Paranoid Cyborgs

Okay, that's not a very kind thing to say about our former vice president. After all, even paranoids have real enemies. But it turns out that Dick Cheney -- who has had a lot of technology loaded into his chest to keep him alive -- had his implanted defibrillator's wireless capability disabled lest a terrorist hack it and send him a fatal jolt. Joel wrote once in The Washington Post about how cyborg technology may affect the recipient's psychology and personality, and it included some speculation about Cheney.

Alpha Dog

For those of you who just can't get enough Big Dog videos, check out his new big sib, Alpha Dog.

A Robot Video to Calm Your Nerves About Them Taking Over Soon

This video by Alicia Fremling for the New America event demonstrates once again that even the zeitgeist is subject to immutable delay.

Profile of Jaron Lanier

The New Yorker has a profile of Jaron Lanier, the poster boy for The Prevail Scenario. It goes into his background in fascinating detail.

A Real Radical Evolution Machine

George Church, the distinguished geneticist at Harvard, is developing a device that forces lifeforms to evolve in weeks in ways that historically took millennia. It is literally a radical evolution machine.

Amazing Hopping Bot

Watch this bot vault a tall chain link fence topped with triple-strand barbed-wired and imagine what it could do with an Olympic fiberglass pole.

Eyes Grown From Stem Cells

In a test tube, mouse embryonic stem cells self-organized into the most complex part of an eye. If it works in humans, it holds the promise to regenerate damaged or lost eyes.

Seagull Bot
Check out the video of the amazingly lifelike, flapping wing, gliding, indoor/outdoor seagull bot.

A Spy Bot That Can Hide

"Lockheed Martin's approach does include a sort of basic theory of mind, in the sense that the robot makes assumptions about how to act covertly in the presence of humans," says Alan Wagner of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Love Is Better Than Drugs in Reducing Pain

Say scientists. They apparently have not studied its ability also to cause it.

The Genetics of 'Nice'

Siberian researchers have created foxes as tame and friendly as golden retrievers. An amazing accomplishment, given how few wild animals have been successfully domesticated. Especially since this has been done in a relatively short period of selective breeding. Now the question is what does the genome of these creatures tell us about the origins of "niceness" in other creatures, including humans?

What's Being Born: Cooperation

If our challenges are increasing exponentially, and our responses are more or less flat, we're obviously toast. Thus, the Prevailish question is whether there is a second curve -- an increase in bottom-up, flock-like, humanistic responses to our challenges, and whether that curve can be bent upwards. This article, by Greg Ferenstein, suggests that's exactly what we're seeing.

Hummingbird Bot

Check out the video of this newly operational DARPA flying bot designed to resemble a hummingbird. Lots of remarkable things. No tail, it's got enough battery to fly and yet it's that small, transmitting video all the way, including into and out of a building. Imagine what a flock of those could do to your privacy.

What if "Watson" Wins at Jeopardy?

If "Watson" wins the Jeopardy challenge, what does that mean? Will "artificial intelligence" increasingly replace information workers as ATM's displaced tellers? Or will "intelligence augmentation" -- I.A. -- make us exponentially smarter? Probably both, but I'm hoping John Seely Brown is right, "The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them."

How the Egyptian Youth Movement Really Organized Itself

Hats off to David Kirkpatrick and David Sanger of The New York Times for this tick-tock on how the Egyptian youth revolution actually did organize itself.

Entangled Between Past and Future

In the weird world of quantum physics, two linked particles can instantly share a single fate, even when they’re galaxies apart.

The PaleoFuture Blog

Endlessly amusing site about "The Future That Never Was" -- marvelously antique futures that were predicted but never quite worked out that way.

Some Thing to Watch Over Me

Cheap ubiquitous machines can now read your face and behavior better than humans -- registering your emotions, and health -- and enabling super stalking

The Machines Really Are Getting Smart

We have created a rich beastiary of gizmos that actually do approach intelligence. They just are little like the human mind. This report in Wired makes the case.

Why Humans Can No Longer Grasp the Stock Market

Trading algorithms have created an environment so volatile, unpredictable and complex that it is increasingly an alien artifact -- impossible to contain, control, or comprehend, according to this fascinating and scary Wired piece.