Early this morning the ISS and a piece of debris from an old Russian weather satellite almost gave one another a bro-like chest bump.
Astronauts had an hour and a half to secure as many of the ISS’s individual modules and get themselves hunkered down into their escape pod (the Soyuz capsule attached to the ISS) and nervously wait to see how it would play out.
While that’s the official word there are a lot of humans on the ground declaring that that’s what NASA wants you to believe and that the “space object” was actually a UFO doing a drive-by of the ISS.
Thankfully the debris or whatever it was went by without incident. NASA gave the astronauts the all-clear a few minutes later.
While safe it’s still a terrifying scenario because orbit is pretty is pretty predictable once things are in it…
At Duke University a researcher who’s pioneering brain-computer interfaces has circuited four rats’ together via their brains and created a gooey and organic “Brainet”.
Miguel Nicolelis, the neurobiologist pioneering this neuroengineering at Duke University has spent 30 years doing similar experiments in hopes of uncovering the secrets of the human mind.
Earlier, in 2011, Nicolelis connected the brain of individual monkeys in order to get them to work a virtual monkey arm and grab virtual objects with it using only their mind. It didn’t take long for the each monkey to grasp the process mentally and move their extra invisible monkey hand.
Nicolelis then wondered if it were possible to string together several brains and have the work together to perform particular tasks. He used four rats to test the idea.
In order to get a drink of water the rats would have to learn to work together mentally to get a drink. In a short amount of time the rats were drinking regularly as normal.
Currently the rats have Frankenstein-like electrodes embedded in their heads. That will change as the technology progresses until it’s completely non-invasive.
What can we gain from a “brainet” as humans? Will we eventually become Borg-like? Is it smart to move toward a hive-mind? Who knows.
Downside? Enough people are connected via their brains and someone hacks the “brainet” to make the world bow before them. Upside? Natural disaster takes place and we use the “brainet” to locate those in need of help and almost telepathically send the information needed to medically aid those people even though the person at the receiving end might not be trained in life-saving techniques.
The entire idea is still in its infancy as to the possible applications but as Nicolelis points out:
“These computers will not do word processing or numerical calculation or internet searches, they will be tailored for very specific tasks like what animals are tailored for. It’s a totally different kind of vision for computation that we’re not used to.”
The whole process is intriguingly involved and fascinating….and somewhat terrifying.
Imagine waking up and being hooked to someone else’s brain?
Or imagine that this is slowly becoming a reality….
Thomas Edison once took a break from electrocuting animals to turn his attention to making dolls for little girls.
Because he was the go-to guy at the time for recording voices, he thought it might be cool to make those dolls speak.
And just like his animal displays that weren’t really the thing anyone who loves animals should watch…
His dolls weren’t really the thing that anyone who loves children enough to get them a talking doll should ever consider giving…
Inside the dolls rests a fragile wax cylinder with grooves on it like a vinyl record. Using a microscope and computers to study the cylinders and create an accurate image that can be virtually played and heard, an engineer and a physicist have, unfortunately for those of us who sleep, brought the sounds of the dolls back to life…
Oh…goody.
You can hear the complete recordings in the video below.
On August 9th of 2014 graduate student Daniel Bowman sent infrasound microphones into the 19 miles into the sky above Earth just out of reach of planes but well below actually being in space.
For 9 hours and for over 400 miles the microphones recorded sounds in a layer of our sky that science hadn’t bothered with in almost 50 years.
They may start bothering it again…
Bowman’s microphones picked up sounds recorded below the range of human hearing. To make those sounds audible to our ears, they’re sped up…
When they’re sped up the results get a little freaky.
Scientists studying the sounds have yet to determine where they came from…a local wind-farm, crashing waves, wind turbulence and even the balloon’s cable.
Ripped right out of hundreds of science fiction, comic book and horror stories comes news that a Russian man has decided to be a medical guinea pig or possibly a pioneer….
By having his head removed and attached to another body.
Suffering from a severe case of spinal muscular atrophy, Valery Spiridonov, a 30-year-old Russian man has volunteered to become the first person to go through the process of a head transplant.
Last December, in a TedTalk, Italian neuroscientist Sergio Canavero claimed it’s possible and he was the guy to do it.
Spiridonov says he’s really got nothing to lose as his condition and quality of life deteriorate:
“I’m very interested in technology, and anything progressive that might change people’s lives for the better. Doing this isn’t only an excellent opportunity for me, but will also create a scientific basis for future generations, no matter what the actual outcome of the surgery is. This technology is similar to the first man to walk in space. This is because in the future it will help thousands of people who are in an even more deplorable state than I am.”
The cost and time to transplant Spiridonov’s head onto it’s new body? 11 million dollars and 36 hours of surgery.
Other doctors in the field are calling this a fantasy and a horrible idea that should never even be considered.
We’ll know in 2017 after 36 hours of surgery…
In the broken-English words of Dr. Canavero during the opening of his TedTALK:
“Are you sitting tight? I’m about to give you one hell of a ride.”
Posted in Bizarre, Brain, Russia, Science, Weird | Comments Off on Russian Man Volunteers for First – Probably Last – Head Transplant by Controverisal Neuroscientist
Since the first announcement of the Mars One program, people have either picked up the story and hailed it with headlines trumpeting our colonization of the red planet or they’ve been standing there with confused looks slapped on their faces. Media outlets have just accepted that Mars One is taking us to Mars and we should all be excited.
Now the curtain has been lifted on Mars One…
By an actual finalist who’s basically packed his bags and walked away from it all.
Joseph Roche, one of the final candidates for the one-way trip to Mars, has walked away from the program recently and is revealing everything that he’s experienced during his time with Mars One.
Originally media and Mars One reported that 300,000 potential one-way ticket holders had applied.
Roche claims it’s less than 3,000 applicants.
Mars One boasted of the lengthy interview process.
Roche says it came down to a 10 minute Skype interview.
Mars One claims that there are billions behind this whole program.
Roche revealed that applicants contribute financially by spending money on Mars One merchandise to earn points.
Mars One’s selection process sounds more like a cross between filling out a Jelly of the Month Club application, joining Amway and learning that QVC is going to launch one in every ten callers to the moon if they also purchase the bonus steel cutlery set.
Roche’s revelations came about because he’s worried just how badly this entire “program” could affect the popularity that space exploration is currently enjoying:
“My nightmare about it is that people continue to support it and give it money and attention, and it then gets to the point where it inevitably falls on its face. If, as a result, people lose faith in NASA and possibly even in scientists, then that’s the polar opposite of what I’m about. If I was somehow linked to something that could do damage to the public perception of science, that is my nightmare scenario.”
In response to Roche’s claims and the interviewer, Elmo Keep, the man behind Mars One, Bas Lansdorp responded to the allegations that Mars One is quickly falling apart:
So what is actually happening at Mars One? Who knows. But even with the two year delay Lansdorp announced? The first Mars One unmanned mission is only five years away.
In 12 years we’re either going to look back and laugh at Mars One…
Or we’re going to be crossing our fingers and holding our breath when those first four astronauts are sitting in a rocket aimed at the sky.
Posted in Mars, NASA, Rocket, Rockets, Scam, Science, Space | Comments Off on MARS ONE: Mars-Bound Candidate Walks Away – Pulls Back the Curtain Revealing a Mess or is it?
The jury’s out on what’s causing the sound (which is far, far below the level of human hearing) and a whole lot of theories are being tossed around about it. Everything from magnetic fields to ionization of particles shearing themselves from the traveling comet is suspect at this point.
“This is exciting because it is completely new to us. We did not expect this and we are still working to understand the physics of what is happening.” – RPC principal investigator Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier
Until there’s an answer, which probably won’t be soon because space is just weird, we’re going to assume that the comet is either harboring a Predator who’s looking for payback, the mobile rehearsal space for a marimba-playing Cantina Band member or that we’ve discovered the dial-up connection for an alien race.
Posted in Alien, Asteroid, Astronomy, Comet, Science, Space | Comments Off on Predator Might Be Hiding on Rosetta’s Comet – Based on the weird sound we’re hearing
Using nanotubes, British scientists have created a material called VantaBlack that acts like a bunch of very, very tiny blackhole when it comes to light.
The material is so black that our eyes can’t discern any type of edges or features an object covered in the material might have.
We’ll leave the explanation to the scientists in the above video.
To get a quick grasp of just how light-sucking and black this material is? Take a look at the piece of aluminum in the photo below. The black portion of the foil is just as crinkled as the silver portion. Think about that.
And then think about what you might cover in VantaBlack…
Or what a top-secret government agency might cover in VantaBlack…
Scientists have been trying to find the elusive combination of instructions that would cause stems cells to become an actual living thing.
That elusive secret just ran out of places to hide.
University researchers were able to cause cells to grow into an entire animal!
The result of all this is that there’s now a baby zebra fish embryo in the world that was created completely from stem cells by scientists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
Absorb that for a minute.
While this discovery is HUGE and of immeasurable value to the creation of organs for those who need them, there’ll probably be some backlash from torch bearers and wielders of pitchforks who want to march across the U of V campus lawn.
It sounds like something straight out of the past few decades of science fiction stories…
Especially when one of the scientists drops a line like:
“We have generated an animal by just instructing embryonic cells the right way…” and “…we can pretty much do what we want.”
The video pretty much tells you everything you need to know about this awesome kid who’s decided to become a tween man of science instead of chasing skirts or worrying about pimples.
We’re putting this little bit of text down here to let tell you to listen all the way to the end to hear about his NEXT project…
Nope. We know what you’re wishing and your hopes are wrong. That’s not an old rice cake that someone dropped under the couch six months ago. It’s not a urinal cake either…because even that wouldn’t be as bad.
It’s exactly what your brain is screaming that it wasn’t right now…
That’s a block of cheese grown from…hold on to your lunch and put down anything you might be eating right now, kids…
Human toe cheese.
Not only did Christina Agapakis and Sissel Tolaas, who’re a part of an exhibit in Dublin called Grow Your Own…Life After Nature that is full of projects like this, create cheese wheels made from toe cheese. No. They swung for the wall by creating cheese wheels grown from other yummy ingredients like armpit sweat and bellybutton debris.
By scraping the bacteria from places that make every single one of cringe, they cultured that bacteria into cheese wheels that no one should ever, ever, EVER eat for fear of being that person for the rest of their lives.
But then again…if you served it to someone and they didn’t know what it was? Would that be a bad thing if they liked it?
3D printng is the ‘it’ thing right now. It seems like nothing can’t be printed. We can print plastic toys, metal parts and even cell tissues using additive manufacturing. So what’s next?
Food…3D-printed food.
A Texas company is partnering with NASA to explore the idea of printing food during long, deep space missions. Systems and Materials Research and
Consultancy, a company in Austin, was recently awarded a Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1 contract concerning printing
food for astronauts. Currently astronauts eat foods that lose their micronutrients during the process they go through to become official space-food.
Eventually the prepackaged, off-the-shelf, single-servings the astronauts nom on now will make way for customizable recipes.
Anyone else excited to witness the first live-stream of a 3D-printed Thanksgiving dinner…in space? Us too.
[DesignBoom]
Recently a group of Japanese scientists at the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference in Orlando, Florida have unveiled
the latest incarnation of…
(sad, loungy drumroll please)
Smell-O-Vision!
That’s right. Scientists have been working hard at making your television smell.
Do we really need to smell the elephants of Africa while watching a beautiful documentary about the animals?
No. Not really.
But advertisers sure would like us to get a whiff of things like the latest addition to the IHOP menu, the latest
colognes and Pilsbury would take the obesity problems in America to a whole new level when that little chubby, animated
chef shows up shoving a tray full of warm, delicious chocolate chip cookies in our faces.
Using gel pellets placed at the four corners of the monitor and small air-streams, scientists are able to get fairly
specific across the face of the monitor where the smell will seem to emanate from. Think of it like 5.1 surround sound but
your nose is the one in the recliner experiencing it.
Modern day theme parks like Universal and Disney often use gel packs or cartridges to send the smell of candy, food or, in the case of Universal’s
Halloween Horror Nights, the smell of rotting meat to add a subtle something to guests’ in-park experience.
What was unveiled at the conference is still fairly primitive but technological developments will continue to improve and
pretty soon you could be smelling the oil and smoking metal of Call of Duty…
Or the sweet, acrid smell of a Well Zombie from the Walking Dead.
Researchers have found the tentacled god Cthulhu at last he shall walk the earth and consume us all. By earth we mean the gut of termites and by consume we mean engage in a symbiotic relationship. Oh, and this Cthulhu as described in the PLOS ONE paper is actually a microorganism. But he does have tentacles and is as scary as the deep dark hell from which he most certainly came from.
For a LOT of the more nerdy kids out there, we’re placing bets that many of you pretended you had the ability to throw fireballs, move objects by waving your hands and occasionally even tried in vain to channel the Force.
That was all fun, lots of pretending and wishful thinking…wasn’t it?
Not any more.
Thalmic Labs, the creators of Myo is a company that, with the help of a special armband, could make a lot of those things a reality.
‘As a company, we’re interested in how we can use technology to enhance our abilities as humans – in short, giving us superpowers,’ Stephen Lake, co-founder and CEO of Thalmic Labs said.
Using gesture control, Myo is an armband that registers the electrical activity in your muscle movements that will produce a signal that’s interpreted and sent wirelessly to your phone, television, kitchen or even your personal drone instantly.
At that price why waste time running around in a swamp with an 800 year-old, green, raisin-skinned, wizard clinging to your back and nagging at you or visiting some weird old desert hermit when you can just drop a little cash and skip the middleman?
Let’s just hope people remember to remove it when they’re doing…uh…private stuff involving a lot of gesturing.
We’re pretty sure that this thing can’t help us ‘unsee’ things yet.
