Monthly Archives: July 2008

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Ray Gun Crowd Control

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It doesn’t get more SFnal than this:

The Sierra Nevada Corporation claimed this week that it is ready to begin production on the MEDUSA, a damned scary ray gun that uses the “microwave audio effect” to implant sounds and perhaps even specific messages inside people’s heads.

I wasn’t really scared about the gun, until I thought about what was written next:

The pulses create a shockwave inside the skull that’s detected by the ears, and basically makes you think you’re going balls-to-the-wall batshit insane.

Thankfully, civilians probably wont have to worry about the gun, it’ll mainly be used to track down bad guys by the military.  But what other uses can this device be put to? Will it just be another tool for the miltary, or will we find other commercial uses?  In recent memory, that description really reminds me of the device used in Iron Man by Obadiah Stane, but the MEDUSA can’t be blocked out by headphones.

[Story from New Scientist, via Slashdot], [image by Nic Name]

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Another step forward: mapping the brain

There has been another development in the ongoing effort to map the human brain. Using a new technique called diffusion tensor imaging, scientists at Indiana University have created the first high resolution map of the human cortical network:

Diffusion imaging is a new twist on MRI that uses magnetic resonance signals to track the movement of water molecules in the brain. In gray matter, water tends to diffuse multidirectionally. But in white matter, it diffuses along the length of neural wires, called axons, and scientists can use these diffusion measurements to map the fibers.

Inside The Ear - Another Edited Anatomy Chart ScanAn intriguing discovery is that of a “core” area – so called by cognitive neuroscientist Olaf Sporns – of highly interconnected neurons near the back of the head:

The node lies on the shortest path between many different parts of the neural network. “It’s highly connected amongst itself, but also highly central with respect to the rest of the brain,” says Sporns. “Network studies in other fields, from the Internet to protein interaction networks, suggest that these kinds of highly connected nodes tend to be very important for determining what the network does as a whole.”

It’s interesting how research in diverse areas of science can inform each other: such that studies of the behaviour of networks, or waves, or mathematical ratios, can crop up again and again.

[story via Technology Review][image from Mikey G Ottowa on flickr]

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Looking on the bright side – ten reasons to like higher gas prices

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Second Life cyber-blimpI don’t know first-hand, as I don’t drive, but it doesn’t take superhuman empathy to imagine how hard the spiralling cost of diesel and petroleum is hitting a lot of people right now.

Time Magazine obviously came to the same conclusion, and decided to make an attempt at cheering everyone up by listing 10 things you can like about $4 gas. These range from the prospect of globalized jobs returning to their original locations to the more prosaic and obvious like less pollution and fewer traffic deaths.

If those aren’t enough for you, perhaps a piece at the New York Times will sell you on the idea. I mean, come on – who here doesn’t think an air-ship renaissance would be extremely awesome? [via BoingBoing; image by Torley Linden]

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Friday Free Fiction for 4th July

Happy Independence Day, America! With that long weekend ahead of you, you’ll be needing some fiction to while away the spare hours, right?

OK, so maybe not – it’ll keep until you’re all partied out, anyway. Everyone else – get stuck in!

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We’ll start off sedately with ManyBooks.net:

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Feedbooks continues to demonstrate the productivity power of crowdsourcing. I don’t know if they can keep up this pace forever, but there’s another random sackful of stories old and new:

And a big wodge of Richard Kadrey‘s stuff:

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Another chunk of Shadow Unit‘s “summertime DVD extras” have appeared – read the whole of “Vigil” so far.

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It’s new ‘zine season at Subterranean Press:

“Oddly (and delightfully) enough, we’ve chosen to kick off the special Mike Resnick issue of Subterranean Online with a brand new story by Jay Lake, as well as an insightful interview with same. His new novel, Escapement, has just hit the stands. “Chain of Fools” shares that novel’s setting, though it doesn’t depend on the novel to be enjoyed fully.

Next week, look for us to start serializing Mike Resnick’s classic novella, “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge.”

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There’s a new issue (#22) of Clarkesworld also:

There’s non-fiction, too:

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Not to mention issue 3 of Oddlands Magazine:

Plus poetry and a review.

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[links expunged]

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And another – Jake Freivald sez:

The latest issue of Flash Fiction Online is up!

Cheers, Jake!

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Via BoingBoing:

To celebrate the release of Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams, Night Shade Books has posted a self-contained excerpt from the book [and] the complete text of Williams’s Nebula Award-winning novella “The Green Leopard Plague” to their downloads page. They’ve also got a short interview with him here.

Implied Spaces comes highly recommended by a number of people, arguably the least influential of whom is myself – check out my review of the book, if you like.

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A seventeenth slice of Memory from Jayme Lynn Blaschke:

Flavius’ footsteps echoed eerily in the deathly silence of the hall. Barely a dozen liveried staff milled in confusion along the perimeter of the oblong chamber, with a like number of guards spaced at even intervals, cuayabs held unobtrusively. The balcony boxes, halfway up the vaulted ceiling, remained empty.

At the far end of the audience hall, seated upon ornate thrones on a raised marble dias polished so brightly it hurt the eyes to look at, were the Tricentennial Emperor and Empress.

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Gareth L Powell‘s been too busy to write anything for us this week, but he has by way of compensation, offered us the chance to download an excerpt from his forthcoming short story collection, The Last Reef.

Indeed, it looks like most of the Friday Flash Fictioneers are taking a sabbatical this week, but the die-hards are still on the case:

  • Phred Serenissima is hanging with “Van and Marla“
  • Neil Beynon‘s on the “Blink“

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And there’s your weekly dose of free fiction – I hope there’s something in there to keep your literary stomach from churning. Don’t forget to send us your tips and plugs for next week – deadline is 1800 GMT Friday afternoon. Have a great weekend!

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I know where you drove last summer – the secrets your satnav could tell

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Super-seekrit satnavHappy Independence Day, America! I expect you’ll be busy making loud noises with explosives and generally partying it up this weekend, and I don’t begrudge you that*. But here’s some advice – if at some point you should decide to take a little drive somewhere to do something you maybe shouldn’t do, turn off the TomTom. [LOLnav based on an image by pizzodisevo]

You see, it turns out that not only does your satnav tell you how to get from A to B, it remembers where A and B were, when you travelled between them, and where you drove through on the way. Plus, if you’ve linked your phone to it via Bluetooth, it’ll have a record of every call and text message you made during the journey.

This isn’t a standard feature, obviously; it takes a detective with some good tech sk1llz0rz to tease out the old files, and now this has been revealed (by the superbly-monikered Beverly Nutter of London’s Metropolitan Police, no less) we can expect the same hacker enthusiasts who found the vulnerabilities to find a way of closing them.

So, just another front-line skirmish in the of the war between technology and privacy … but then if you’re doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear, right?

[ * Actually, I do kinda begrudge you it; the closest we Brits have to Independence Day is Guy Fawkes Night. I’ve always clung to the explanation for burning Fawkes in effigy that a slightly inebriated friend of my father’s told me when I was about twelve: “We’re not burning him for trying to blow up the government, Paul; we’re burning him because he failed.” Happy 4th July! ]