Seed Magazine's series "Revolutionary Minds" introduces, to a larger audience, the people who are building our future for us. And not only are they helping to create the world we live in and will live in, they are doing it in ways unheard of just a few years ago:

The more science advances, the less, it seems, that any one discipline holds all the answers—even to the problems that a discipline was originally conceived to answer. So it's not surprising that some of today's most innovative scientific thinkers are making breakthroughs by hybridizing multiple fields. In this installment of Seed's Revolutionary Minds series, we feature five young researchers whose work fuses seemingly disparate disciplines. By drawing upon the techniques, insights, or standard models of other scientific fields, these individuals are redefining their own. Among them are a computer scientist who rethought the concept of information after studying immune systems; an archaeologist who believes material culture is an important driver of human cognitive evolution; and an astronomer who has discovered how to take an MRI of the cosmos. These thinkers are doing more than merely crossing disciplinary boundaries—they are altogether shattering them.

Meet the 5 people featured. And see what's coming around the corner.

Seed Magazine has a great article on how we evolve. Not just how we got to where we are, but where we're going and how we got pointed in that direction at all.

Benjamin Phelan writes:

When the previous generation of life scientists was coming up through the academy, there was a widespread assumption, not always articulated by professors, that human evolution had all but stopped. It had certainly shaped our prehuman ancestors — Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the rest of the ape-men and man-apes in our bushy lineage — but once Homo sapiens developed agriculture and language, it was thought, we stopped changing . . .[but] the colossal amount of information suddenly available has spurred a revision of the old static picture that will render it unrecognizable. Harpending and a host of researchers have discovered in our DNA evidence that culture, far from halting evolution, appears to accelerate it.

Some of the ideas presented have a history of misinterpretation and misapplication, but the reseachers Phelan quotes are meticulous in pointing out the fallacies that might arise from a misunderstandng of the data. One of the more elegant sentences from Phelan, "High intelligence is to great apes as the wing is to birds." I love the transformation of a process into something physical. The full article is available over at Seed.