The people behind the kooky Christian "Left-Behind" science fiction novels (about the futuristic battles on earth after the Rapture takes all the good Bible-bashers to heaven) have produced a violent, bigoted video-game version of their stories.
The cave, which has been dubbed the Ayalon Cave, is "unique in the world," said Prof. Amos Frumkin of the Hebrew University Department of Geography. This is due mainly to its isolation from the outside world, since the cave's surface is situated under a layer of chalk that is impenetrable to water. The cave, with its branches, extends over some 2½ kilometers, making it Israel's second largest limestone cave. It is to remain closed to the public to permit further scientific research.
When you mash this software up with Google Earth, planners or architects (or anyone for that matter) gain the ability to create 3D printouts of chunks of land or clusters of buildings. Their NYC 3D prints have generated models of Ground Zero and Columbus Circle, and could do any other area, with great precision. The software is free and open, produced by EyeBeam, a R&D lab which "is focused entirely on incubating experimental technologies and media that directly enrich the public domain."
What is the "soul" anyway (or, for the non-religiously inclined, "consciousness")? Beond this plane of existence, who knows, for sure? In the here and now, however, isn't it the sum of our experiences that matters? What harm in transferring that to another body, i.e. a clone, or perhaps a cyborg, should our technology someday allow it? I don't think we're defined by the outer shell - indeed, any religion that I know of views the body as a mere vessel. It's what's inside that counts, and I see no reason why that couldn't be transferred, whole, to another vessel (well, no non-technological reason, at any rate).
It should also be pointed out that Kurzweil's logic also has implications for Ufology. For one, if Kurzweil is correct and humans are only 50 years away from creating the Singularity it stands to reason that any advanced ET life traveling between stars to visit our planet will have already passed through the "singularity" phase of their evolution. As a result, they will probably NOT be biological organisms (humanoid or otherwise) but technological beings. It’s quite hard to say what this might look like although it is quite possible that they could instantiate bodies appropriate to the audience with which they are trying to communicate if they were so inclined.
The theme park will include life-sized silicone-made models which visitors can touch to discover erogenous zones.
People will also be able to build their ideal partner from a series of body parts and there will be instructions on how best to kiss and how to talk more sexily.
(Via Gravity Lens.)
For the braneworld model would have notable consequences. The hypothesis predicts that small black holes from the early universe -- with a mass similar to that of a small asteroid -- would have survived to the present. Such objects would be part of the dark matter that seems to pervade the universe, exerting gravitational force but reflecting or emitting no light. General Relativity says that such primordial black holes would have evaporated away by now, so finding them would make the braneworld hypothesis tenable.
It would also change our view of nearby space. For remarkably, if such black holes do exist, they may be close.
Quite why we need to look at pictures of clouds, when there are prefectly good craft orbiting Mars that can better analyse them, is anyone's guess, but the dust-storms will be of interest, as it is these that are thought to be responsible for clearing the dust and debris from the Rovers' solar panels, thus greatly extending their operational lives.
On the downside, this new upgrade to the Rovers' software might mean they miss other photo opportunities on the ground - after all, in the event of coming across anomalous surface features, how is a Rover to image them if its cameras are constantly pointed up at the sky?
Here is a photo of Earthman Tonnies and I at a place called Newport Beach, California.
I was hopeful that I might run acrosss earthwoman Carmen Electra while there, but no such luck.
Glowing, silvery blue clouds that have been spreading around the world and brightening mysteriously in recent years will soon be studied in unprecedented detail by a NASA spacecraft.
The Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) mission will be the first satellite dedicated to studying this enigmatic phenomenon. Due to launch in late 2006, it should reveal whether the clouds are caused by global warming, as many scientists believe.
(Via The Anomalist.)
Like any red-blooded, masculine man of the male gender, I love PVC weaponry. You should too. If the concept of heading on down to the local Home Depot and transforming $100 worth of random pipe bits into a killing machine doesn't appeal to you, you're a frikkin' pansy.
(Via Aberrant News.)
With Posthuman Blues I'm in for a UFO buffet, topped with techno-information and an occasional sociological on the mark comment from a down to earth fellow.
On the Moon, for instance, mission planners hope to find water frozen in the dark recesses of polar craters. Water can be split into hydrogen for rocket fuel and oxygen for breathing. Water is also good for drinking and as a bonus it is one of the best known radiation shields. "In many ways," notes Beaty, "water is key to a sustained human presence." Ice mining on the Moon could become a big industry.
What have we learned from all the recent Mars data? Is it realistic that advanced life once existed there, and maybe still remains? Has NASA covered up significant information? Mac Tonnies, author of After the Martian Apocalypse, will join us with his views.
Ducks sometimes eat grain or even gravel and use it as a kind of internal grinding mechanism when they are digesting food, Holcomb explained. An autopsy Thursday revealed some grain in the bird's stomach, but nothing else out of the ordinary.
An international team of professional and amateur astronomers, using simple off-the-shelf equipment to trawl the skies for planets outside our solar system, has hauled in its first "catch."
The astronomers discovered a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a Sun-like star 600 light-years from Earth in the constellation Corona Borealis.
The animations below show the flooding we can anticipate in major cities as global warming raises sea levels and leads to stronger hurricanes. They show that as sea levels rise, even relatively weak storms will be able to do a great deal of damage.
The Moon is not only extremely odd in its construction; it also behaves in a way that is nothing less than miraculous. It is exactly four hundred times smaller than the Sun but four hundred times closer to the Earth so that both the Sun and the Moon appear to be precisely the same size in the sky -- which gives us the phenomenon we call a total eclipse. Whilst we take this for granted it has been called the biggest coincidence in the universe.
Welcome. I'm an artist exploring how math, science and sculpture meet, and this is my gallery and storefront. My work is about life in three dimensions, symmetry and balance, and always finding beauty in geometry.
Here you'll find my signature designs in metal, along with 3D laser-etched glass designs including the Milky Way Galaxy and protein structures.
Britain's biggest water supplier, Thames Water, is seriously considering towing icebergs from the Arctic to London to solve what could be the worst shortage in a century, a newspaper says.
"We have to look at any possible alternative, including towing icebergs from the Arctic and seeding rain clouds," The Times quoted Richard Aylard, of Thames Water in London.
(Via Beyond the Beyond.)
"Sunshine Garden," an adorable euphemism for the fact that Britons can no longer plant the same things in their gardens that their parents did. Why? No rain. No irrigation, either. "Sunshine." Lots of that. Perhaps the Sahara could be re-dubbed the "Sunshine District."
"Considering the continent's negligible contribution to global greenhouse-gas emissions, it is a terrible irony that Africa, according to current predictions, will be most affected by climate change," added Taylor. "Furthermore, the rise in air temperature is consistent with other regional studies that show how dramatic increases in malaria in the East African Highlands may arise, in part, from warmer temperatures, as mosquitoes are able to colonize previously inhospitable highland areas."
Both teams were able to identify mathematical patterns in the distribution of galaxies throughout the universe indicating the presence of large structures. "This is one of the first detections of structures that are so large," Padmanabhan says. "The only other place that they have been detected is in the cosmic microwave background", the afterglow of the big bang.
(Via KurzweilAI.net.)
Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, says the possibility of such an interesting payoff for little additional cost makes the idea of looking for artefacts worth considering.
"On the Moon, I think it's certainly worthwhile taking a couple hundred square feet or so of material and looking it over," he says. But SETI researchers "probably wouldn't bet their mortgages on finding anything".
I'm running out of hokey analogies for "out of this world" and the amazing ass photos that Mac from Post Human Blues is posting but the point is that you should buy his book and read his blog because the guy is brilliant and we can all agree that we love boobies no matter what our opinions are on extraterrestrial life or the paranormal.
Brazilian archaeologists have found an ancient stone structure in a remote corner of the Amazon that may cast new light on the region's past.
The site, thought to be an observatory or place of worship, pre-dates European colonisation and is said to suggest a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy.
According to the study, evolution has practically programmed women to recognize which men would be interested in becoming fathers.
The study also concluded that women can look at men's faces and instantly figure out which men have the highest levels of testosterone. Those men are rated the most masculine and tend to be the kind of guys they favor for a more short-term relationship or a fling.
There's no way to change the weather, but the next time it rains, your My Day umbrella will let you look up and see sunshine. Confused? My Day's fabric is made from ePaper, so the umbrella can display any of six different images on its underside, and it'll add to the effect by playing some corresponding ambient music.
(Via Gravity Lens.)
More than $4 million in equipment upgrades will shine 100 million pixels on Iowa State University's six-sided virtual reality room. That's twice the number of pixels lighting up any virtual reality room in the world and 16 times the pixels now projected on Iowa State's C6, a 10-foot by 10-foot virtual reality room that surrounds users with computer-generated 3-D images. That means the C6 will produce virtual reality at the world's highest resolution.
(Via The Speculist.)
When you think about it, the universe isn't a terribly exciting place. After a million years of civilization, all those gas giants and nebulae must start to look the same. When you've seen one desolate windswept rocky terrestrial covered with fungi, you've pretty much seen them all. Truly advanced civilizations might not have any particular interest in exploring the universe after a certain point. They won't even need to, because their technology will enable them to build and explore better universes.
A couple of space colony summer studies were conducted at NASA Ames in the 1970s. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed. A number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made. These have been converted to jpegs and are available as thumbnails, quarter page, full screen and publication quality images.
(Via Boing Boing.)
"These people will have like beads of sweat but it's black, black and tarry," said Ginger Savely, a nurse practioner in Austin who treats a majority of these patients.
Patients get lesions that never heal.
"Sometimes little black specks that come out of the lesions and sometimes little fibers," said Stephanie Bailey, Morgellons patient.
Patients say that's the worst symptom -- strange fibers that pop out of your skin in different colors.
"He'd have attacks and fibers would come out of his hands and fingers, white, black and sometimes red. Very, very painful," said Lisa Wilson, whose son Travis had Morgellon's disease.
An expedition by the Census of Marine Zooplankton has just returned from the Sargasso Sea with a large sampling of sea creatures, many of them microscopic. Onboard DNA sequencing has allowed a team of scientists from over 14 countries to classify 220 of the species at sea. The following photos of these tiny animals are courtesy of the Census of Marine Zooplankton.
(Via The Huge Entity.)
Invisible "smog", created by the electricity that powers our civilisation, is giving children cancer, causing miscarriages and suicides and making some people allergic to modern life, new scientific evidence reveals.
The evidence - which is being taken seriously by national and international bodies and authorities - suggests that almost everyone is being exposed to a new form of pollution with countless sources in daily use in every home.
When astronauts return to the Moon, to explore and eventually build a moon base, they're going to need oxygen... and lots of it. Fortunately lunar soil - or regolith - is almost half oxygen. NASA researchers are using a technique called vacuum pyrolysis, where the regolith is heated until it releases oxygen. Light from the Sun was focused by a lens to heat lunar soil to 2,500 degrees C. As much as 20% of the soil was converted to free oxygen, and the leftover slag could be used for bricks, radiation shielding or pavement.
Jacqueline Roumeguere-Eberhardt, a French anthropologist perhaps best known for her marriage to an illiterate Masai warrior and for a controversial theory that prehistoric beings still live in Africa, died on March 29 in Nairobi. She was 78.
The author of numerous anthropological treatises, she won notoriety in 1978 when she said that a group of creatures -- "X's," which appear similar to prehistoric humans -- were living in the Kenyan bush.
At today's conference, Wolf and a colleague demonstrated three SurvivaBall mockups, and described how the units will sustainably protect managers from natural or cultural disturbances of any intensity or duration. The devices - looking like huge inflatable orbs - will include sophisticated communications systems, nutrient gathering capacities, onboard medical facilities, and a daunting defense infrastructure to ensure that the corporate mission will not go unfulfilled even when most human life is rendered impossible by catastrophes or the consequent epidemics and armed conflicts.
"It's essentially a gated community for one," said Wolf.
(Via Beyond the Beyond.)
The tiny robot smells and acts just like a roach, fooling the real insects into accepting it as one of their own. Through its behaviour, the robot can persuade a group of cockroaches to venture out into the light despite their normal preference for the dark, for example.
The lawsuit, filed April 20 by Reno-based lawyer Bob Hager, accuses the government of skipping public comment and failing to complete required environmental studies before picking a date and place for the explosion.
It claims the planned 700-ton ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb will kick up radioactive fallout left from nuclear weapons tests conducted from 1951 to 1992 at the Nevada Test Site and irreparably desecrate land that members of the Western Shoshone tribe have never acknowledged turning over to the U.S.
The blast, some 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is expected to generate a 10,000-foot mushroom cloud and a shock wave that officials say will probably be felt in Indian Springs, about 35 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency claims the explosion will help design a weapon to penetrate hardened and deeply buried targets. Critics have called it a surrogate for a low-yield nuclear "bunker-buster" bomb.
Thought experiments are a very powerful technique of philosophical investigation. In practice, it's intractably difficult to visualize the side effects of new technological developments. In order to tease out the subtler consequences of current trends, a complex science-fictional simulation is necessary; inspired narration is a more powerful tool than logical analysis. If I want to imagine, for instance, what our world would be like if ordinary objects were conscious, then the best way to make progress is to fictionally simulate a person discovering this. Here again I make a distinction. Freestyle thought experiments are quite different in intent and in execution from merely futurological investigations. Freestylists aren't interested in making useful predictions that businessmen can use. We don't care about what might "really happen" in someone's limited notion of the mundane world. The point is to see what could happen in an emotionally meaningful world of if.
The MoD document compiles UFO sightings reported to the ministry over previous decades. But the top-secret nature of the project meant that none of the UFO witnesses were questioned further about their experience. "That's the weakness of the report," says Ian Ridpath, an astronomy writer and UFO-debunker from Brentford, UK, who was a guest speaker at Clarke's press conference on 8 May. No scientists were directly consulted, and the author relied instead on literature searches, says Clarke. It even appears to rely on some pretty "dodgy" theories put about in UFO folklore, he adds.
(Via The Anomalist.)
The upside of global warming is that it's bound to create a whole lot of new beachfront property (albeit at the expense of existing waterfront parcels). To help you get a handle on the future of coastal real estate, this Google Maps hack shows you what the earth will look like when the sea levels rise up to 14 meters. In this image, San Francisco's SOMA district, most of downtown Oakland and the entire island of Alameda are submerged by a 14-meter rise in the water level.
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