The UN's Human Development Index takes account of income, education, life expectancy and health care when judging its 'quality of life' index.
The report found that the US had the highest level of "human poverty" - relating to life expectancy, illiteracy and unemployment - among industrialised nations, followed closely by the UK and the Irish Republic.
"Sexuality is like any other activity," says David Jay, AVEN's 23-year-old founder. "There are people for whom skydiving, chocolate cake and soccer are their world. But some people don't like skydiving, chocolate cake or soccer. There's no reason to focus your energy and attention on something you feel no reason to do anything about."
(Via Aberrant News.)
To the United States, he is a seriously dangerous man who put the nation's security at risk by committing "the biggest military computer hack of all time."
But Briton Gary McKinnon says he is just an ordinary computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens and UFOs exist.
The eyes of insects such as bees and dragonflies are made up of tens of thousands of tiny components called ommatidia. These all point in different directions to give the insect a very wide field of vision.
Inspired by this, Luke Lee and colleagues developed an artificial compound eye consisting of a moulded polymer resin dome filled with thousands of light-guiding channels, called waveguides, each topped with its own miniature lens.
The artificial eye could be used to create surveillance cameras, cellphone cameras, and surgical endoscopes with a much wider field of vision, the researchers say.
(Via KurzweilAI.net.)
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There are already a number of bipedal or bipedal-like bots, exoskeletons, suits, assists, and devices, but Atsuo Takanishi's team at Waseda University, in conjunction with Japanese robot superpower tmsuk, unveiled their new WL-16RIII walkbot. We know they'd be a huge boon to the handicapped, elderly, lazy, and anime-obsessed the world over, but seriously, could you imagine actually walking into a grocery store or a job interview with this thing?
Last Tuesday I decided to combine World of Warcraft with exercise, so I brought my music stand down to "The Laboratory" and set up the laptop while I peddeled for 45 minutes.
This experiment failed on both levels in that I played a crappy game because I had to keep adjusting the music stand, worried it would topple, and I wasn't paying attention to my cycling form and subsequently over used my dominant leg resulting in an off balance soreness.
We might actually discover other civilizations by extending our first wormholes to the black hole at the center of our galaxy - only to find that the polar jets have already been staked out by a dozen or more other species - not that there would be any risk of overcrowding at the black hole energy well. Black hole polar jets might be able to accommodate an almost limitless number of energy-tapping wormholes. And if not, you could just invest enough energy to loop a wormhole through a big enough arc in spacetime to intercept the polar jet at a sufficiently distant point in the past before anyone else's wormholes hog the particle stream.
In sci-fi films, bald women have conveyed a number of things in addition to desexualization, including masculinity, sexual ambiguity, dehumanization, youthfulness, and innocence. And paradoxically, bald women have also been used to portray an enhanced sense of sexuality and control.
Perhaps you've already tried 3D goggles and virtual gloves. And you might know about innovative new interface technologies that put full keyboard functionality in just a single hand. But now, if researchers are able to commercialize a new project, you might also be using your tongue to interact with your PC.
(Via KurzweilAI.net.)
The primary objective is to convert human raw material into human resources which can be employed efficiently by the managers of government and the economy. The original purposes of schooling were to make good people (the religious purpose), to make good citizens (the public purpose) and to make individuals their personal best (the private purpose). Throughout the 19th century, a new Fourth Purpose began to emerge, tested thoroughly in the military state of Prussia in northern Europe. The Fourth Purpose made the point of mass schooling to serve big business and big government by extending childhood, replacing thinking with drill and memorization while fashioning incomplete people unable to protect themselves from exhortation, advertising and other forms of indirect command.
Sea ice offers foraging walruses a place to rest. Mothers leave their calves on the ice while they dive to feed on animals on the sea floor such as crabs and clams. But rising ocean temperatures may be forcing the walrus mothers to abandon their young as they follow the rapidly retreating ice edge north to colder waters, the study said.
(Via Dr. Menlo.)
The erosion caused by rainfall directly affects the movement of continental plates beneath mountain ranges, says a University of Toronto geophysicist -- the first time science has raised the possibility that human-induced climate change could affect the deep workings of the planet.
While it might not have the global impact of Reagan - Gorbachev, Mac Tonnies and I will finally get a chance to meet each other in person on May 17th, when Findlay Muir (my ace Director of Photography) and I stop by Kansas City on Part 1 of what I'm dubbing our Magical Mystery Tour for Best Evidence, now that we're finally ready to begin filming.
Humans like to fuck. It's a fact few of us can ignore, and even fewer of us would like to change. But, as with most activities we undertake with vigor, automation, mass production and media manipulation have turned sex into the commodity of cultures.
A more obvious explanation for fading interest in UFOs is that the craze has simply run its course. "The internet killed it off," says Mr Lake. "And it's been overshadowed by other events." The internet has also given support to myriad conspiracy theories. Why worry about extraterrestrial life when down here on earth you can concern yourself with whether MI5 murdered Princess Diana, Nasa staged the moon landings and Jesus had a bloodline that can be traced to Leonardo da Vinci?
(Via The Anomalist.)
"It all seems very real and it's very, very frightening," French says. "But what is happening is that people are still in a kind of REM sleep - the kind associated with dreams - which is coming through into consciousness."
Most people who experience sleep paralysis shrug it off, but a fraction are more concerned about the experience. In some cultures, the phenomenon has been thought of as a sign that evil spirits or other nasties have taken over your body.
Palmer wrote to Shaver, asking how he had learned of Mantog. Shaver responded with a 10,000 word document entitled "A Warning to Future Man." Shaver wrote of tremendously advanced pre-historic races who had built cavern cities inside Earth before abandoning Earth for another planet. Those ancients also abandoned some of their own diseased offspring here, who degenerated over time into a population of mentally impaired sadists known as Dero--short for detrimental robots.
Climate change will cause the extinction of tens of thousands of species in coming decades, says a study in the scientific journal Conservation Biology.
The study predicts a disastrous thinning of life in the world's biodiversity "hotspots" -- places like the tropical Andes or the Caribbean basin, which contain a disproportionate wealth of species.
The authors estimate that 39 to 43 per cent of species in these regions -- 56,000 plant species and 3,700 vertebrates -- would likely disappear with a doubling of carbon dioxide from pre-industrial levels.
"These (hotspots) are the crown jewels of the planet's biodiversity," lead author Jay Malcolm of the University of Toronto said in an interview Tuesday.
"Unless we get our act together soon we're looking at committing ourselves to this kind of thing."
The Danube and other rivers in southeast Europe have swollen to record highs and broken flood defences, swamping large tracts of land and forcing thousands from their homes. Thousands have been evacuated in Romania, while Serbia has seen the worst damage to agriculture. Bulgaria has escaped serious damage, but will be alert as waters stay high and threaten to erode flood defences for at least a week more.
(Via Beyond the Beyond.)
Previous antimatter-powered spaceship designs employed antiprotons, which produce high-energy gamma rays when they annihilate. The new design will use positrons, which make gamma rays with about 400 times less energy.
The NIAC research is a preliminary study to see if the idea is feasible. If it looks promising, and funds are available to successfully develop the technology, a positron-powered spaceship would have a couple advantages over the existing plans for a human mission to Mars, called the Mars Reference Mission.
The team conducted a series of experiments to pinpoint the brain activity associated with introspection and that linked to sensory function. They found that the brain assumes a robotic functionality when it has to concentrate all its efforts on a difficult, timed task -- only becoming "human" again when it has the luxury of time.
Ilan Goldberg and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of nine volunteers during the study. Participants were shown picture cards and told to push buttons to indicate whether or not an animal was depicted.
(Via KurzweilAI.net.)
It's a very cool project, but it uses the futurism wrapper essentially to argue for a set of actions we ought to take now, rather than help us imagine what a climate-friendly future might in fact be like. That's a shame -- not because we don't need to mobilize public action (in this case buying green energy) -- but because we have a far more pressing need for visions of the future worth fighting for, and this was a perfect opportunity to create such visions. Still it's great to use a sweeping future-historical setting as a means of showing people why their individual actions are part of a grander story.
Over at Posthuman Blues Mac is still pondering what term to use instead of ultraterrestrial and is settling on cryptoterrestrial. Although I my not be agree with some of the ideas he throws out (Hell I don't agree with some of the ideas I throw out!!) there is always something that gets me thinking. This time about the best name for the Other.
Since the water strider robot cost just $10 in materials (though models with sensors & brains would cost more), this little beast would be a perfect candidate for a swarming robot. Cheap, distributed sensing across bodies of water could map effluent plumes from factories, temperature gradients, oxygen or other nutrient levels, toxic spills, any number of things.
To Western scientists and medical researchers, Salome is a human specimen of potentially incalculable value. Despite plying her trade for more than two decades in a country ravaged by Aids, she has never contracted HIV, and every credible study of her case points towards her being immune to it.
(Via The Anomalist.)
On Friday, a team of rescue workers from a local coal mine, followed by archaeologists and geologists examined the tunnel, thought to be 2.4 miles (3.8km) long.
The team found two intersections with other tunnels leading off to the left and right.
Their conclusion was that it had to be man-made.
"This is definitely not a natural formation," said geologist Nadja Nukic.
Experts had previously suspected the south pole might have a vortex feature; a vast vortex with an unusual double-eye feature has already been observed over the planet's north pole.
But the south polar region has scarcely been observed.
"We can see there is a twister here that is similar to that which we know from the north pole," said mission scientist Horst Uwe Keller.
(Via Remote Central.)
I'm guessing this prank - by a bunch of techno-literate campaigners in Toronto, Canada - got plenty of people enraged, amused or just plain mystified. Would it make you leave your car at home though? The signs usually advertise events at the University of Toronto, but have started doing their bit to save the planet.
According to Pink Tentacle and NS Technology Blog, Robo-One which organises a remote-controlled robot combat event held in Tokyo every year plans to launch in space a mini-satellite carrying small humanoid robots in October 2010.
Tokyo will have 10-minute windows of communication with the satellite 4 times per day as it passes overhead. Battles will be conducted in the space surrounding the ROBO-ONE satellite during these 10-minute periods.
There seemed to be some teething problems with batteries running low - the bots didn't seem to want to stay at the feeding station to charge themselves up - I guess all the people waving things at them was kind of distracting. The bots themselves are amazingly elegant in their motion - more so than organic spiders that have that 'alien' quality to them.
In some ways it feels like we have unknowingly stumbled into some kind of street theatre were the actors undergo constant costume changes and appear to be improvising the plot as they go along - changing it nearly as often as they change their costumes. How much more disturbing this would be if they suddenly fondled your most private parts!!
"The enhanced warming we have seen since the 1990s along with phenomena such as the widespread melting of glaciers could well be due to this increased intensity of sunlight compounding the effect of greenhouse gases," said Professor Martin Wild of the Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich, Switzerland.
(Via Unknown Country.)
It's not quite as dramatic of the famous Viking photo of the "Face on Mars" taken in 1976, but I really like the subtlety of the Happy Face crater.
"People like to think of modern human biology, and especially mental biology, as being the result of selections that took place 100,000 years ago," said University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn. "But our research shows that humans are still under selection, not just for things like disease resistance but for cognitive abilities."
A few years ago, USA Today called Sedona the most beautiful place in America. At sundown, that doesn't begin to cover it. And it's not just the views. There's a vibe in the air, something not quite audible, a kind of metaphysical dog whistle that calls people out to have a look around and to try to feel something that, if you're not a committed New-Age pilgrim, is hard to put into words. Nowhere else in this country does a natural setting feel so much like the inside of a soaring pantheistic cathedral.
A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was "absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb" if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do "what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do," and "that saving Iran is going to be his legacy."
Rather predictably, however, certain surfers have been using the spot-building website for purposes that don't exactly put Chevrolet’s newest in the best light. Unfortunately, GM's webmeisters appear to be asleep at the wheel, as we can't imagine these derogatory ads staying up on purpose.
The symptoms of progeria seem to be exaggerated in the Greys [. . .], suggesting that Greys have a much more severe form of the disease. They have obviously found a way to treat it, because some of them grow up to be pilots and scientists and live beyond childhood, but how can they control a disease which is always progressive and always fatal in human children? Are all Greys healthy? If the Greys have progeria, can all Greys control their disease? Most reports from UFO abductees suggest that the Greys have an advanced medical technology. Can this advanced medical technology help all the Greys control their progeria if they have this disease? If they cannot cure it, can they stop its progression?
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