I love my rock music, and I love robots, and I’ve been heard to remark once or twice that the two spheres of interest simply don’t converge often enough. I need never do so again, however, for thanks to Wired I have now discovered Captured! By Robots – a band that consists of one human guy in a gimp mask and a stage-full of freaky foul-mouthed automatons. Be warned – the video clips beyond the link feature synthesized swear-words and the sort of music that doesn’t make it onto daytime radio. Amen to that.
Category Archives: Blog
Electrical fields trounce brain tumors
If you have a friend or co-worker with a paranoid streak (or who simply consumes too much tabloid media), they may have informed you that electrical fields can cause cancers to form in your brain. Well, now you can tell them that the opposite is the case – an Israeli company has developed a device for killing brain tumors using weak electrical fields. Of course, your friend will just tell you how that’s what the Illuminati want you to think, but that’s half the fun. [BeyondTheBeyond]
Pig clones cloned, cloned and cloned again
Aaah, aren’t these little piglets cute? They’re also fourth-generation piglet clones, apparently free of any abnormalities resulting from their engineered origin. Scientists have pinned great hopes on the cloning of animals as a potential solution to the world-wide shortage of transplantable organs; pigs, with their great similarity to human physiology, may well play a large part in such plans.
The tipping point for climate change denial?
While there are still some loud shrill voices denying the reality of climate change, Jamais Cascio thinks we may have finally reached the tipping point where such denialism is irredeemably exposed as obfuscation by those with vested interests – I sincerely hope he’s right.
That said, even advocates for environmental issues should be prepared to question the accepted dogmas; for example, a detailed study seems to indicate that the “eat local” philosophy may be misguided by the best of intentions, and that the long distance transportation of foodstuffs may actually have a smaller footprint than locally grown equivalents when other factors are introduced into the equation. [Brian Dunbar]
Russian space tourist lineup
According to Personal SpaceFlight blog, several Russian space tourist candidates are getting their applications vetted by Roskosmos, and that Space Adventures (the group that handles these private space travelers) has two seats set aside on Soyuz flights in fall ’08 and spring of ’09. The names for who’s flying should be coming soon.
I always find it ironic that it’s the Russian space program that’s taking willing, paying passengers, while the US is not. Who would have believed that 20 years ago?