ScamperFilter has moved to FutureFilter.com ∞
This little hobby deserved its very own domain. So I’ve migrated everything over to http://futurefilter.com, and will be building my futuristic empire there. See you!
This little hobby deserved its very own domain. So I’ve migrated everything over to http://futurefilter.com, and will be building my futuristic empire there. See you!
Sean O’Kane, for The Verge: Astronaut Terry Virts uses the action camera to capture a stunning view of Earth passing by, and in the second one we get a strapped-on view of what it looks like to navigate the underbelly of the International Space Station. And it’s pretty stunning to see in good quality video.
Christopher Hooton, for The independent: Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Centre, who described Dr Canavero as “nuts”, believes that the bodies of head transplant patients “would end up being overwhelmed with different pathways and chemistry than they are used to and they’d go crazy.” Or just crazy enough…
Medgadget reports on research from UCLA’s Biomechatronics Lab: While tactile sensors have been used before in order to create a rudimentary sense of touch, the UCLA team is taking this technology a step further by introducing smart algorithms to process what the sensors are feeling. Specifically, the researchers are building a “language of touch” that…
Germain Lussier, for /Film: The director is finishing up Tomorrowland, the film he chose to do over Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and has started to look towards his next project. Thankfully for him, his next project was kind of revealed over a year ago. That’s when Disney CEO Bob Iger told investors Pixar was beginning work on The Incredibles 2 and,…
Irene Klotz, for ABC Science: Using advanced computer modelling, Mastrobuono-Battisti and colleagues ran dozens of simulations of later-stage planet formation, each time starting with 85 to 90 planetary embryos and 1,000 to 2,000 planetesimals extending from about halfway between the orbits of Mercury and Venus to within 50 million miles or so of Jupiter’s orbit….
Astrophysicist Sean Raymond, for Aeon: These planets don’t orbit stars. They wander the stars. They are free citizens of the galaxy. It might seem like the stuff of science fiction but several free-floating gas giants have been found in recent years. Our own gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, are leashed to the Sun on well-behaved…
Ian Failes, for fxguide: Ava is clearly intended to be a robot of some kind, but Whitehurst was adamant that she not feel robotic in terms of her CG materials. “The one rule I made from the outset,” he says, “was that no-one was allowed to look at robots. You were allowed, though, to look at things…
Martin Enserink, for Science/AAAS: The study, published online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that tall Dutch men on average have more children than their shorter counterparts, and that more of their children survive. That suggests genes that help make people tall are becoming more frequent among the Dutch, says behavioral…
Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, for Gizmodo: Dr. Nadine Chahine is a type designer at the foundry Monotype who focuses on the science of legibility. Dr. Bryan Reimer is a scientist at MIT’s AgeLab who researches distracted driving and the impact of in-car interfaces on drivers. Together, they’re writing the book on how our eyes read when we’re distracted by the world…
Jason Schreier, for Kotaku: There’s no release date or even year announced yet for the much-anticipated fourth Deus Ex game, which will be released on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. In other words, don’t expect this game until 2016. But still, it’s exciting—Human Revolution was excellent, and it sounds like the developers have been working on this next…
Author Joe Quirk, a “seavangelist” for The Seasteading Institute presents a brief but thought provoking case for the development of independent sea faring habitats. From the description: Joe Quirk of the Seasteading Institute thinks floating cities will allow micro nations to compete for people — providing better life options and innovations. “Aquapreneurs,” says Quirk, can save humanity…
A prominent group of thinkers has raised the alarm that humanity would do well to heed the inherent dangers of artificial intelligence. Lyle Cantor, on Medium: A superinteligence (sic) whose super-goal is to calculate the decimal expansion of pi will never reason itself into benevolence. It would be quite happy to convert all the free matter and…
Martin Bellander scraped the color data from 120,013 paintings — most of them produced between 1800 and 2000 — then wrote statistical software to extract color data from them. Bellander: There seems to be a reliable trend of increasingly blue paintings throughout the 20th century! Actually almost all colors seem to increase at the expense of orange….
Oliver Sacks, for The New York Review of Books: Soon after waking from the embolization—it was performed under general anesthesia—I was to be assailed by feelings of excruciating tiredness and paroxysms of sleep so abrupt they could poleaxe me in the middle of a sentence or a mouthful, or when visiting friends were talking or…
This one’s fascinating to me. I’ve seen several otherwise unrelated articles about LA’s parking sign redesign, and each had a negative spin. What drops my jaw is that the new signs, to me, are a vast improvement. Finally, at a glance, I can see exactly where I am right now, and where I’m not supposed…
Nicola Twilley, for The New Yorker: Until recently, astronomers had focussed on analyzing a planet’s reflected light for evidence that its atmosphere contained oxygen or other gases that are considered to be positive indicators for the presence of life. In 2002, however, they proved for the first time that a pigment—chlorophyll, the molecule that makes…
David Pierce, for Wired: Lynch and team had to reengineer the Watch’s software twice before it was sufficiently fast. An early version of the software served you information in a timeline, flowing chronologically from top to bottom. That idea never made it off campus; the ideas that will ship on April 24 are focused on…
Victoria Turk, for Motherboard: Blumlein’s work included inventions needed for recording, processing and playing sound in stereo and he had around 70 patents to his name. Dedicating the plaque, IEEE President Howard Michel explained that his work included “a ‘shuffling’ circuit to preserve directional sound, an orthogonal ‘Blumlein Pair’ of velocity microphones, recording of two…
Elif Batuman, for the New Yorker: This was my first experience of transcranial direct-current stimulation, or tDCS—a portable, cheap, low-tech procedure that involves sending a low electric current (up to two milliamps) to the brain. Research into tDCS is in its early stages. A number of studies suggest that it may improve learning, vigilance, intelligence,…
John Timmer, for Ars Technica: Ohio State University’s Carl Vuosalo helped show us around the CMS, but first he had to shepherd us past higher security than I’ve ever experienced. To do so, he passed through a retina-scanning security system that simultaneously checked his weight (presumably to keep someone with a disembodied eyeball from making their way past the system). I…
Annie Minoff and Jared Goyette, for Public Radio International: When Kathy Kleiman started researching the history of computer programming as an undergraduate, she came across old black-and-white photos of the people who worked on the ENIAC, the world’s first all-electronic programmable computer. But they seemed to be missing a key detail. Both men and women were pictured posing…
A paper published on PLOS One breaks it down: Playing certain types of video games for a long time can improve a wide range of mental processes, from visual acuity to cognitive control. Stands to reason, since practice makes 1up. Dian Schaffhauser, for Campus Technology: The researchers said they aren’t exactly sure what’s happening in the brain…
Bryan Bishop, for The Verge: Max became a singular ’80s pop culture phenomenon that represented everything wonderful and horrible about the decade. Max hosted music video shows; Max interviewed celebrities; Max hawked New Coke; Max Headroom became US network television’s very first cyberpunk series. Max was inescapable — and then almost just as quickly as he had…
Jonathan Webb, for BBC News: Researchers want to learn from the ants’ cooperative methods and develop search algorithms for groups of robots. The ants were sent aloft in a supply rocket in January 2014, and results from the experiments are published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. The team is now beginning a citizen…