It's no secret that Jackson always loved fantasy, and he turned to one of the masters of scifi/horror, John Landis, to direct his music video masterpiece Thriller. When the video hit MTV in the mid 1980s, audiences were shocked by how far Jackson went in this horror-parody. The special effects were genuinely scary, and Jackson wasn't afraid to make himself look like a real monster. Though the zombie werewolf boogie seemed like a weird idea at the time, it has become a staple of pop culture and a perennial favorite with the YouTube flash mob generation. Here you can see one of the YouTube memes the song spawned - a group of prisoners reenacted the dance sequence and made internet history.

Later, Jackson made a science fiction movie called Captain EO which aired exclusively at Disneyland. This allowed him to bring together his obsession with Disney-related fantasies and outer space. In fact, it was a perfect match. Disneyland has always been about science fiction, which is why there is an entire area of the park called Tomorrowland filled with rockets and outer space themed roller coasters.

Among the many things about Jackson that caught the public's imagination in the 1990s was the way he turned his body into a kind of science fiction story. He became an enhanced human, using plastic surgery and pharmaceuticals to change his face and seemingly his race as well. He became whiter than most white people, and his pale bandaged skin became his trademark.

Jackson was a post-human celebrity, and nowhere was this more obvious than in his video "Black or White" (also directed by Landis). Once again, Jackson turned to one of the greatest minds in science fiction to help with the video. He used the morphing software used by James Cameron for The Abyss and Terminator 2 to create a memorable and oft-copied scene where dozens of people's faces morph into each other, streaming through different racial identities, ages, and genders with an uncanny ease.

In the years since that time, Jackson went from being a science fictional figure to a scandal-plagued mystery. It seemed that his body was still morphing, and every time he made a public appearance people tried to figure out what new enhancements he'd gotten. He made the scifi-themed video "Scream" with his sister Janet, filled with weird anime characters and hints that Janet was as alien as Michael was.

Recently, he immigrated to Dubai, possibly the most science fictional city in the world right now. There he was apparently helping to design a theme park, which seems fitting for someone whose identity has always been so closely linked with fantasy.

No matter what you think about Michael Jackson the man, Michael Jackson the legend has transformed the way we think about identity. He injected pop culture with the future, and showed us what happens (good and bad) when you have the means to make fantasies real.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina have found a protein, called p16INK4a, that is tied to aging. In a forthcoming article in Aging Cell, the team describes this protein's presence in the human blood stream. Higher amounts of the protein are also tied to tobacco use and inactivity. Interestingly, the study found that inactivity contributed more to this aging marker than a high body mass index, which seems to show that activity slows down aging more than preventing obesity does.t

The research team says that this discovery could help with stabilizing organ transplants, recovery from surgery, or cancer treatment. As of now, it's a way to see just how far your body has aged molecularly, regardless of how you have aged chronologically. It also might lead to further development of age-prolonging procedures.

Aging is traditionally coupled with a process called "senescence," which is generally understood to be the wearing out and breaking down of cells over time. There are many theories of aging, but many biologists theorize that the effects of aging are a naturally evolved part of life. The corollary to this is that aging (or even death) isn't necessarily a requirement for life. It might be something we can prevent entirely.

The research into prolonging peoples' lives is expansive. A group called the Methuseleh Foundation is constantly working to cure aging, and a governmental agency, the National Institute on Aging, is working on the problem as well. This new research, which gives researchers a tool for documenting and measuring the aging process, could eventually contribute to longer lives for humanity.

Test detects molecular marker of aging in humans [UNC School of Medicine, via Science Daily]

Mr. Nobody, starring Jared Leto and directed by Jaco Van Dormael (Toto The Hero), comes out in Belgium in October, but there's no U.S. or U.K. release date yet. Here's the official synopsis:

Nemo Nobody leads an ordinary existence at his wife's side, Elise, and their 3 children until the day when reality skids and he wakes up as an old man in the year 2092. At 120, Mr. Nobody is both the oldest man in the world and the last mortal of a new mankind where nobody dies anymore. But that doesn't seem to interest or bother him very much. The only questions that preoccupy him in the present is whether he lived the right life for himself, loved the woman whom he was supposed to love, and had the children whom he was meant to have... now his purpose is to find the right answer.

[via QuietEarth]

More isn't always better, but if self-selected use of technology to push back the biological goal posts is any criteria, Octomom - as a world-champion biological mother - has had her performance dramatically enhanced . . . I don't see this so much as the dark side of radical technological evolution as just the weird side. I mean, yes… you do have people screaming about the taxpayers having to pay for her babies, but compared to billions of dollars in banker bonuses or Paul Bremer running around Iraq with satchels filled with $4 billion dollars in cash, Octomom is a bargain – well worth the price in entertainment dollars.

Writer Chris Nakashima-Brown just got back from a three-day colloquium on "parallel worlds" in Mexico, with Bruce Sterling, Linda Nagata, Mark Dery, Christopher Priest and M. John Harrison. Nakashima-Brown posted a tantalizing collection of soundbites about the Singularity, the economy and our posthuman future.

Among the choicest are Christopher Priest's claim that only speculative fiction novels really put the individual's choices at the center of the story: "Only in the modern speculative novel is responsibility the core, the argument, the message."

Bruce Sterling argues that celebrities, athletes and models will be the leading edge of posthumanism, but then he also says, "In the future, the poor will not be able to avoid becoming posthuman, because they just can't afford it."

And M. John Harrison says culture may already have collapsed, "and we may already be on the other side of it." Now, our personalities are being mediated through mass media. And the job of science fiction is to show how we're "compiling our personalities from moment to moment." The writer's task, says Harrison, is to "write about individuals who are constantly being mediated and re-mediated. Not alienated, but pureed." (Which sounds sort of Dickian to me.)

Nakashima-Brown's unreconstructed notes are a bit frustrating to read, but it sounds like it was a fascinating discussion, and just the bits you can read are thought-provoking.

Posthuman image from Anders Raytracing Page. [No Fear Of The Future]

Of course, we could take this in the exact opposite direction. How about a gene mod for blue skin? Maybe someone out there wants to osseointegrate an extra set of arms onto his torso. Right now, we're focused on replacing or repairing damaged parts, but how long before we start on the upgrades? This year we dealt with the question of whether an amputee athlete with prosthetic running legs had an unfair advantage over runners with just human legs. Are you feeling post-human yet? Image by: StudioCanal.

Surgery Will Put Dog With Amputated Leg Back On All Fours Again. [Science Daily]

To-Do Lists for Futurists:

1. Five ways to build an ecotopia, an urban space that exists in harmony with nature
Sure, recycling helps, but so does repurposing an old machine.

2. Five ways to contribute to the creation of artificial intelligence
You can help bring about machines with the ability to reason just by surfing the web.

3. Five ways to start planning for a future moon colony in your bedroom
From growing plants with LEDs to participating in a space elevator contest, there are a lot of things you can do to make that moon vacation in 2030 a reality.

4. Five ways to become posthuman by this time next year
A software download that makes your computer search for proteins that cure cancer while you sleep, and a tiny device that will make your body machine-readable tomorrow.

To-Do List for Futurists: Become Posthuman

1. Today: Download the Rosetta@home program, and let your computer crunch data on protein shapes while you're not using it. Like the SETI@home program, Rosetta@home is designed to harness the power of thousands of PCs to take the data that scientists have gathered about how proteins in our bodies are shaped, and churn quickly through that data to figure out how we could design new proteins that might fight disease or turn us into posthuman, flying, megabrainiacs who don't need to sleep.

2. This week: Read all about what posthumans and transhumans want in James Hughes' fantastic book Citizen Cyborg.

3. This month: Volunteer to participate in neurological experiments at your local university. No, we don't want you to get the zapper, we just want you to volunteer to sit inside an MRI brain imaging machine and do various tasks so that neuroscientists can learn more about which parts of your brain are responsible for which activities. The more we understand the neurology of the brain, the better we'll be at preventing its degeneration through age or disease. And maybe we can get closer to those awesome Google brain implants. Most labs and universities have helpful websites that explain who can volunteer and how.

4. This month: Get a high-tech implant. Want to feel electro-magnetic waves? Get a magnet implanted in your finger. Want to be machine-readable? Get an RFID implanted under your skin. You can save all kinds of useful data on that RFID, but just be sure you keep it encrypted!

5. This year: Get your genome sequenced and donate the data to a public research institution. Companies like Knome and 23andMe will do it for some cash, and then you can take the data they get and give it to the International HapMap, an open database of genomic information used by researchers all over the world. The more data they amass about human genetic diversity, the sooner you can get a drug tailored specifically for you to cure your cancer, or make your legs move at super-speed.

• Kraftwerk — "We Are Robots": The original video for this song came out back in 1978, and they released an updated version in 1991. During their 1981 concert tour they used mannequins to perform as themselves onstage in a bizarre "robots singing about robots" moment.
• Peter Miser — "Scent of a Robot": Pete Miser is actually Pete Ho, an asian-american hip hop rapper who breaks beats in New York City. This robot video features cool CGI versions of Pete becoming a robot.
• Flight of the Conchords — "The Humans Are Dead": Probably the finest post-human robot song is one written for the robots of the future by the humans of today, just so they'll have something to dance the funky robot to, on our mass graves.
• Bjork — All Is Full Of Love": One singing Bjork robots would be pretty creepy, but imagine what would happen with two of them singing with each other. Now you can see it for yourself.
• Beck — "Hell Yes": This video was directed by Garth Jennings of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and features the world's (at the time) only four QRIO robots doing some fan dancing.
• Daft Punk — "Robot Rock": Daft Punk already thinks that they are robots, and they go out of their way to hide their humanity from audiences. So who better than robots to provide some of the first music for robots?
• Styx — "Mr. Roboto": This video is about Robert Orin Charles Kilroy (ROCK) hiding inside a "roboto" prison guard robot to escape from jail. Of course, this will just give away that secret to real robots, so now we're screwed.