Water Vapor Seen 'Raining Down' on Young Star System

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected enough water vapor to fill the oceans on Earth five times inside the collapsing nest of a forming star system. Astronomers say the water vapor is pouring down from the system's natal cloud and smacking into a dusty disk where planets are thought to form.

The observations provide the first direct look at how water, an essential ingredient for life as we know it, begins to make its way into planets, possibly even rocky ones like our own.

Baby boy born with 12 tiny fingers, 12 tiny toes

Jeshuah Fuller is just over 7 pounds (3.2kg), but in the eyes of his proud parents, he's as mighty as Goliath. Like the biblical giant, Jeshuah was born with six fingers on each hand and six toes on both feet.

Study predicts more severe U.S. storms

As the world warms, the United States will face more severe thunderstorms with deadly lightning, damaging hail and the potential for tornadoes, a trailblazing study by NASA scientists suggests.

While other research has warned of broad weather changes on a large scale, like more extreme hurricanes and droughts, the new study predicts even smaller events like thunderstorms will be more dangerous because of global warming.

Be prepared -- read Bruce Sterling's disquietingly prescient "Heavy Weather."





More Sterling here.

Here's a downloadable radio dramatization of William Gibson's 1984 classic "Neuromancer." (I remember Gibson doing an abridged audiobook version sometime in the mid-1990s; if anyone knows if it's available online, let me know.)

When Sterling cites Cronenberg, I listen.

Here's footage from a waiter-less German restaurant where meals descend a roller-coaster-like rail system encased in table-ready dining modules.



I hate to say it, but this is almost "steampunk" in its flaunted intricacy.

(Hat tip: Communist Robot.)

More "shocking" taped confessions from alleged Roswell witnesses.

This cool but awkward "flying saucer" is apparently the precursor to the Moller skycar I've been waiting for for far too long.

Manufactured landscapes

Edward Burtynsky is a photographer that makes pictures scarred or altered landscapes, changed by industrial activities. His work shows the disappearance of nature and the appearance of a new sort of nature.

Burtynsky's industrial hellscapes are simultaneously revolting and hypnotic. Take a good look: these blighted vistas just might epitomize our future.

Pink Tentacle invites you to experience Tokyo in time-lapse.

A couple happening links, the first via Cliff Pickover's always-diverting Reality Carnival and the second via Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond:

An Atlas of the Universe

This web page is designed to give everyone an idea of what our universe actually looks like. There are nine main maps on this web page, each one approximately ten times the scale of the previous one. The first map shows the nearest stars and then the other maps slowly expand out until we have reached the scale of the entire visible universe.

Calling the Glacier - A Mobile Elegy

You listen the to sounds of water, occasional cracking and other utterances made living glaciers as they grow and recede in perpetual seasonal flux.

The world has come to the awareness that global warming is real and that the ensuing climate change will affect us all. Our planet's glaciers are a powerful and dramatic symbol for this process. They are like giant living creatures that are slowly dying - melting, leaking and waning into ultimate oblivion.

Terry Bisson's "They're Made Out of Meat": the film. When did this happen?

AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central

(Fez-tip to The Speculist.)

Antarctic Ozone Hole Appears Early in 2007 - UN

A hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica has appeared earlier than usual in 2007, the United Nations weather agency said on Tuesday.

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said it would not be clear for several weeks whether the ozone hole, which is expected to continue growing until early October, would be larger than its record size in 2006.

You're reading this blog's 6000th post. Aren't you lucky?

Evolution takes balls.

My my, what a big head you have

The fragile aliens of contemporary mythology owe much to Lamarck and his influence, through Wells, on pulp science fiction. As a race, they are ancient, feeble, and slipping inexorably into collective senility. Their power derives solely from their technology. They are already half dead, and like Wells's over-evolved Martians who inject themselves with our blood, they can only survive by preying upon younger, more vital species.

Rather than serving as Lamarckian caricatures, could the diminutive, often feeble-seeming Grays be suffering a genetic illness hastened by a shortage of genes? Or perhaps they're so casually reliant on their technology that they're effectively "postbiological," eager to jettison physical brawn in favor of better, faster brains.

Researcher Kevin Randle offers one of many reasons why Project Mogul fails to account for the "Roswell Incident."

World's Tallest Building to Rise Higher than Mount Fuji

The building, known as the X-Seed 4000, is designed to house up to one million residents on as many as 800 floors! Designers have had to consider tricky questions of temperature and pressure differentials between the base and topmost floors, and are looking to utilize solar power to solve these and other critical issues.

Shades of the pyramidal arcologies in "Blade Runner" . . .

(Thanks, Elan!)

I watched this approximately three minutes ago. I'm still wincing.

(Thanks: Boing Boing.)

I'm pretty sure I've just discovered a new favorite photographer.

(Twitch of the antennae to Ectoplasmosis.)

Apparently I'm not the only one who thought the "induced OBE" release was flawed:

Editorial: OBE's induced in the lab?

I don't know if we could iron out a 'classic' symptomology of OBE's, but the most central elements of these experiences include a loss of bodily sensation and the image of being disembodied. The experimenters at the UCL neuroscience lab provided volunteers with this image of disembodiment; they did not induce it. And the manipulation of stroking volunteers' chest and back areas suggest that participants still experienced bodily sensations during the sessions. While the participants did experience the sensation of being out of their bodies, calling this an induction of the out-body-experience, the same experience that according to the press release "has been much discussed in theology, philosophy and psychology," is an overgeneralization.

(Via The Anomalist.)

Click here to see an oddly voyeuristic video of a next-generation bionic arm. There's something elusively prurient about this footage; perhaps it's the music, which invites comparison to a porno-movie soundtrack, or the frequent illustrative close-ups.

(Thanks: Communist Robot.)

The age of steampunk

Steampunk has its roots in science fiction literature, where it describes a corner of the genre obsessed with Victoriana and the idea that the computer age evolved alongside the industrial. Steampunk stories, which started appearing with regularity in the 1980s, eschew clean and orderly visions of the future in favor of gas-lighted streets, steam engines belching toxic smoke, and dastardly villains inventing strange technologies. Dirigibles rule the air, and the upper classes employ clockwork servants to serve their meals.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Frankly, I'm getting little bit sick of steampunk. Want to know what the fuss is about? Read "The Difference Engine" and K.W. Jeter's woefully overlooked "Infernal Devices" and move on.

What is Wetware? (Rudy Rucker)

As one of the initial popularizers of the word wetware, I'm disappointed to see that over the years the meaning of the word is being watered down to mean something like a company's employees or a human brain. Like: "Yeah, we got the PCs, we got the Office software, now we just gotta hire us some wetware."

When I see people trying to reduce everything to corporate human resources issues, I think of someone giving a monkey in a zoo a crayon, and all he can draw is the bars of his own cage.

Post includes some fantastic cover art from foreign editions of Rucker's "Ware" series.

The Diana-Morrissey Phenomenon, certainly one of the strangest sites on the Web, has been updated with fresh material, including a head-scratching introductory video. Worth the click.

A mesmerizing short film inspired by (and starring) author and intellectual explorer J.G. Ballard:



Much more on this deft and unsparing work here.

The blade runner generation

Christensen is describing a world often expounded by futurists, where the boundary between organisms and devices begin to blur -- a world where neural implants create a direct link to the brain, essentially making computers an extension of our minds. Futurists don't talk of connecting to the "bog-standard" PCs of today, but to sentient computers, thousands of times cleverer than a human brain and with up to a million times more processing power.

If I'm a member of the "blade runner generation" then where the hell's my flying car?

I started reading Rudy Rucker's "Mathematicians in Love" yesterday. This one starts fast; I can already sense an epically weird plot seething just below the surface, ready to erupt.





More Rucker titles reviewed here.

Bonnie Jean Hamilton writes:

I am a life-long friend of the star people. I help abductees and contactees deal with alien abduction and secret government psychic attack.

By "star people" I assume she's not talking about Angelina Jolie and Clive Owen. And yes, she blogs.

Huge Hole Found in the Universe

It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it's also strangely empty of the mysterious "dark matter" that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale.

Astronomers don't know why the hole is there.

"Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size," said researcher Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota.

(Via KurzweilAI.net.)

I think this must be where Seth Shostak stores his ego.

Here we go again . . .

Study: Martian soil may contain life

The search for life on Mars appeared to hit a dead end in 1976 when Viking landers touched down on the red planet and failed to detect biological activity.

But Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, said on Friday the spacecraft may in fact have found signs of a weird life form based on hydrogen peroxide on the subfreezing, arid Martian surface.

His analysis of one of the experiments carried out by the Viking spacecraft suggests that 0.1 percent of the Martian soil could be of biological origin.

Scientists develop technique to induce out-of-body experiences

As well as providing scientists with a way to examine out-of-body experiences further in a lab setting, the experiments could have industrial applications. "This is essentially a means of projecting yourself, a form of teleportation," said Dr Ehrsson. "If we can project people into a virtual character, so they feel and respond as if they were really in a virtual version of themselves, just imagine the implications.

(Via Reality Carnival.)

Of course, depending on one's point of view, the experiments may not have "induced" OBEs at all, but merely simulated them.

"Propagating Fictions"

The effects of daylight and electrical light upon the space that surrounds them is something Saroff likes to study, using different translucent materials as a vehicle. Light is used to mark change and the passage of time, as well as science and man's effects on his world -- one comment she makes in reference to her Cyber Plants installation is that "In the future we may come home from work at the end of the day and turn our plants on . . . pulsing with energy as if they had been transformed from toxic pollution."

Bulletproof school backpacks for frightening children

My School Backpack is a bulletproof child's backpack manufactured by MJ Safety Solutions of Massachusetts. Because your kids aren't scared enough, dammit.

Wait a minute -- "MJ Safety Solutions"? As in . . . MJ-12? And didn't Philip Corso claim that the Roswell crash resulted in the development of super-tenacity materials like Kevlar?

Long live MJ-12!

Infectious Diseases Spreading Faster Than Ever - UN

In its annual World Health Report, the United Nations agency warned there was a good possibility that another major scourge like AIDS, SARS or Ebola fever with the potential of killing millions would appear in the coming years.

"Infectious diseases are now spreading geographically much faster than at any time in history," the WHO said.

Could Enceladus' Plume Damage Cassini?

Enceladus has a remarkable secret, and scientists want to know more. Something is keeping the moon warm, and creating great plumes of water ice that spew out into the Saturnian system and even contribute to the rings. NASA is sending the Cassini spacecraft back in for another look in 2008; however, some engineers are concerned that the tiny particles might pose a risk to the spacecraft as it flies right through them.

It came from outer space

The videos hummed to the top of YouTube's "Most Viewed" list, and from there invaded discussion forums and news aggregator sites across the Web, where debate raged about their origin and authenticity. Skeptics pronounced the videos a computer-generated fraud, probably part of some viral marketing ploy.

Paul Kimball summarizes the latest MJ-12 controversy. Because it's always fun to watch a modern myth in the process of accelerated decay.

CyberpunkReview.com is hosting a poll to gauge readers' favorite cyberpunk authors. The usual suspects are duly listed -- Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Egan, Rucker, etc. -- but one name jumped out at me as wholly undeserving: Mac Tonnies. I mean, yeah, I wrote a book of moderately cyberpunk short-stories back in 1995. One book. And quite honestly, it's not that great, although I had a lot of fun writing it.

So do I qualify as a "cyberpunk" in the literary sense? Probably not, although I drew (and continue to draw) heavily from ideas and tropes that originally metastasized under the competent gaze of "Movement" cyberpunks in the 1980s. (But then again, what thirty-something with a blog and an affinity for science fiction doesn't?)

I guess I prefer the term I coined in my recent interview with Ballardian: "ufopunk." So from now on, if anyone asks, that's what I'll say I am.

Hurricane Dean's Global Warning (note spelling, n not m)?

Hurricane Dean is now officially among the top ten strongest Atlantic storms ever measured. Even more telling, six of the top ten have occurred during the past ten years.

Start-up sees 1,000 "brains" on one microchip

Tilera Corp, a Silicon Valley semiconductor start-up, is launching a single microchip with 64 processing units, or cores, in a technological jump generations ahead of the mainstream.

[. . .]

Now, instead of ratcheting up how quickly the chip cycles, Intel, AMD and others are assembling multiple cores, or processing brains, on a single chip, which boosts performance while keeping down the consumption of electricity.

"You lay out these cores much like you do tiles on a floor," said Anant Agarwal, Tilera founder and chief technology officer. "By 2014, you will see a 1,000-core chip coming out."

I've been extremely skeptical of the UFO videos recently uploaded to YouTube. But the following is so perfectly executed that I can't help but think that it's an authentic recording of an actual sighting.



As always, you be the judge.

It's (almost) official: physicist/ufologist Stan Friedman to get his own holiday!

Which X-Treme Spacer Are You?

I'm all of the above.

(Thanks: Beyond the Beyond.)

I turn 32 today.

Here's some R.E.M.