Genetically Modified Animals

Genetically Modified Animals
UNLESS you live in Europe, your last meal probably contained genetically modified ingredients – 80 per cent of soya grown worldwide is now genetically engineered, for instance. Yet while modified plants are rapidly taking over the planet’s farms, the same cannot be said for GM animals. There’s...
July 28th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

Psychedelic Technologies

Psychedelic Technologies
Imagine… you are strolling along the Esplanade at Burning Man, and something catches your eye. Bands of lights are rapidly moving up and down a 30 foot high pyramid, from Red at the bottom, through Orange, Green, Turquoise, Indigo, Violet, and finally White light at the top. Nothing too unusual,...
July 26th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine

Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine
Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It’s March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich...
July 20th, 2010 | Big Ideas | Read More

Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World

Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World
Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year’s list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails,...
July 13th, 2010 | Big Ideas | Read More

“WATSON: THE NEEDLE!”

“WATSON: THE NEEDLE!”
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND COCAINE By Mike Jay – http://mikejay.net/ Cocaine was the great pharmaceutical success story of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In a few short years, it went from a minor item in specialist catalogues to a major seller in a huge range of preparations in high-street...
July 1st, 2010 | Arts | Read More

Feathering the Falcon’s nest

Feathering the Falcon’s nest
ELON MUSK is not, to paraphrase James Watson’s bon mot about Francis Crick, a man given to modest moods. Today, though, he might be forgiven a little hubris. The co-founder of PayPal, and developer of the Tesla, the first modern electric sports car, has long wanted to get into the space business as...
June 13th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

Entrepreneurs leading the Space Race

Entrepreneurs leading the Space Race
NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — At the Bigelow Aerospace factory here, the full-size space station mockups sitting on the warehouse floor look somewhat like puffy white watermelons. The interiors offer a hint of what spacious living in space might look like. From the New York Times by Kenneth Chang “Every...
June 11th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

Botticelli’s love drug

Botticelli’s love drug
A new discovery suggests that Botticelli’s masterpiece Venus and Mars shows the effects of a hallucinogenic plant – but is the real drug the painting itself? From the Guardian by Jonathan Jones The Florentine Renaissance weaver of floral fantasies Sandro Botticelli is a magical artist. Just to...
June 1st, 2010 | Arts | Read More

The First Synthetic Life Form

The First Synthetic Life Form
Craig Venter and his team have built the genome of a bacterium from scratch and incorporated it into a cell to make what they call the world’s first synthetic life form // function getOmnitureData_86922730001() { var omniture = new Object(); omniture.prop43="Video"; omniture.prop44="Video:...
May 21st, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

The Future of Brain Imaging

The Future of Brain Imaging
Silicon Shrinkwrap Melts Smoothly Onto Cat Brain to Monitor Activity in Real Time The wetted silk can apply a thin silicon layer directly to the brain’s contours, shrink-wrap style, and monitor brain activity By Jeremy Hsu Silk-Silicon Let me get inside your head John Rogers Implanting...
May 4th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More
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