Here, have a TED Talk about Emotiv’s EPOC neuroheadset:
Meanwhile, DARPA are looking into wiring prosthetic arms straight into patient’s brains:
A team of scientists at…
Further advances in Mind Control
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Whenever we boot up our time machines, cruise back to 1200 B.C., and try to pick up chicks at our favorite wine bar in Western Syria, our rudimentary knowledge of Ugaritic is usually more embarrassing than helpful. The good folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have us stoked on some new software we hope to have in pocket form soon. It analyzes an unknown language by comparing letter and word patterns to another known language (in Ugaritic’s case, its close cousin is Hebrew) and spits out a translation quickly, using precious little computing power. To give some perspective, it took archaeologists four years to do the same thing back in 1928. It’s not quite Berlitz yet, but this proof of concept is kind of like the Michael Jordan of computational linguists – it’s probably the first time that machine translations of dead scripts has been proven effective. If we plug some hopeful numbers into our TI-83, we calculate that we’ll be inserting our own genes into the ancient Syrian pool in a matter of months. Thanks, MIT! (via New MIT software learns an entire dead language in just a few hours – Engadget)
Read moreRead moreNo single gene is a guaranteed fountain of youth. Instead, the secret of longevity probably lies in having the right “suite” of genes, according to new studies of centenarians and their families. Such combinations are extremely rare — only one person in 10,000 reaches the age of 100.
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The so-called Methuselah genes — named after the biblical patriarch who lived to 969 — are thought to include ADIPOQ, which is found in about 10% of young people but in nearly 30% of people living past 100. The CETP gene and the ApoC3 gene are found in 10% of young people, but in about 20% of centenarians.
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“If we know which genes control longevity then we can find out what proteins they make and then target them with drugs. That makes it possible to slow down ageing. We need to reclassify it as a disease rather than as a benign, natural process,” he said.
Read more“I won’t dumb down Neuromancer,” he says. “There would be no point in making that version. We’ve seen things like that before. What is exciting about William Gibson’s vision in 2010 is how prescient it was. He really anticipated the post-human world. And I think we are entering that world very quickly. So, what draws me to the book – and what I think the film will offer that we haven’t seen before in the cinema – is an in-depth exploration of our growing relationships to the cybernetic universe. If Splice is about the evolution of our bodies, then Neuromancer will be about the evolution of our minds.”
Is Gibson involved in the creative process? And will the film be a blockbuster, or more of a purist science-fiction thing?
“Gibson is involved, and yes, he has been immensely supportive and I’m actively developing the script with his consultation,” says Natali. He tells me he is hoping that the success of Nolan’s film will help convince studios to greenlight a big-budget Neuromancer, but one which maintains the book’s cerebral impact. “The movie would not work without that kind of cash, and I wouldn’t want to do it,” he says. “I think with the advent of Inception there is now an example out there of how that would be possible.”
Read moreThe attack on the hydroelectric station was the most dramatic outburst of violence in the Russian Caucasus in recent months. Although Kabardino-Balkariya sees less violence than nearby Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, the republic suffers from persistent tensions stemming from poverty and harsh police actions toward worship by unsanctioned Muslim sects.
Read moreMy notion of a story is an interesting situation in which a human being has to cope with a problem, does so, and thereby changed his personality, character, or evaluations in some measure because the coping has forced him to revise his thinking. How he copes with it, I can’t plot in advance because that depends on his character, and I don’t know what his character is until I get acquainted with him.
In the six-week pilot for the promotion, more than 100,000 in virtual Farm Cash was redeemed using the stickers, which appeared on 25 different Green Giant produce items. The promotion was launched in Target Fresh Grocery and SuperTarget stores first, but was expanded to stores nationwide as a result of the pilot promotion success.
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FarmVille, which has 65 million users and 20 million who play daily, has perhaps finally reached the mainstream by getting inside our grocery stores and refrigerators. Recently, we learned that Google is reportedly partnering with FarmVille game-maker Zynga to launch a hub for social online games after investing some $100 to $200 million in the company. And one of Zynga’s newest social games, FrontierVille, recently passed the 20 million user mark.
(via FarmVille Cash Invades Supermarkets Nationwide)
Read moreRead moreRussia is building a new spaceport to enhance the growth of its commercial space industry and aims to launch unmanned flights from it by 2015. The country is pumping investments worth $800 million into the new site which will be smaller than its current launch site of Baikonur that it rents from Kazakhstan and will have state-of-the-art launch pads, research facilities and a modern residential complex. Russia’s space officials say that the future spaceport is planned mostly for civilian launches and that the new cosmodrome will ensure stability of the Russian space industry by setting it up on its soil and will foster the development of its private space industry. The country also plans to build a new generation of spacecraft to be used for interplanetary flights
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 