Scars can fade, but the memories of what we went through when they were caused live on. It's My Scar memorializes each individual's journey by recreating their scar as a pendant on a necklace, a ring, or another form of wearable art; so while the scars may fade, the memories are always able to visibly live on.
(Via Grinding.)
It's true that unlike the previous inhabitant of the White House (remember him?), Barack Obama is sane, intelligent, and mature. He's responsive to what others think. He hopes to institute real change in education, health care, the environment.
But even with his great charisma and silver tongue, he's a proper soldier for the system which is ravishing the planet. As he said in his inauguration speech in January, already aware of the huge financial mess he was inheriting, "We will not apologize for our way of life."
What do these words mean? They mean that the mall-i-zation of the planet will continue. They mean that the commercialization of all of life will not stop. They mean that our massive so-called footprint will never be substantially downsized.
And they mean that the force which has erased indigenous cultures and plant and animal species, which has sullied our air and soil and water, will essentially not be called into question, no matter how many of its most glaring excesses may be curbed.
The planet-seeking Kepler spacecraft has beamed home its first images of a patch of the sky where NASA hopes to find Earth-like planets circling distant, alien stars.
Some 14 million stars are estimated to lurk within the first views from Kepler, which NASA released Thursday. The images reveal a swath of stars between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra that fill an expansive area of our Milky Way galaxy which, when seen from Earth, is about the size of human hand held up against the night sky at arm's length.
The suit's "voluntary control system" works by capturing bio-electrical signals detected on the surface of the skin, before the muscles actually move. The system analyzes these signals to determine how much power the wearer intends to generate and calculates how much power assist must be generated by which power units. The power units then generate the necessary torque and the limbs move. All this takes place a split second before the muscles start moving, allowing the relevant robotic joints to move in unison with the wearer's muscles.
Designed by Soviet secret-keepers in the depths of the Cold War, Star City lies deep in the pine and birch forests on Moscow's edge, and even now you can't find it on many maps. The men at the gates and checkpoints ask for your documents, and when you get inside the legendary cosmonaut training center, you expect to find something splendid -- a glimmer of the cosmos, a flash of eternal striving.
But the hushed fields and deep woods have an eerie, deserted feel. Between research buildings, stray dogs pick at frozen mud scabbing the snow. Here and there, retired engineers in fur-lined hats stroll unsteadily among the buildings of the compound, a cross between a village and an industrial park.
In front of a bank of control panels and computers, two middle-aged women discuss methods of cooking potatoes and sausages. There are some men too, one of them in camouflage. Except for the cosmonauts in their bright blue jumpsuits, you can't tell what any of them are doing, and you are not supposed to ask.
The fin on the suit, which resembles a wetsuit covering about three-quarters of her body, acts like a rudder and gives her stability. Allison can change direction by varying the strokes of her front right flipper, the lone survivor in what rescuers believe was a shark attack.
(Via The Keyhoe Report.)
Arkin contends that a properly designed robot could behave with greater restraint than human soldiers in the heat of battle and cause fewer casualties.
"Robots can be built that do not exhibit fear, anger, frustration or revenge, and that ultimately behave in a more humane manner than even human beings in these harsh circumstances," he wrote.
(Via Sentient Developments.)
Is there an evolving giant life form of synaptic fibers emerging within cyberspace? Is it a new set of neurotransmitters, allowing and encouraging an alternative web of synchronistic happenings?
But the gist of the work is worth repeating: members of the MRO HiRise team are using fresh impact craters as probes of the subsurface, and are finding ice farther south than anyone has thought possible.
The authors watched the ice sublimate away over subsequent weeks, and used calculations from that to show that this ice is solid and nearly pure, not just a little bit of pore ice mixed in with the soil. And since these craters lie around 45 degrees north, it means that the subsurface ice that Mars Odyssey spotted (providing the raison d'etre for Phoenix) extends further south than previously thought.
Chemical signs of life can be ambiguous, but Ruvkun and his team hope to find its unequivocal signature by sending a DNA amplifier and sequencer to Mars in the next decade. They're betting that any life on the Red Planet shares an evolutionary heritage with life on Earth, and therefore contains a similar genetic code -- a requirement that other scientists say is too narrowly focused, since Martian life may have evolved independently and therefore may have very different chemistry.
On December 21st, 2012, the world ends -- and begins anew, like a PC rebooted after yet another Windows software patch. Or at least that's the general idea. Like the Y2K phenomenon before it, the 2012 meme is only fractionally tolerant of agnosticism: either one accepts that Earth will undergo some vaguely defined transformation or one does not.
I take a cautious middle ground, choosing to view the end of time (or, rather, the ancient Mayans' conception of it) as a useful temporal rallying point, a juncture not unlike a hyperlink leading to some dodgy -- if tantalizing -- FTP site.
Comprised of robotics engineers, brain specialists, psychologists and other experts, the research team has been teaching the android to think like a baby by having it evaluate facial expressions and classify them into basic categories, such as happiness and sadness.
On the compilation of video clips made by the perpetrators to prove their point, the second was of a breathless reporter who was all set to believe in aliens and flying saucers and who seemed to know very little about it. Unfortunately, she worked for a FOX affiliate so the interviews she conducted were used by FOX News on several of their reports. It was the reporter, in talking to witnesses, who often introduced the idea of UFOs, meaning alien craft rather than lights in the night sky.
But what she didn’t seem to get, nor did either Russo or Rudy, was that the descriptions offered by the witnesses were often accurate. It was the interpretation put on those observations by the media and others that took it from what we’d call nocturnal lights into the realm of alien spacecraft.
Take two companies whose products are sort of a joke, slap them together, and here's the result: The P.U.M.A., a sort of giant, two-person Segway that is designed for commuters, with a 35-mile range from its lithium-ion batteries. It has a top speed of 35 MPH, which is plenty for city cruising.
Oh, this is much worse than you think. The Epidermits toy is the Karten Design firm's bizarro, conceptual end of several current trends in the toy/gadget industry, like personalization, fuel cell engineering, and animatronics. It is the scariest concept design I've ever seen.
Tensions are understandably high ahead of the launch, and some sources suggest that could be as early as Saturday (April 4th) as there are indications that fuelling activities are being carried out by Pyongyang. Spy satellite images appear to show there is indeed a satellite attached to the rocket, but the US and regional allies are under no illusions that such a launch would also test ballistic missile technology, violating the UN resolution passed in 2006 in response to the underground nuclear test and repeated missile launches. North Korea can expect severe treatment by the international community should this launch go ahead.
I am standing in a cave. Sitting before me, on a throne fashioned out of the rock, is what I can only describe as a very large pansy flower. The kind of flower that looks like it has a face with large slanted eyes (I know, when I saw the Communion book cover 20 years ago I almost had a cow.)
Although the flower creature did not speak to me, I could feel that it was communicating to me somehow in a form of extreme condescension and intelligence. Like it was implying to me that it was in total command. Not necessarily in a malevolent way, but in a way of true authority.
Two self-admitted skeptics who rigged highway flares to weather balloons to create a UFO hoax are now facing misdemeanor charges in Morristown, New Jersey for endangering public and air traffic safety.
Fundie skeptics nearly always lump all UFO cases together, as if anything unknown in the sky is representative of all cases throughout history, especially from the 20th century to the present. To this mindset, the lack of hard evidence for one is enough to throw the rest of the UFO reports out with the bathwater. This is a classic CSICOP ploy: Find the easiest case to debunk, and frame it as representative of all issues associated with it. at least by their definition. Believers, for the most part, ignore normal explanations because it detracts from their case for unidentifieds, and the "only answer," which has to be extraterrestrials.
"It is really like a real space flight without the weightlessness and the danger to our lives," said Sergei N. Ryazansky, a cosmonaut-in-training who will lead the mission. "On the inside, we will have a lack of incoming information, so it's the science of sensory deprivation."
Called Mars-500, the Russian-led project based at the Institute for Biomedical Problems here will culminate in a 520-day simulation beginning early next year of a complete manned mission to the planet -- a time frame that incorporates launching to Mars touchdown and back -- that scientists hope will edge humanity a little closer to that next giant leap.
However, it's critical to remember that the key letter in ETH is the "H" - it's still just a hypothesis, and anyone who tells you that they can prove that aliens have visited Earth beyond a reasonable doubt, or even on the balance of probabilities, is putting the cart well before the horse.
This is what I call "Keyhoe-ian" ufology, because it is based directly on the way of thinking that Major Donald Keyhoe first put forward in the 1950s. It is out-of-date, and badly out-of-touch with modern science. It presumes that aliens are only a few decades, or maybe one or two hundred years or so more advanced than us, which is highly unlikely. It presumes that the aliens are preoccupied with us, and that we are somehow important to them, which is also highly unlikely. In short, it is a point of view that is based on what people who grew up in the pioneering days of sci-fi and the space race expect of their aliens, and not the point-of-view that modern physicists and astrobiologists take.
Modern technology increasingly is encroaching into human connections with the natural world and University of Washington psychologists believe this intrusion may emerge as one of the central psychological problems of our times.
"We are a technological species, but we also need a deep connection with nature in our lives," said Peter Kahn, a UW developmental psychologist and lead author of a new study exploring how humans connect with nature and technological nature.
Writing in the current issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Kahn and two of his UW graduate students, Rachel Severson and Jolina Ruckert, look at the psychological effects of interacting with various forms of technological nature and explore humanity's growing estrangement from nature.
Originally conceived as a graphic novel in the pictographic format of the surviving Mayan codices, the project -- eight years in the making -- consisted of over 100 illustrations by Malcolm McNeill, 30 in full color and about 50 pages of text. "Ah Pook is Here" would have been prohibitively expensive to publish at the time. As Burroughs wrote "over the years of our collaboration Malcolm McNeill produced more than a hundred pages of artwork. However, owing partly to the expense of full color reproduction, and because the book falls into neither the category of the conventional illustrated book, nor that of a comix publication, there have been difficulties with the arrangements for the complete work."
Mitra and his co-authors therefore advocate for "a concerted effort" to complete a first-draft circuit map of the entire mouse brain within two to three years, as a first step to mapping vertebrate brain architecture across species. The proposed project would ideally be pursued simultaneously by neuroscientists at multiple institutions according to standardized protocols. "In this respect," says Jason Bohland, Ph.D., a postdoctoral neuroscience researcher at CSHL and the paper's lead author, "it would be analogous to the multi-institution effort to sequence the human genome, with the important distinction that our brain-circuit map could be completed much more rapidly and would cost a small fraction of the genome project - as little as a few million dollars ranging up to perhaps $20 million, depending on the redundancy in coverage that we commit to."
The goal is to find a way to achieve controlled, sustained nuclear fusion and energy gain in a lab. According to the director of the facility, Dr. Ed Moses, "When all NIF lasers are fired at full energy, they will deliver 1.8 megajoules of ultraviolet energy to the target." Lasting just a few nanoseconds, the system is capable of generation 500 trillion watts of power -- more than the peak electrical generating power of the entire United States. Significant results are expected sometime between 2010 and 2012.
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