Social/Ethical/Legal

Blackout

“Better the government shut down than Wikipedia go on strike. That would be like part of my mind going on strike. Just give them [Wikipedia] whatever they want — we don’t even need to hear what it is.” — Ray Kurzweil

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Social networks, surveillance, and terrorism

“We are creating systems of comprehensive surveillance in which a billion people are involved and those people’s lives are being lived under a kind of scrutiny which no secret police service is the 20th century could ever have aspired to achieve,” claims militant digital privacy advocate Eben Moglen, Betabeat reports. “And all of that data [...]

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How to learn things automatically

OK, this one’s right out of The Matrix and The Manchurian Candidate. Imagine watching a computer screen while lying down in a brain imaging machine and automatically learning how to play the guitar or lay up hoops like Shaq O’Neal, or even how to recuperate from a disease — without any conscious knowledge. Researchers at [...]

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random | Bots gone wild

Introducing random — a new, occasional blog category for stuff that’s way too weird for our regular weird posts. Like these wacky robot stories: Wanna take a ride on a 15-foot-long inflatable walking robot named Ant-Roach (as in anteater-cockroach)? Um, maybe not, but hey, “human safe” bots are not a bad idea, especially if you [...]

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Let’s tell everyone how to make a virus that could kill millions!

Here’s an idea: why don’t we just tell everybody in the world how to make an airborne H5N1 influenza virus strain (“bird flu”) that has been genetically altered to be easily transmissible (between ferrets, which mostly closely mimic the human response to flu), and which if released, could trigger an influenza pandemic, quite possibly with [...]

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Is Sponge Bob destroying kids’ minds — or accelerating their intelligence?

Young children who watch fast-paced, fantastical television shows may become “handicapped” in their readiness for learning, says a new University of Virginia study. U.Va. psychologists tested 4-year-old children immediately after they had watched nine minutes of the popular show “SpongeBob SquarePants” and found that their “executive function” — the ability to pay attention, follow rules, [...]

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teleXLR8 returns, featuring quantum physicist Gildert on ‘Hack the Multiverse!’

This exciting news just in from Giulio Prisco: “teleXLR8 is reopening on Sunday 21 10 a.m. PST with a talk by [experimental quantum physicist/programmer] Suzanne Gildert on Hack the Multiverse!.” The teleXLR8 online talk program is “a telepresence community for cultural acceleration,” as their blog puts it. Translation: an audiovideo seminar — think TED in [...]

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Sex and the Red Queen hypothesis

Biologists at Indiana University have discovered why it takes two to tango. (Insert obligatory geeks-who-can’t-get-a-date joke here.) The biologists claim their research shows that sex allows parents to produce offspring that are more resistant to co-evolving parasites, while self-fertilization dooms populations to extinction at the hands of their biological enemies. It’s the Red Queen hypothesis, a [...]

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How to measure emotions

Are you a geek who has trouble “reading” people? Now there new hope. Research at the MIT Media Lab and the University of Cambridge to help people on the autism spectrum has spawned two new technologies to measure emotional response, along with a company called Affectiva to market them. In the videos below, MIT’s Dr. [...]

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How your memories can be twisted under social pressure

Listen up, Facebook and Twitter groupies: how easily can social pressure affect your memory? Very easily, researchers at the Weizmann Institute and University College London have proved, and they think they even know what part of the brain is responsible. The participants conformed to the group on these “planted” responses, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% [...]

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