The Known Universe
Via the American Museum of Natural History / Rubin Museum.
(Thanks, Evonne Heyning!)
(Previously on Dangerous Minds: Rubin Museum Tracks Cosmic Cycles)
Via the American Museum of Natural History / Rubin Museum.
(Thanks, Evonne Heyning!)
(Previously on Dangerous Minds: Rubin Museum Tracks Cosmic Cycles)
Oh for f’k’s sake… not content with covering the whole country with surveillance cameras, the UK police are now planning on implementing US-style spy drones to catch suspected pedophiles (read: everybody in the country) or something. Drones are planned to be implemented by 2012.
Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the “routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.
The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.
Documents from the South Coast Partnership, a Home Office-backed project in which Kent police and others are developing a national drone plan with BAE, have been obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.
They reveal the partnership intends to begin using the drones in time for the 2012 Olympics. They also indicate that police claims that the technology will be used for maritime surveillance fall well short of their intended use ?
You’ll never have to fear your cellphone running out of juice again as long as you’re near a 7-Eleven or a vending machine, thanks to brilliant London-based designer Daizi Zheng. But maybe “juice” is the wrong word; Zheng has produced a cellphone that runs on Coca-Cola. Or Mountain Dew or Pepsi or whatever sugary, fizzy beverage you happen to have handy. Yes, you read correctly, this is a cellphone that runs on soda. It’s the call that refreshes!
As Zheng explained to Tree Hugger:
“Through my research, I found that phone battery as a power source, it is expensive, consuming valuable resources on manufacturing, presenting a disposal problem and harmful to the environment. The concept is using bio battery to replace the traditional battery to create a pollution free environment. Bio battery is an ecologically friendly energy generates electricity from carbohydrates (currently sugar) and utilizes enzymes as the catalyst. By using bio battery as the power source of the phone, it only needs a pack of sugary drink and it generates water and oxygen while the battery dies out. Bio battery has the potential to operate three to four times longer on a single charge than conventional lithium batteries and it could be fully biodegradable.”
Three to four times longer than a lithium battery? Sounds good to us. Now all Zheng has to do is come up with a way to run a cellphone on booze, for a sort of unholy cellphone/hip flask hybrid.
Cross posting this from Brand X
io9 reports on a recent Scientific American article that suggests that plants use quantum entanglement in photosynthesis. The mind doth boggle. The original Scientific American article is here.
A recent article in Scientific American suggested that plants use quantum entanglement in photosynthesis. What can this mean? The answer is more (and less) than expected. Take a quick look at quantum entanglement and find out why.
Quick Quantum Entanglement Facts:
a) Quantum entanglement happens when the quantum status of two particles is intertwined, like two cats in a sack.
b) As with two cats in a sack, determining the state of one particle (say, by lightly nudging the sack with your toe until one side twitches and says ?
Exploration of Beatles music through infographics:
These visualizations are part of an extensive study of the music of the Beatles. Many of the diagrams and charts are based on secondary sources, including but not limited to sales statistics, biographies, recording sesion notes, sheet music, and raw audio readings. Join this project here.
New Scientist on a growing, vocal minority that maintains that consciousness is not linked to the brain. Well, you all knew that already, of course…
MOST neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time is near when we will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. There is, however, a vocal minority of neurosceptics who contest this orthodoxy. Among them are those who focus on claims neuroscience makes about the preciseness of correlations between indirectly observed neural activity and different mental functions, states or experiences.
This was well captured in a 2009 article in Perspectives on Psychological Science by Harold Pashler from the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues, that argued: “...these correlations are higher than should be expected given the (evidently limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality measures. The high correlations are all the more puzzling because method sections rarely contain much detail about how the correlations were obtained.”
Believers will counter that this is irrelevant: as our means of capturing and analysing neural activity become more powerful, so we will be able to make more precise correlations between the quantity, pattern and location of neural activity and aspects of consciousness.
This may well happen, but my argument is not about technical, probably temporary, limitations. It is about the deep philosophical confusion embedded in the assumption that if you can correlate neural activity with consciousness, then you have demonstrated they are one and the same thing, and that a physical science such as neurophysiology is able to show what consciousness truly is.
(New Scientist: You Won’t Find Consciousness in the Brain)
(Consciousness: An Introduction, by the venerable Susan Blackmore)
What if you took Angelina Jolie, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, Elizabeth Cuthbert, Hilary Duff, Jennifer Love Hewitt. Jessica Alba, Jennifer Biel, Kiera Knightly, Kate Bosworth, Kristin Kreuk, Mandy Moore, Megan Fox, Monica Belluci, Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, put them in some kind of a sci-fi DNA blender and mixed them altogether? Her, apparently, the winner of the genetic sweepstakes. You can see all the intermediate steps to creating the most beautiful girl in the world here.
James St. James on a roll today! Via World of Wonder/The WOW Report
Why oh why does this exist? From Gizmodo:
Researchers from the Machine Perception Laboratory at UCSD have developed this baby robot to simulate the development of a 1-year-old. And clearly, they’ve become somewhat attached to the little automaton with a gigantic head.
The robot baby is named Diego-San, and aside from joy, he’s bundled with a high resolution camera and 6-axis accelerometer. And while his coordination is limited to standing from a chair and holding a bottle, Diego-San’s face has 20 moving parts to convey emotion without speaking?
ScienceDaily reports on a species of ants that has adopted a completely asexual lesbian society…
Most social insects?
