Category Archives: Blog

Blog

Robotic Dragonflies

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Fans of one of Terry Pratchett’s early comic science-fiction novels The Dark Side of the Sun, will be familiar with the idea of robotic versions of insects being used as “bugs” to spy on people.

This is an idea that is being enthusiastically embraced by the US military, with many small UAVs in development for surveillance purposes.

And there is even more insect-themed biomimicry on it’s way from the labs: the dragonfly is of particular interest, according to researchers:

Dragonflies are one of few creatures that utilize four independently controlled wings to fly,dragonfly allowing them to hover, dart, glide, move backward, and change directions rapidly. Looking to understand such abilities, scientists at the Royal Veterinary College, in England, and the University of Ulm, in Germany, have developed a robotic dragonfly to measure the current flows over and under the wings at different flap cycles. While most of the dragonfly hovering scenarios were not efficient, the team found that if the lower wings are beating slightly ahead of the top wings, the double set of wings proves more efficient at generating lift, employing 22 percent less power to lift the same weight as a single pair.

Well good luck to them. Fortunately for privacy-lovers/paranoids it seems that practical fabrication of these insect spies is still some way in the future.

[story from Technology Review][image by Lori Greig]

Blog

William Gibson interviewed at io9

William GibsonJust in case you hadn’t noticed, the good folks at io9 have an interview with the nigh-legendary William Gibson, who I’m sure needs no introduction to Futurismic readers. Here he is explaining why he thinks people describe his work as dystopian:

“None of us ever live in dystopia. That’s an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don’t seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.“

Click on over; plenty of brain food in exchange for five minutes of your time. [image by fugin]

Blog

Mars Water Fit for Pickling . . . Life

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toxic waterThe scientific community eagerly watches the progress as Pheonix lander scours Mars. They are hoping that there will be signs that there was once a supply of water on the planet that would give evidence that there may have once been life on the planet. Most scientists seem to conclude, though, that data from the Opportunity indicates that the water was a toxic mix of salty water and minerals that would have been unsuitable for Earth-like lifeforms. [photo courtesy Kevin].

If this is true, then it changes a lot of our views of the Red Planet, making it a lot less viable as a possible location for colonies or population in the future. What was once seen as the new bastion of human existence when we ruin the planet we have now, may be nothing more than a dusty satellite orbiting the Sun. Who’s to say, though? We on Earth have such an egocentric view of our existence that it’s hard for us to imagine that there may be other possibilities of variant lifeforms in the universe that don’t operate as we do (i.e. – do all lifeforms really have to be carbon-based?).

Blog

Grr! Arrgh! Nearly-extinct predators make a comeback

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fisherHorror writers in search of a plot need look no further: a weasel-like predator known as the fisher is making itself right at home in your Northeast or Midwest suburbs! The mixture of eco- and morality tale make it the perfect story device, given that they were almost wiped out by trappers and foresters in the last century, but reintroduced to prey on porcupines. The New York Times describes a householder’s encounter with a fisher that tried to eat her German shepherd’s face:

“I had never seen anything like it,” Ms. Beaudry recalled. “I didn’t know what it was. It kind of looked like a fox. But it was very, very ratty looking and had fangs and claws. It was creepy looking, but not that big.”

More animals-out-of-place news: The Caribbean monk seal, extinct. The Chinook salmon, endangered in the U.S., is thriving so well in Chile and Argentina that it could disrupt freshwater and marine ecosystems. And there’s thumbnail-sized quagga mussels clogging up the Colorado River. What other displaced creatures might be cast in near-future fiction?

[Image: Wikimedia Commons]

Blog

Revenge of the Sneakernet

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sneakers-from-powerlinesBuilding on Paul’s post on writing and piracy, I thought I’d flag an article by Rasmus Fleisher (of Sweden’s Piratbyrån) on the future of copyright;

According to one recent study 95 percent of British youth engage in file sharing via burned CDs, instant messaging clients, mobile phones, USB sticks, e-mail, and portable hard drives.

Such practices constitute the “darknet,” a term popularized by four Microsoft-affiliated researchers in a brilliant 2002 paper [opens pdf]. Their thesis is simply that people who have information and want to exchange it with each other will do just that, forming spontaneous networks which may be large or small, online or offline…

One early darknet has been termed the “sneakernet”: walking by foot to your friend carrying video cassettes or floppy discs. Nor is the sneakernet purely a technology of the past. The capacity of portable storage devices is increasing exponentially, much faster than Internet bandwidth, according to a principle known as “Kryder’s Law.” The information in our pockets yesterday was measured in megabytes, today in gigabytes, tomorrow in terabytes and in a few years probably in petabytes (an incredible amount of data)…

In other words: The sneakernet will come back if needed. “I believe this is a ‘wild card’ that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all,” writes Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson. “When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ – what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?”

And there’s something about the idea of the sneakernet which, particularly when approached from a speculative angle, really captures my imagination.

Imagine – five years from now. With the internet collapsing under the bandwidth-distorting weight of iPlayer streams and mobile videoblogs, you watch the sun rise from the dovecot, anxiously fiddling with your (slightly battered) GPS-enabled iPhone as you await the feathernet delivery of a USB primed with the entirity of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks collection. For many, the most important question – was the USB in ordered directly from the publishers, or a copy from a mate?

[Image by kookalamanza]