stories of science that will play out over the next decade: Decrypting the Brain, Hacking Space, Massively Multiplayer Data, Sea the Future, Strange Matter, and Engineered Evolution. Those stories are emerging from a new ecology of science shifting toward openness, collaboration, reuse, and increased citizen engagement in
scientific research.

ocial media isn’t really “new.” While it has only recently become part of mainstream culture and the business world, people have been using digital media for networking, socializing and information gathering – almost exactly like now – for over 30 years:

New Media Field Manager Judith Freeman acknowledges that the integration of the supporter database used by field organizers (VAN), the web campaigning tools (MyBO tools and email list powered by Blue State Digital), and the national voter file and associated demographic data (Catalist) brought important improvements. In addition to putting basic online volunteer and donor information directly into the hands of field organizers, integrating voterfile data with the national calling tool, "Neighbor to Neighbor" allowed online volunteers to make immediate contact with sets of voters. For more on how most of these systems connected, see Marc Ambinder's summary in the Atlantic.

Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like

For each of the 5 big topical trends described below, I've assembled some resources I think will be useful for anyone who wants to keep up with cutting edge developments in these fields in the next year.

Wired Magazine

Last week Gizmodo, Macworld and several other sites pointed to a gadget called Inflight Power, a nifty device that plugs into the audio jack of an airplane seat and converts the music into electricity to charge up your iPod or other portable energy suck.

Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it's taken on a life of its own. We anticipate profitability by 2043

If you want to validate your website, you have to get rid of embed. In this article, I’ll show you how.

...no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materials for the next decade, much less for the ages.