Please tell me you haven't already seen this.

Scientists beaming after test of big atom smasher

The beams will gradually be filled with more protons and fired at near the speed of light in opposite directions around the tunnel, making 11,000 circuits a second. They will travel down the middle of two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder than outer space. At four points in the tunnel, the scientist will use giant magnets to cross the beams and cause protons to collide. The collider's two largest detectors -- essentially huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons -- are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

It is likely to be several weeks before the first significant collisions.

Several weeks for LHC physicists to perfect their plans to annihilate the planet!

Found Image #14

"Going to a Town" (Rufus Wainwright):

William S. Burroughs demonstrates his famous literary "cut-ups":



Here's a sample cut-up of my own writing (de)constructed by an online generator:

But while disclosure of alien visitation is eagerly awaited -- even expected -- encourage belief that Grays are flesh-and-blood ET anthropologists. Their antics, while horrifying, may be as bogus as But I doubt that that "something" is genetic material in the usual sense; it seems more likely spacecraft and diminutive occupants who seem to have stepped out of there's the equally appealing possibility that manifesting in terms comprehensible to witnesses reflects the vocabulary with which to understand it. Or maybe it won't, content to let us project our own unspoken semi-straight faces.

Meanwhile, the enigma persists--as always, seemingly just beyond our comprehension. And we have the nerve is both trickster and trigger -- indisputably real, but real in a way "explain" the phenomenon's intricacies to a wary public (often in the guise of would-be political discourse), an aerial object of unknown origin.)

Am I a it seems more likely to me that encounters with hybrid children and distressingly intimate "exams" are attempts Their antics, while horrifying, may be as bogus as the it should be thoroughly familiar with us and able to like this, with Fortean forces hovering at the fringes of our perception. I don't is) between cautious advocates of the Extraterrestrrial Hypothesis and know-nothing science popularizers who seem genuinely incapable of considering limited expectations of the witness. Thus we have a pageant of fantastic beings of all descriptions: robot-like monsters, winged entities need to "explain" the phenomenon's intricacies to a wary public (often in the guise if tantalizing, comments by insiders both real and imaginary) has been repeatedly enacted over the last by physical effects on the environment), demand a level of unconscious participation on behalf pass the burden of their arrival onto our collective shoulders.

Jennifer Rodgers is today's featured artist.

Philip K. Dick's Reality (Tessa Dick)

The time travelers, or time meddlers, sometimes enter our reality to observe us, and they appeared quite shocked whenever they realized that Phil could see them. They did occasionally communicate with him. They claimed to come from a time that is neither the past nor the future, but outside of our time. Phil most often thought that they were humans, not aliens, but genetically altered in some way.

'Galactic internet' proposed

Firing a high-energy neutrino beam into a Cepheid could heat its core and brighten the star early -- "just as an electric pulse to the heart can make it skip a beat," Learned says.

The neutrinos could be made by blasting a proton beam at a target -- sapphire, carbon or tungsten would work, says Learned. The target produces subatomic particles, mostly pions, which decay to produce neutrinos.

The normal and shortened pulses could be used to encode data, to form what the researchers call a 'galactic Internet' in a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server.

An operatic version of David Cronenberg's "The Fly"? Yes!

(Thanks: BB.)

If spiders creep you out, I emphatically recommend not clicking here.

One I missed:

Stanford's 'autonomous' helicopters teach themselves to fly

Stanford computer scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system that enables robotic helicopters to teach themselves to fly difficult stunts by watching other helicopters perform the same maneuvers. The result is an autonomous helicopter than can perform a complete airshow of complex tricks on its own.

(Hat tip to Elan.)

Electronic smog 'is disrupting nature on a massive scale'

Dr Ulrich Warnke – who has been researching the effects of man-made electrical fields on wildlife for more than 30 years – will tell the conference, organised by the Radiation Research Trust at the Royal Society in London, that "an unprecedented dense mesh of artificial magnetic, electrical and electromagnetic fields" has been generated, overwhelming the "natural system of information" on which the species rely.

He believes this could be responsible for the disappearance of bees in Europe and the US in what is known as colony collapse disorder, for the decline of the house sparrow, whose numbers have fallen by half in Britain over the past 30 years, and that it could also interfere with bird migration.

For more, click here.

Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life

Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.

Water on Mars Was Prolonged, Study Shows

"Our results argue for liquid water being stable at the surface of Mars for prolonged periods in the past," said Charles Barnhart, a graduate student in Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "Precipitation on Mars lasted a long time -- it wasn't a brief interval of massive deluges."

The Wildcats of Foreclosure

Repurposed McMansions, emptied of their human inhabitants, are filled in later by a troupe of mountain lions.

I sense a children's film here.

Water bears survive open space

Microbiologists from the Institute of Aerospace Medicine sent tardigrades into orbit last September and exposed them to the cosmic radiation and deep vacuum of space. They returned alive.

What should I read next?

Real live Pokemon auctions for $925 million

We capture each one after your order, so we guarantee its health! These are Pikachus plucked straight from the natural Pikachu forest, so they're of much higher quality than ones you'd get from a breeder or in other regions.

A feat of Japanese genetic engineering? Your call!

Blog of the day: Kontrast Blog

Will the world end on Wednesday?

If you think it's unlikely that we will all be sucked into a giant black hole that will swallow the world, as German chemistry professor Otto Rössler of the University of Tübingen posits, and so carry on with your life as normal, only to find out that it's true, you'll be a bit miffed, won't you?

On the other hand, perhaps an insatiable artificial black hole is the only thing capable of averting a McCain presidency.

Cloud-seeding ships could combat climate change

This cloud-seeding proposal is one of a number of ideas put forward by scientists in recent years to "geoengineer" the Earth in response to climate change rather than, or as well as, deal with the causes of the change.

"Zippy" has been my favorite comic strip since junior high, and I feel a sort of psychic kinship with cartoonist Bill Griffith, seen here coyly explaining his work to the uninitiated.

Scientists get death threats over Large Hadron Collider

The head of public relations, James Gillies, says he gets tearful phone calls, pleading for the £4.5 billion machine to stop.

"They phone me and say: "I am seriously worried. Please tell me that my children are safe," said Gillies.

Emails also arrive every day that beg for reassurance that the world will not end, he explained.

Others are more aggressive. "There are a number who say: "You are evil and dangerous and you are going to destroy the world."

(Via Futurismic.)

Neal Stephenson Explains What's Wrong with Mobile Phones

What's intriguing is that Stephenson is saying mobiles suck not just because of their interfaces, but because of how people act when they use mobiles. Of course, how people act with cell phones has everything to do with the interface. You have to stick them against your face, or put some weirdass Cyberman-looking thing in your ear. So your body language, when you're on a mobile, makes you immediately seem rude to anyone around you.

Plus, most people still use audible ringers (as opposed to vibration), so it is essentially impossible to have a mobile without inviting a noisy, irritating interruption. What that means is your mobile doesn't just interrupt your train of thought or conversation -- it interrupts everyone's within earshot. So the mobile as we know it is perhaps one of the worst attention-shattering devices imaginable.

Found Image #13

I've created a new poll (located on the sidebar). You may select more than one answer.

Bruce Sterling on the aesthetic merits of ferrofluid.

Robert Anton Wilson explains quantum physics . . .



(Thanks, Elan!)

"Swarmbots" are in their infancy, but it doesn't take an incredible amount of imagination to envision the sorts of reality-altering technologies that might arise from their successors.



More swarmbots here.

(Thanks to Robotic Nation Evidence.)

"Man-Sized Wreath" (R.E.M.):

Your Cameraphone: a Harbinger of a Massive Social Transformation

You may not be aware of it, but the cameraphone in your pocket is the harbinger of a massive social transformation, one already underway.

This transformation could be at least as big as the ones triggered by television and by computers, as the base technology -- mobile phones -- fills a new niche, different from both of these earlier technologies.

I use my cellphone's camera far more regularly than I use the actual phone.

The Most Alien-Looking Place on Earth

Well worth the click!

Greg Bishop poses a most interesting question:

Was The "Father Gill" Sighting A Classified Aircraft?

Gill's own account stresses the almost mundane nature of the encounter. There were no high-G or other strange movements made by the object. It apparently hovered over the small church complex and then slowly disappeared into the clouds. (There were two sightings on subsequent evenings.) During the second event, Gill went inside before the craft had left. While some investigators have expressed surprise that anyone would leave in the middle of such an extraordinary sight, Gill and his companions had been looking at the UFO for over four hours just the night before.

19-square-mile ice sheet breaks loose in Canada

A 19-square-mile ice shelf in Canada's northern Arctic has broken away from Ellesmere Island, surprising scientists who say the floating ice shelf is another dramatic indication of how warmer temperatures are changing the polar frontier.

Dr. Derek Mueller, an Arctic ice shelf specialist at Trent University in Ontario, said Wednesday that the 4,500-year-old Markham Ice Shelf separated in early August and is now drifting into the Arctic Ocean.

Well, at least we can rest easy knowing that this is undoubtedly part of "God's will."

It gets worse:

Palin: Iraq war 'a task that is from God'

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a "task that is from God."

In an address last June, the Republican vice presidential candidate also urged ministry students to pray for a plan to build a $30 billion natural gas pipeline in the state, calling it "God's will."

I've published some new photos on Flickr.

Two compelling new Roswell-related posts from Kevin Randle: Blanchard, Lytle and Roswell and Corroboration for Frankie Rowe.

I refuse to get into the mind-sucking habit of blogging electoral politics, but this turned my stomach:

Sarah Palin's Big, Sleazy Safari

[Palin's] most recent "victory" came on Aug. 26, when Alaska's voters defeated Measure 2, an initiative that would have banned hunting wolves from airplanes for sport.

Palin organized a campaign against Measure 2 and funded it with $400,000 of state money. For most of us, the idea of zooming around in a private airplane over snowbound wilderness just for the chance to spot a terrified wild dog and blow it apart with a high-powered rifle is insane. But there's a whole culture out there in love with the idea. Palin did her part by playing the tired old Alaskan pioneer card, saying that lower-48 naysayers who dared to object to the idea of dive-bombing wildlife didn't "understand rural Alaska."

Drilling Into Alien Oceans

Despite high hopes for the thermal drill, Weiss isn't sure whether one will feature on any upcoming probes. He says, "ESA and NASA were discussing a future mission to icy Europa, but it is uncertain if there will be a landing or impacting probe onboard. But sending an orbiter without lander to Europa would be like going to a candy shop without bringing money to spend."

I heartily concur.

Gigantic City-Structures of Paolo Soleri

Soleri created the concept of an "arcology," a combo of architecture and ecology. The idea is pretty uncomplicated, though what Soleri did with his concept is wonderfully elaborate: cities have traditionally been urban slime mold, grinding away at the planet as they’ve crawled across the landscape. So why not create cities with as many people as possible in a small as possible footprint? And not only that but why not also make these super cities magnificently, tremendously, elegantly . . . beautiful?

Am I the only one reminded of Rudy Rucker's "uvvies"?

LightMates are soft anthropomorphic pillows and warming lamps. This awfully attractive creature heats, lights and provides company. Their different sizes answer to everyone's need of heat; a mate to hug or a huge companion you can lay on.

Having recently endured several airports (where the Homeland Security Advisory threat level is always "orange"), I couldn't help but appreciate this patently moronic attempt to foster paranoia. We're living in a post-ironic era; Orwell himself couldn't have done it better.

Are geopolitics applicable to space? Like it or not, it looks like we're about to find out . . .

Could Conflict in Georgia Block US Access to the Space Station?

The conflict between Georgia and Russia over the disputed region of South Ossetia may have huge consequences for NASA's ability to send astronauts to the International Space Station in the future. The US has criticised the Russian military action, prompting concerns for the future NASA use of the Russian Soyuz space vehicle. This comes at a particularly critical time, as concerns were already high due to the Shuttle decommissioning in 2010.

Bruce Sterling has this to say about the above CGI reconstruction of the Huygens lander:

I hope any aliens who exist on Titan, below the freezing point of ammonia, don't watch George Pal movies. The Huyghens there is a very squat, grumpy, rather sinister-looking 1950s UFO.

Panspermia in a nutshell: