Posts Tagged ‘technology’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noam Chomsky and Latin America

Noam Chomsky speaks about the future and predicts difficult situations for China and India. On the other hand he analyzes the appearance of progressiveness in Latin America as very important. For the first time in 500 years, LA is moving towards a degree of independence and a kind of integration and...

June 7th, 2010 | Social Insight | Read More

Brain’s Master Switch Is Verified

The protein that has long been suspected by scientists of being the master switch allowing brains to function has now been verified by an Iowa State University researcher. Yeon-Kyun Shin, professor of biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at ISU, has shown that the protein called synaptotagmin1...

June 1st, 2010 | Science of the Mind | Read More

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

In the Beginning: The Birth of a Psychedelic Culture

The following is adapted from the Foreword to Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties, by Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner with Gary Bravo, from Synergetic Press. LSD is a drug that produces fear in people who don’t take it. –Timothy...

May 17th, 2010 | Social Insight | Read More