A new report from the U.S. Department of Commerce predicts that with the proper investments in technology, futuristic scenarios such as mind uploading, or humans living past 100 years, or people linking their brains together to form a global collective intelligence could come to pass in this century.

An operating system spanning the Internet would bring the power of millions of the world's Internet-connected PCs to everyone's fingertips.

Short, meandering column about the consciousness-raising impact of wiring ecosystems into the global network via sensors and cameras: "(w)hether it's a happy plant on the office window ledge, or a deeper understanding of how the last few members of a species are clinging to life, directing new capillary sensor networks into ecosystems can bring us real insight into problems that matter."

The author surveys the growing number of \'bird-watching\' sites on the internet and argues that their combined effect is \"bringing an explosion of intelligence and even global consciousness to the earth.\" He notes: \"The projects are still embryonic -- perhaps 70,000 people contributed this year. But those numbers are vastly greater than in the days of paper and pen and have been doubling every year. The resulting picture of the natural world is consequently becoming richer and more complex. That\'s not the earth-moving part, however. The earth-moving part -- literally -- is that, as a result, a movement is spontaneously emerging that alters the physical nature of the planet so as to make it more amenable to the birds that are indicator species of global environmental health.\"

Danny Belkin argues that integration of human and machine will lead to an interconnected \"organism\"--the next major evolutionary step forward for humanity.

As the Internet continues to proliferate, it has become natural to think of it biologically as a flourishing ecosystem of computers or a sprawling brain of Pentium-powered neurons. However you mix and match metaphors, it is hard to escape the eerie feeling that an alien presence has fallen to earth, confronting scientists with something new to prod and understand.

Internet computing and Grid technologies promise to change the way we tackle complex problems. They will enable large-scale aggregation and sharing of computational, data and other resources across institutional boundaries. And harnessing these new technologies effectively will transform scientific disciplines ranging from high-energy physics to the life sciences.

The World Wide Web is one thing, but Planet Earth as one big computer? That\'s the startling thesis of Larry Smarr, Professor of Computer Science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Smarr believes exponential growth in computing devices linked via the Internet is leading us, inevitably, down the road to a planetary, integrated computer.

In a move that blends decentralized networks with the massively parallel architecture of supercomputers, several distributed-computing ventures are rapidly developing software and services that will tap the unused resources of Internet-connected PCs to solve computationally intensive tasks. These companies envision massive \"computing grids\" of thousands of computers, collectively a big brain that will be the foundation for a new class of dynamic Net applications.