What’s the insect-equivalent of PETA? Some hippies somewhere are going to be seriously pissed about this:

Via 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).

Double fucking awesome is the Metal Gear-referenced DARPA being involved. Someone call up Nietzsche, it appears we have finally killed God. Next time I see a beetle I’m going to have to stomp it, fearful it’s being controlled by foes to asphyxiate me in my sleep.

Yeah, brilliant idea, let’s teach robots to ask questions.

Via New Scientist:

ASKING someone for help is second nature for humans, and now it could help robots overcome one of the thorniest problems in artificial intelligence.

That’s the thinking behind a project at Willow Garage, a robotics company in Palo Alto, California. Researchers there are training a robot to ask humans to identify objects it doesn’t recognise. If successful, it could be an important step in developing machines capable of operating with consistent autonomy.

Consistent autonomy? Are you out of your fraking minds? Seriously. You’d think all these tech nerds that are pushing us closer and closer to the Great Robotic Uprising of Spring of 2020 would probably watch some sci-fi. I mean c’mon, you guys are building robots. You have to be geeks. Philip Kindred Dick is considerably aggravated with all of us.

Asking questions? It’s like seventeen years before some hot blonde chick is walking up to you and asking “Are you alive?” before robotrons bomb the cities and scorch the skies. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

This is truly rad:

Via New Scientist

On 2 September, MIT students Oliver Yeh, Justin Lee, and Eric Newton launched a 350-gram (0.8-pound), helium-filled weather balloon from a field in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. The balloon carried a used 7.1-megapixel camera — purchased on Amazon.com — that was programmed to take pictures every 5 seconds.

…

After four hours, the balloon reached its peak altitude, an estimated 28,350 metres above the Earth’s surface. At this height, the curvature of the Earth was just visible.

Earlier in 2009, a team of Spanish students launched a €1000 balloon-borne probe that made it to 30,480 metres using a bigger balloon. Larger balloons have more room to expand before breaking as the pressure of the atmosphere decreases with altitude.

[check out the entire gallery @ new scientist]

Welcome To The Future! Where you’ll be snorting stem cells to fix your Alzheimer’s:

Via New Scientist:

STEM cells show promise for treating a range of neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s, strokes and Alzheimer’s, but it is tricky getting them into the brain. Perhaps inhaling stem cells might be the answer – if mice are anything to go by.

Other options all have their drawbacks. Drilling through the skull and injecting the stem cells is painful and carries some risks. You can also inject them into the bloodstream but only a fraction reach their target due to the blood-brain barrier.

The nose, however, might be a viable alternative. In the upper reaches of the nasal cavity lies the cribriform plate, a bony roof that separates the nose from the brain. It is perforated with pin-size holes, which are plugged with nerve fibres and other connective tissue. Since proteins, bacteria and viruses can enter the brain this way, Lusine Danielyan at the University Hospital of Tübingen in Germany, and her colleagues, wondered if stem cells would also migrate into the brain through the cribriform plate.

To test their idea, they dripped a suspension of fluorescently labelled stem cells into the noses of mice. The mice snorted them high into their noses, and the cells migrated through the cribriform plate. Then they travelled either into the olfactory bulb – the part of the brain that detects and deciphers odours – or into the cerebrospinal fluid lining the skull, migrating across the brain. The stem cells then moved deeper into the brain.

Hold on Nana! We got your ass, just uh, snort these cells.

Sleeping easy? Well, I wouldn’t! Not while god damn mice are moving god damn objects with their god damn brains:

Via New Scientist:

Kevin Warwick and Ben Whalley at the University of Reading, UK, have already used rat brain cells to control a simple wheeled robot

Some 300,000 rat neurons grown in a nutrient broth and producing spikes of electrical activity were connected to the output of the robot’s distance sensors. The neurons proved capable of steering the robot around a small enclosure.

But don’t fucking worry! With the forthcoming Rodent Uprising, apparently we’ll be able to use our own futuristic mind powers. FUCK YOU JEAN GREY, I’M AWESOME NOW:

To make the system a better model of human disease, a culture of human neurons will be connected to the robot once the current work with rat cells is completed. This will be the first instance of human cells being used to control a robot.

Doesn’t anyone watch Terminator? Or Blade Runner? Or Battlestar Galactica? Or The Matrix? Or Pinky and the Brain? This shit is going to end in tears.

There is a certain disconnection in my life whenever I leave the mancave and embark on some sort of journey. Whether I’m fucking around in Cow Country, or I’m meandering the marshes of Nova Scotia, I am decidedly unplugged. And I’m not sure I particularly dislike it.

Most of the time.

I’m a Twitter fiend. I don’t really use it to convey my feelings or what I’m doing. Seldom will you see me all,

Just took a shit. Used my hand to wipe up, toilet paper couldn’t handle the sludge.

or

Sam wasn’t happy when I ripped ass at the dinner table with her Dad, LOL.

Just not my thing. I’m already self-indulgent enough thinking people care about my analysis of banal news and stifling non-stories.

But I use Twitter to actively and obsessively garner the latest news from a variety of venues. What’s the latest word from Destructoid? What’s my other blogging situation over at Mishka sporting right now? And unmentioned but equally as important in personal mind-numbing minutiae is sporting news.

Open Twitter. Click refresh. Click refresh. Open Firefox. Click refresh. Click refresh.

I don’t think that this is a behavior particular to me. We all dabble in data streams these days without even realizing it. Open Facebook. Open MySpace. Open Twitter. Get the latest news. Get the latest status updates.

When I first leave, I brace for impact. Data crash. Information withdrawal. As I hurtle further and further down the highway, or skyway, or waterway, my parents’ basement recedes further into the distance.

I cry a single tear and mourn the loss of my computer, my comfortable set-up. Sure there are other computers I can hop on, check the e-mail. But it’s not the same. I’ve often remarked that I could physically move these days a countless number of times and not mind, so long as I had MY computer. MY mouse. MY phone. My life isn’t the room I’m sitting anymore; it’s the computer I’m sitting on. I equate comfortableness with the alignment of my icons on the taskbar, my wallpaper waiting for me when I boot up the computer.

It’s sad, or maybe it simply is. Maybe that’s just the way the world is swinging these days. Who knows. Give me my iMac and my keyboard and I’m ready to handle shit. Typing this mindless goop right here on a computer not my own is like sleeping in a bed not belonging to me. It’s a bed, it serves a purpose. But it isn’t mine.

The further I get away from my computer, the instantly-refresh lifestyle that my generation is buried in, the more it becomes okay. The desire to incessantly interact with the same five stories on thirteen different sites (including this here shit box) fades into the back of my mind.

And for the moment, silence.

Keep Reading »

As I mentioned before, the “Welcome to the Future” category is based off of inspiration from reading Warren Ellis’ Doktor Sleepless. It seems fitting then, that it appears his crazy insight is about to become true. In DS, there is the Clatter. What is the Clatter? Peep it:

Clatter is a wireless IM Lens instant messaging system built on to a soft contact lens. Clatter differs from other, commercial lens services by being open source and “riding” other services to create free cross-platform access.

It was created by John Reinhardt/Doktor Sleepless before he left for the Amazon.

Shriekygirls piggyback their shriekyware connections on Clatter signals.

In other words, it’s an instant messaging system that you see in front of you. This is futuristic sci-fi nonsense, right?

Not according to this news article at the IEEE Spectrum:

In the Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character sees the world with data superimposed on his visual field–virtual captions that enhance the cyborg’s scan of a scene. In stories by the science fiction author Vernor Vinge, characters rely on electronic contact lenses, rather than smartphones or brain implants, for seamless access to information that appears right before their eyes.

These visions (if I may) might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle [see sidebar, “A Twinkle in the Eye”]. These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.

Welcome to the motherfucking future. Where you’ll be able to see like the Terminator, and chat with your friends while you close your eyes waiting for sleep.

This is the first installment of Welcome to the Future. It’s often that I think to myself that the future has arrived, and people don’t appreciate it. We’re waiting for an unattainable horizon, while magic happens around us. It’s a concept that was really slammed into my head by Warren Ellis’ comic book Doktor Sleepless. I’m going to use the category Welcome to the Future to showcase amazing shit that is happening before our eyes without being appreciated.

So it seems obvious where I’d start, huh? Fucking and magical iPod sex devices. To catch you guys up to speed with my demented mind, let me quickly define Teledildonics for you:

Via Wiki:

Teledildonics (also known as “cyberdildonics”) are electronic sex toys that can be controlled by a computer.[1] Promoters of these devices have claimed since the 1980s they are the “next big thing” in cybersex technology.[2] “Teledildonics” can also refer to the integration of telepresence with sex that these toys make possible – the term was coined in 1975 by Ted Nelson[3] in his Computer Lib/Dream Machine

There, now you’re with me. There’s some amazing teledildonics. There’s the RealTouch, which seems fucking amazing. It’s a vagina (or anus, no seriously for rockin’ gay porn or dudes who enjoy anal) that is connected to your computer via your USB port. Then the vagina/anus interacts with special porns that you watch via the RealTouch website. It’s god damn stupendous. I can’t imagine even the biggest prude not being amazed by this.

And then there’s the inspiration behind this column. A couple of nights ago I was rocking some pre-bed porn. And the specific scene I was watching featured the OhMiBod. It’s a vibrator whose vibrations are determined by the music being output by an iPod. So in essence, you plug the OhMiBod into your iPod, while rocking some headphones. And then women or men who enjoy anal play get off to the various vibrations output by their favorite George Clinton or Napalm Death songs. Depending on the sort of music you enjoy, of course.

You plug the headphones into the iPod, the iPod into your OhMiBod, and then the OhMiBod into your orifice of choice. Brilliant.

Welcome to the Future.