Say no more. Actually, I’ll say that this is a pleasantly wide-ranging interview that dips into some unexpected areas. Christoph Scheuermann and Barbara Supp, for Der Spiegel: Cleese: When I was young, I felt that if you made fun of a certain kind of behavior, people would realize it was ridiculous. And then it would slowly…
Jason Caffrey, for BBC World Service: For decades, Mark Landis donated art to museums and galleries across the US. He was feted as a wealthy collector but the pictures were fakes that he had created himself. He was never prosecuted though – he didn’t take payment so hadn’t broken any law. “It obviously isn’t a…
Gerard Gormley, for The Conversation: Left-right discrimination is a complex neuro-psychological process involving several higher neurological functions such as the ability to integrate sensory and visual information, language function and memory. For some it is second nature but for others a considerable challenge. You can take a test here to see how well you do. One further problem facing…
Timothy Prickett Morgan, for The Platform: The computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, software that is used to simulate the movement of fluids and gases and their ignition inside of all kinds of engines is particularly bad at assisting in rocket engine design. “Methane is a fairly simple hydrocarbon that is perfectly good as a fuel,”…
David Conrad, for I Programmer: Why does Festo spend so much time creating impressive robots? Simple — all of the techniques can be used in factory automation and that’s what Festo specializes in. Wouldn’t you want the company that can build ants and beautiful butterfly robots to automate your factory? It’s always made sense to me…
Su Avasthi, for Modern Farmer: They don’t have mouths, ears or even a brain, but according to some scientists, plants are talking all the time. We just need to understand their language. Once we do, we may discover that plants routinely exhibit animal-like behavior. What if, as some research indicates, they communicate with each other…
Lisa Zyga, for Phys.org: For the first time, physicists have performed machine learning on a photonic quantum computer, demonstrating that quantum computers may be able to exponentially speed up the rate at which certain machine learning tasks are performed—in some cases, reducing the time from hundreds of thousands of years to mere seconds. The new…
Seth Shostak, for the NYTimes: The aliens could very well be out there. And that realization has spurred a call by some for broadcasts intended to elicit a communication from at least the nearest other star systems. But we know nothing of the aliens’ possible motives or behavior. Therefore, it’s conceivable that betraying our existence…
Roheeni Saxena, for Ars Technica: Focusing on the process itself, the researchers found that the selective retrieval of the second association caused forgetting of the first association. When subjects were asked to recall the second associations, the competing first associations were no longer recognized at the same levels. This effect remained true for faces, objects,…
Kevin Ashton, on Medium: Science begets technology, which begets goods, which beget value. Science is the principal source of value in modern economies. Second, because economies are chaotic, most of the consequences of any particular technology are unpredictable. An example: The watermill led to the automatic loom, which led to general literacy. Add in the…
As the article says, this one’s food for thought for potential cosmonauts. MIT Technology Review: The movement of a relativistic spacecraft will have another effect. It should scatter the cosmic microwave background in a way that produces a unique signature. “As a baryonic spacecraft travels at relativistic speeds it will interact with the CMB through…
Laura Hudson, for Boing Boing: The first time [Jason] Shiga blew my mind was with an interactive graphic novel called Hello World. The story is simple enough: You’re a little boy sent to the store by his mother with a grocery list of items and a suitcase to carry them home. But the moment you open…
And then he said, “My birth cry will be the sound of every phone on this planet ringing in unison!” Just kidding, that’s from Lawnmower Man. But with all this talk of “the father of cyberpunk” and other cyber-things, it’s hard to keep those early forays into virtual worlds at bay. Mario Aguilar, for Gizmodo:…
Scott Huver interviews Pegg for Spinoff Online: What got you excited about the opportunity to write the next “Star Trek” movie, and can you talk about the sensibility you want to bring to it? It just came out of conversations I was having with J.J. [Abrams] and Bryan Burk, and they decided to kind of…
Convergent evolution isn’t a new thing, of course — the retina being the usual example. But neurons are a different story. Emily Singer, for Quanta Magazine: Moroz’s primary evidence for an independent origin of neurons in comb jellies comes from their unusual nervous systems. “The ctenophore’s nervous system is dramatically different from any other nervous system,”…
John Timmer, for Ars Technica: A robotic probe will pluck a boulder from the surface of an asteroid and return that, testing our ability to redirect similar rocks if they threaten Earth. In fact, the entire mission is generally focused on technology development. Once the asteroid is placed in a cis-lunar orbit (orbiting Earth and…
Tell me that image doesn’t evoke some emotion, or make you think of X-Men. Max Plenke, for Mic: In “people becoming superhuman” news, a small independent research group has figured out how to give humans night vision, allowing them to see over 50 meters in the dark for a short time. Science for the Masses,…
Lauren Smiley, for Medium: Five months ago I moved into a spartan apartment a few blocks away, where dozens of startups and thousands of tech workers live. Outside my building there’s always a phalanx of befuddled delivery guys who seem relieved when you walk out, so they can get in. Inside, the place is stuffed…
If you were to combine Heavy Metal with Star Wars, this might be the result. Animator Paul Johnson: What if there was an Empire-focussed (sic) short Star Wars animation, drawn with the crazy detail and shading of classic 80s anime that’s all but vanished from Japan nowadays? and: Drawn and animated by yours truly over…
It’s hard to beat a headline like that. Sign me up! Nellie Andreeva, for Deadline: Thirteen years after The X-Files ended its nine-season run on Fox and months after talks about a new TV installment started, the sci-fi hit is returning as a six-episode event series from series creator/executive producer Chris Carter, with stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson set to reprise their roles as FBI…
Phrased very delicately, the JPL news brief clarifies: There is no evidence to suggest that the fixed nitrogen molecules found by the team were created by life. The surface of Mars is inhospitable for known forms of life. Instead, the team thinks the nitrates are ancient, and likely came from non-biological processes like meteorite impacts…
Liz Stinson, for Wired: In the recent exhibition Drawing With My Eyes, artist Graham Fink drew portraits using only his eyes, some software and enviable amounts of concentration. Fink worked with a programmer to develop software for an eye-tracker that would allow him to draw simply by looking at the screen. Much like the EyeWriter, a piece of open-source software…
Destin Sandlin, producer of the educational video series Smarter Every Day, interviews astronaut Scott Kelly inside the Soyuz mockup. They discuss everything from how to reach buttons under the strain of multiple g-forces, to how the vehicle finally positions itself perfectly for docking with the space station. It’s a pretty fascinating explanation.
Kyle Orland, for Ars Technica: Offering a fixed object that doesn’t shift as you move around a virtual world has been shown to help anchor many VR users, reducing the apparent difference between visual and sensorimotor stimuli that can lead to simulation sickness. That’s useful for VR experiences that can insert a virtual cockpit or…
This hour long podcast also features Bill Nye the Science Guy. What’s not to like? From the description: Join us as Neil and Elon talk about NASA funding, getting humans excited for the colonization of Mars, and why Elon feels it’s important to not be stuck here on Earth. You’ll also find out why sustainable production…