This weekend, hundreds of people from across the globe will gather in Madrid to discuss how to turn themselves into a new species. The occasion is TransVision, the world’s biggest annual meet-up of transhumanists — and probably the most important intellectual summit you’ve never heard of. This year, anti-ageing specialist Aubrey de Grey will explain why he thinks most people alive today have a 50/50 chance of living to a thousand years old.

Winter Mraz says she loves having her keys in her hand but she does not mean holding them. She has actually had her door key implanted into her left hand in the form of a microchip. In her right hand, she has had another microchip implant that acts as her business card but could also be used to store important medical information for use in the case of an emergency.

Transhumanism is the new byword, popularized by the commercial ventures of Elon Musk and other futurists in the business world. What makes it so fascinating is that the technology — in some forms at least — is already here. All we need to do now is integrate it with humankind and then it’ll be a race to the top. But the top of what, exactly?

Johnny Metheny sits at an electric piano in his Port Richey home self-teaching himself the song Amazing Grace. Johnny’s never played before, but he’s determined to master the song. He plays through fairly well with his right hand. "That side I got down pretty good,” said Metheny. Then he raises his left hand to the keyboard, the hand he’s only known for a few short months, and that he never thought he’d be raising. The world’s first fully mind controlled artificial arm.

Stanley Bing considers rooting for the bad guys in search of eternal life.

Telepathy, echolocation, and the future of perception. By Matthew Hutson.

You are already a cyborg! Here’s 10 ways you could merge even more with technology in the coming decade. By Elise Bohan.

"Transhumanism is becoming more respectable, and transhumanism, with a small t, is rapidly emerging through conventional mainstream avenues," Eve Herold reports in her astute new book, Beyond Human. While big-T Transhumanism is the activist movement that advocates the use of technology to expand human capacities, small-t transhumanism is the belief or theory that the human race will evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of deliberate technological interventions.

Everywhere I look, Pope Francis, the 266th pope of the Catholic Church, seems to be in the news—and he is being positively portrayed as a genuinely progressive leader. Frankly, this baffles me. Few major religions have as backwards a philosophical and moral platform as Catholicism. Therefore, no leader of it could actually be genuinely progressive. Yet, no one seems to pay attention to this—no one seems to be discussing that Catholicism remains highly oppressive.

Richard Cocks reviews "Conversations with Roger Scruton" by Roger Scruton and Mark Dooley.

Good news: You're immortal. Bad news: Life as you know it is over. By Cara Rose DeFabio.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal tackles the human technological singularity.

When people think about rocket ships and space exploration, they often imagine traveling across the Milky Way, landing on mysterious planets and even meeting alien life forms. In reality, humans’ drive to get off Planet Earth has led to tremendous technological advances in our mundane daily lives — ones we use right here at home on terra firma.

Easter celebrations. The swearing in of President Obama with a bible. The Pledge of Allegiance’s “One nation under God.” Ted Cruz’s freakish evangelism. Even when we sneeze, many Americans still reflexively say: God bless you. American society exists in an engulfing religious framework—and that inescapable Abrahamic point of view leads to one ultimate goal: an eternal afterlife with the maker. For the majority of Americans—about 70 percent—that is what they believe and how they live in...

Researchers have successfully preserved a rabbit brain using a new method of cryopreservation that focuses on memory storage.

The World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland just wrapped up its annual gathering. It isn’t hard to make fun of this yearly coming together of the global economic and cultural elites who rule the world, or at least think they do.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's resolution in 2016 is to build an AI system similar to Jarvis from Iron Man.

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, in his recent and celebrated book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, argues that advanced AI poses a potentially major existential risk to humanity, and that advanced AI development should be heavily regulated and perhaps even restricted to a small set of government-approved researchers. Bostrom’s ideas and arguments are reviewed and explored in detail, and compared with the thinking of three other current thinkers on the nature and implications...

New wave of Transhumanist religions believe technology could one day offer immortality.

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla fears gene manipulation more than computers taking over humankind. When it comes to existential threats facing the human race, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is more concerned about new technologies that can be used to remove genes in embryos that cause illness than he is about artificial intelligence. Khosla, the high-profile founder of Khosla Ventures, made his case while answering a question Wednesday on the website Quora. A member of the public had...