Posts Tagged ‘Futurism’
Can We Really Control the Weather?
From The Independent:
Recently both Russia and China have claimed to be able to use cloud seeding to increase rainfall and snowfall, or change the location of where it falls. In the past, snow-making experiments have been carried out in North American ski resorts in the past with little evidence of success. So how have the Russian and Chinese scientists achieved this feat and what evidence is there that it is in fact due to cloud seeding?
The seeding method used is to add tiny particles of silver iodide to the clouds and there is solid science behind this method. At temperatures a few degrees below zero degrees centigrade, clouds consist mainly of supercooled water droplets. These clouds can be quite stable, but silver iodide has an ice-like structure and it will…
Star Trek-like Phaser Developed
From the Telegraph:
However, anyone hoping that the machine will become a powerful new weapon could be disappointed, scientists have only proven the effect on worms.
A phaser traditionally emits a beam capable of stunning or killing an enemy.
Researchers have now found a way to paralyse tiny worms when they expose them to ultraviolet light.
Even when the ultraviolet light was turned off the animals stayed stunned.
However, if they were subsequently exposed to a different form of light they recovered again and were able to move.
[Read more at the Telegraph]
Moon Water: Will Lunar-Base Humans Be Able to Drink It?
Rebecca Sato writes on the Daily Galaxy:
Scientists recently solved some longstanding lunar mysteries, including how the Moon is producing its own water.
While it turns out that the Moon is not made out of Swiss cheese (disappointing, I know—that would have been a food source for lunar explorers), it does act like a big sponge of sorts. The lunar surface is a loose collection of irregular dust grains, known as regolith. Basically, the regolith absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These electrically charged particles interact with molecules of oxygen that are already present in lunar dust, and voila, you have H2O…
Darpa: Freeze Soldiers to Save Injured Brains
From Wired:
The Pentagon’s mad science division has a new way to deal with the 70,000+ troops diagnosed with traumatic brain injury: freeze ‘em.
Darpa, the military’s far-out research arm, is looking for research projects that would create a “therapeutic hypothermia device” to prevent traumatic brain injuries from causing permanent molecular damage to the brain. The idea is based on successful studies that used cortical cooling to treat survivors of strokes and cardiac arrest. According to Darpa’s solicitation, cooling down the brain after trauma can offer “dramatic neuroprotection” that will prevent long-term harm to cognition and motor skills.
So far, Darpa-funded studies suggest that traumatic brain injuries are caused by repeated exposure to blasts, specifically the “supersonic wave” of highly-pressurized air they emit. Within a fraction of a second after impact, brain cells, tissues and blood vessels are stretched,…
‘Space Elevator’ Wins $900,000 NASA Prize
From New Scientist:
A laser-powered robotic climber has won $900,000 in a competition designed to spur technology for a future elevator to space.
Building a space elevator would require anchoring a cable on the ground near Earth’s equator and deploying the other end thousands of kilometres into space. The centrifugal force due to Earth’s spin would keep the cable taut so that a robot could climb it and release payloads into orbit.
Though building a space elevator might require an initial investment of billions of dollars, proponents say once constructed, it would make for cheaper trips into space than is possible using rockets. But huge technological hurdles must first be overcome, including how to supply power to the robotic climber.
To that end, NASA offered $2 million in prize money in a competition called the…
Mind Control with Sound and Light
From BoingBoing:
From a slew of new brainwave toys and bionic monkeys to advanced brain scans and wireless neuro-implants that will soon enable paralyzed people to remotely operate computers with their minds, the gap in the human-machine interface is closing. But while mind-reading gets all the glory, other researchers are developing new amazing non-drug methods to control the brain as well. We’ve posted many times about zapping regions of the brain with magnetic pulses, called transcranial magnetic stimulation, to treat depression, boost creativity, or even improve reaction time. And brain “pacemakers” are increasingly common treatments for epilepsy, Parkinson’s, and even depression. What’s next? Mind control through sound and light.
[Read the full story at BoingBoing]
Weird Face Mask the Next Level of Multitouch?
From CNET:
Hard to believe that before Apple made multitouch cool, the most we ever “touched” our PC was touch typing. Now, here’s Photoelastic Touch, a more tactile form of interaction that enters into “Minority Report” realm (still one of the coolest future tech shows) by not even requiring users to touch the screen.
Japanese researchers led by Hideki Koike at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo used a face mask comprising see-through gel as a haptic interface, allowing users to press, pinch, or touch the transparent mold to control the face on the LCD. In this case, the actions prompted a furrowed eye brow or eye movement.
[Read more at CNET]
Will Novels Be Read By A Minority ‘Cult’ in 25 Years?
Alison Flood writes in the Guardian:
Philip Roth’s late run of productivity has long been a source of wonder in the literary world, with his latest novel coming out this week less than a year after the last, and another already complete. But the 76-year-old’s own energy is not, according to him at any rate, any reflection of vibrant life in fiction itself. Roth has long been pessimistic about the survival of the novel in a gaudy, short-attention-span culture, but his latest prophesy is one of his bleakest yet, predicting that the form will dwindle to a “cultic” minority enthusiasm within 25 years.
The author believes that the concentration and focus required to read a novel is becoming less and less prevalent, as potential readers turn instead to computers or to television.…
Will Women Rule Over Men In The Future?
Joshua Glenn writes on Hilobrow:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women will likely overtake men in the American workforce some time this month or next. In August, women held 49.9 percent of the nation’s 132 million nonfarm jobs. Why? Because 80 percent of the 5.1 million people who have lost their jobs in this recession are men; and women are gaining the vast majority of jobs in the few sectors of the economy that are growing.
Doesn’t having, then raising children keep many women out of the workforce? Not so much. A chart posted to the NY Times’ Economix blog notes that women across the board have entered the labor market in higher numbers over the last three decades, but the biggest increases have been among mothers with young children.
What does this mean for men, you ask? John Broome, author of “It’s a Woman’s World,” a science fiction story that appeared in the DC comic book Mystery in Space (#8), asked the same thing way back in July 1952. As the panels shown here demonstrate, Broome predicted that women would one day cruelly discriminate against men — force them to work in the home, while women ran businesses and fought wars.
More on Hilobrow
Scientists Predict the End of Aging By 2029
Spencer Kornhaber writes in OC Weekly:
Call it an anti-death panel. We just received a press release saying that the world’s top aging scientists will converge on Manhattan Beach from November 13 through 15 to figure out how to put off that whole getting-old-and-dying thing.
The scientists, supposedly, will “predict the end of aging by 2029.” Which sounds cool but … We’ll all be kinda old by then anyways. Couldn’t they get this thing done now?
The topics at the conference will include gene therapy, nanotechnology and, of course, “Organ Re-Growth and Transplantation.” Sound like science fiction? Well, yeah. They realize: “Technology has so rapidly caught up with us that what was once the domain of science fiction movies and novels is quickly becoming mainstream medicine. Medical scientists are rapidly perfecting techniques that…
Is The Large Hadron Collider Being Sabotaged from the Future?
Lauren Davis writes on io9.com about an article in the NY Times:
What if all the Large Hadron Collider’s recent woes are more than bad luck and technical problems? Two noted physicists speculate that the future may be pushing back on the LHC to avert the disaster of observing the Higgs boson.
The quest to observe the Higgs boson has certainly been plagued by its share of troubles, from the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 to the Large Hadron Collider’s streak of technical troubles. In fact, the projects have suffered such bad luck that Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto wonder if it isn’t bad luck at all, but future influences rippling back to sabotage…
Will Sex Be Different in the Future?
“It is important to remember that sexual intercouse is a highly ancient, simplistic-at-its-core activity that we may choose to discard at some point in the future…”
In “Sex and the Singularity,” futurist magazine H+ asks radical techs (including Ray Kurzweil) to describe futuristic “sex after the Singularity.” They envision “more complex activities that generate even more pleasure and connection between people,” and suggest “The primary purpose of the Singularity will be seen, after the fact, to be Awesome Sex.
“There will be exponentially more sex, with exponentially more interfaces, and with exponentially more measures of pleasure.” With “millions of super computer-generated sex fantasies,” one technologist concludes “I love the future. Bring it on.”
“Whether we choose to call it ’sex’ will be entirely arbitrary, but it may bear little resemblance to the sex of…
Remote-Controlled, “Cyborg” Flying Insects Exist: The Goal is the Ultimate Spy
Creepy, really brings the expression “a fly on the wall” to life. Ewen Callaway reports in New Scientist:
It’s tempting to call them lords of the flies. For the first time, researchers have controlled the movements of free-flying insects from afar, as if they were tiny remote-controlled aircraft.
By connecting electrodes and radio antennas to the nervous systems of beetles, the researchers were able to make them take off, dive and turn on command. The cyborg insects were created at the University of California, Berkeley, by engineers led by Hirotaka Sato and Michel Maharbiz as part of a programme funded by the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The project’s goal is to create fully remote-controlled insects able to perform tasks such as looking for survivors after a disaster, or acting as the ultimate spy. (Read more on New Scientist)
