wired.co.uk Antonio Espingardeiro In science fiction the term “cyborg” is used to describe human beings whose bodily functions are aided or controlled by some type of technology. When you consider that what this actually refers to is enhanced capabilities through technology, we’re not talking about the bionic man. […]
“Paging John Connor..” DARPA’s Cheetah Bot Breaks Human, Robot Speed Records By Stephanie Mlot PC MAG The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Boston Dynamics have unleashed a legged robot that’s even faster than Olympic champion Usain Bolt. The Cheetah recently broke its own land speed record […]
Wisdom Dancer expresses scepticism about the Szaszian project… ____________ Reading on the internet has probably already introduced you to the anti-psychiatric movement, which appeals to the dislike people have for the “disease model” and fear of medication for mental illness, which relates to their fears of being […]
DGR in Mexico. Nature assesses the aftermath of a series of nanotechnology-lab bombings in Mexico — and asks how the country became a target of eco-anarchists. By Leigh Phillips Under attack: policemen stand guard outside the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education after a letter bomb exploded […]
From Mashable.com Mitt Romney’s tax returns are reportedly in the hands of a team of hackers who plan on releasing them publicly at the end of the month unless a ransom is paid. The group allegedly obtained the files from PricewaterhouseCooper’s Tennessee office on Aug. 25, in what […]
When decentralized desktop manufacturing achieves the successful and widespread production of a workable, reliable weapon then the world as we know it will be effectively over. It may be a gun. It may be a drone. It may be a cruise missile for all we know. Technology may […]
by David J. Hill singularityhub.com Consider, for a moment, the rising use of drone technology by the military. In light of how years of advances in robotics and artificial intelligence will transform drones, imagine how warfare will look in merely one decade. That’s the subject of a recently released […]
brecorder.com Agence France-Presse Australian scientists said Thursday they had successfully implanted a “world first” bionic eye prototype, describing it as a major breakthrough for the visually impaired. Bionic Vision Australia (BVA), a government-funded science consortium, said it had surgically installed an “early prototype” robotic eye in a woman […]
salon.com The idea that paralyzed people might one day control their limbs just by thinking is no longer a fantasy By Miguel A.L. Nicolelis, Scientific American This article originally appeared on Scientific American. In 2014, billions of viewers worldwide may remember the opening game of the World Cup […]
Has social psychology become a Tribal Moral Community since the 1960s? Are we a community that is bound together by liberal values and then blind to any ideas or findings that threaten our sacred values? I believe the answer is yes, and I’ll make 3 points to support […]
kurzweilai.net Giulio Prisco A transhumanist congressman? In Italy? Seriously? Yes. In July, Italy — ironically, a stronghold of the Catholic Church — became the first major Western nation to elect an active transhumanist.
New Scientist Will Ferguson They beat like real heart cells, but the rat cardiomyocytes in a dish at Harvard University are different in one crucial way. Snaking through them are wires and transistors that spy on each cell’s electrical impulses. In future, the wires might control their behaviour […]
gizmodo.com Jesus Diaz Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered an efficient and totally safe method to turn adult blood cells “all the way back to the way [they were] when that person was a 6-day-old embryo.” The discovery could be the key to cure the incurable—from heart attacks […]
theverge.com Ben Popper Shawn Sarver took a deep breath and stared at the bottle of Listerine on the counter. “A minty fresh feeling for your mouth… cures bad breath,” he repeated to himself, as the scalpel sliced open his ring finger. His left arm was stretched out on […]
theregister.co.uk Iain Thomson The latest list from Forbes of the 100 most powerful women on the planet suggests that the technology industry is leading the way in promoting sexual equality, contributing 15 per cent of the spots overall and a quarter of the top 20 positions. The technology […]
stratrisks.com Source: Gizmag Once the preserve of science fiction, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have advanced to the point where they can even be found in novelty headwear, which only makes an achievement of an international team of scientists more frightening. Using an off-the-shelf Emotiv BCI costing only a few hundred […]
guardian.co.uk Naomi Wolf If you think that 24/7 tracking of citizens by biometric recognition systems is paranoid fantasy, just read the industry newsletters Tom Cruise as John Anderton in the futuristic film Minority Report, where the advertisements use recognition technology to call out to the shoppers. Photograph: Allstar/20th […]
sciencedaily.com Two new species of owls have been discovered in the Philippines, and an MSU researcher played a key role in confirming their existence. (Top left: Cebu Hawk owl. Bottom right: Camiguin Hawk owl.) (Credit: Courtesy of Oriental Bird Club: original painting by John Gale)
theregister.co.uk Phil Muncaster Iron-Man style DIY effort has man grasping again Plucky Chinese gent Sun Jifa showed the world exactly what persistence, and a rudimentary knowledge of welding and prosthetics, can do when it emerged this week that he built his own bionic hands after accidentally blowing the […]
Here’s the money quote: “In fact, the entire idea of “white male science” reminds me, I’m afraid, of “Jewish physics.” Perhaps it is another inadequacy of mine, but when I read a scientific paper, I can’t tell whether the author is white or is male. The same is […]
By Charles Choi Photo by Fred Spoor Four decades ago, in 1972, the Koobi Fora Research Project discovered the enigmatic fossilized skull known as KNM-ER 1470, or “1470” for short, which ignited a now long-standing debate about how many different species of early Homo lived alongside Homo erectus […]
by Daniel Acheampong
Two weeks back, the state of Texas sent convicted murderer Marvin Wilson on a KCI-addled one-way trip to oblivion. News of this came to my attention via the Huffington Post, which made a big how-to about the potassium-punctured perp’s IQ. Leading with the headline “Texas Puts Man with 61 IQ to Death”, HuffPo made mention of a variety of testimonies regarding Wilson’s intelligence…
The Supreme Court late in the afternoon rejected without comment…
jpopasia.com Aysohmay Japan has taken robotics to the next level. Suidobashi Heavy Industry has developed a fully functional mecha robot named Kuratas that can shoot rockets and 6,000 bullets per minute. The mecha unit was debuted at Wonder Fest 2012 in Tokyo. It is about 4 meters high, […]
From Medical Xpress August 1, 2012 By Gerry Everding New research suggests as much as 10 percent of individual variances in human intelligence can be predicted based on the strength of neural connections between the left prefrontal cortex and other regions of the brain.
From Popular Mechanics By James Vlahos The phone rang when I was shoeless and only a couple of sips into my morning coffee. “Hi, it’s Novella Carpenter,” the caller said. “My goat is giving birth.” Twenty minutes later I was crouched in the hay at Ghost Town Farm, pushing […]
How the brain responds to and processes images of people from different racial groups is an emerging field of investigation that could have major implications for society. Psychologist Elizabeth Phelps of New York University, in New York, who in 2000 led one of the first studies in this area, tells Nature what her latest review of the field reveals about the neuroscience of race1.
rawstory.com AFP A surgeon operates on a patient in 2009. A medical transplant centre on the Italian island of Sicily said Monday it had carried out the world’s first partial liver transplant using only a robot to remove the organ of the donor. (AFP Photo/Axel Schmidt) A medical […]
wired.com Chris Anderson At last year’s Paris Air Show, some of the hottest aircraft were the autonomous unmanned helicopters—a few of them small enough to carry in one hand—that would allow military buyers to put a camera in the sky anywhere, anytime. Manufactured by major defense contractors, and […]
From Business Insider This infographic created by Jason at Frugal Dad shows that almost all media comes from the same six sources. That’s consolidated from 50 companies back in 1983. NOTE: This infographic is from last year and is missing some key transactions. GE does not own NBC (or […]
schneier.com Bruce Schneier We’re in the early years of a cyberwar arms race. It’s expensive, it’s destabilizing, and it threatens the very fabric of the Internet we use every day. Cyberwar treaties, as imperfect as they might be, are the only way to contain the threat. If you […]
From Food Democracy Now! This weekend the American Medical Association will consider an important resolution to call for the support of GMO labeling. The AMA is the nation’s largest and most respected association of doctors and medical students and their support of labeling genetically engineered foods will go […]
By Kevin Carson Following the major news networks’ projections of Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall vote Tuesday, the dominant reaction among anti-Walker activists was apocalyptic. “If out-of-state corporate interests can outspend us ten-to-one, and that’s enough to beat all this grassroots organizing and public outrage, then […]
Kevin Carson, Senior Fellow and Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory at Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS), was interviewed June 1 by Kevin Barrett on Truth Jihad, American Freedom Radio. The interview, which takes up the the first hour and continues for part of the second, centers on the […]
By Kevin Carson On a recent episode of PBS Newshour, economist Richard Freeman and futurist Ray Kurzweil argued the significance of technological progress. Freeman warned “We don’t want it to be that there’ll 20 or 30 billionaires controlling everything, and the rest of us struggling for the one or […]
By Richard Spencer The cloyingly named “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act” (HR3541) failed in the House on Thursday, despite gaining overwhelming Republican support. If passed, the bill would have outlawed racial and sexual discrimination in abortion, jailing any doctor who helped a woman end a pregnancy […]
By Kevin Carson I’m not a Marxist, but I find a lot of Marx’s ideas useful. Old Karl certainly had a gift for turning a phrase. Nobody who could come up with something as Proudhonian as “the associated producers” could be all bad. One of his best in […]
By Kevin Carson Rob Reiner, in a recent interview with Chris Matthews, showed that while he may have moved on to directing and producing, he’s still a comedic actor at heart. Reiner, best known as Archie’s son-in-law “Meathead” on “All in the Family,” told Matthews — with a […]
From The Atlantic Over 20,000 years ago, humans won the evolutionary battle against Neanderthals. They may have had some assistance in that from their best friends. Shutterstock/Pedro Jorge Henriques Monteiro One of the most compelling — and enduring — mysteries in archaeology concerns the rise of early humans […]
From BBC News. Don’t “think of the children” too much, lest you lose valuable freedoms (and IQ points) in the process! ____________ Pornography filters on mobile phones are “censoring” normal web content, according to the Open Rights Group. Its report found that 60 websites were incorrectly blocked by […]
By Kevin Carson Many Occupy supporters on the Left express concern that it could be coopted by the mainstream institutional Left and harnessed to a political agenda of NPR liberalism. The recent prominence of Van Johnson’s Rebuild the Dream and MoveOn.org seems to provide at least superficial justification […]
io9.com by Jess Nevins Transhumanism is a popular movement to convert ordinary humans into superhumans, using technology. For 20 years, transhumanism has been a favored topic of futurists, who see it as a possible salvation for humanity. But we’ve already seen one attempt at transhumanism, and it failed […]
chronopause.com CHRONOSPHERE Over the past few years there has been increasing friction between a subset of cryonicists, and people in the Transhumanist (TH) and Technological Singularity communities, most notably those who follow the capital N, Nanotechnology doctrine.[1, 2] Or perhaps more accurately, there has been an increasing amount […]
From MRDA’s Inferno. Who would’ve thought such a mild-mannered, bourgeois Englishman could ignite such a fibre-optic firestorm? A few weekends back, all right-thinking Left-leaners united for a hyperextended Two Minutes Hate session against one John Derbyshire, a Brit expat and paleocon pundit who occupies a comfy niche amongst […]
WTF? Collaborative research from a gathering of exo-scientists postulate that there are genes from over 20 extraterrestrials civilizations in Human DNA. These exo-scientists have continued the work of Nobel Prize winner Dr. Frances Crick, and other scholars in this area. Current findings are consistent with reports of Professor […]
theverge.com T.C. Sottek At least fifty calves and three human beings are living with no pulse in their bodies, thanks to an artificial pump that replaced their naturally-grown hearts, as detailed in a story from Popular Science. Doctors Bud Frazier and Billy Cohn devised the artificial organ, and […]
Article by Thomas N. Naylor. ——————————————————————————————————————————————————- With the publication of his courageous new book, Why America Failed (John Wiley, 2012), Morris Berman has become one of the very first well-known, left-wing writers to acknowledge that not only is the American Empire in decline, but that it is completely unfixable. In […]
From The American Dream. —————————————————————————————————————————————————– According to CNBC, the Federal Reserve “is planning on monitoring what you say about it on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook”. Apparently we are not supposed to be alarmed though, because as the CNBC headline states, the Federal Reserve just “wants to […]
bbc.co.uk Yarns made of the tiny straws of carbon called nanotubes have an astounding ability to twist as they contract, scientists have found. The effect, reported in Science, is similar to the action of muscles found in elephant trunks and squid tentacles. However, the yarns twist 1,000 times […]
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson
Recent Comments