How far would you go to improve your ability to interface with computers more efficiently? I know a lot of people who say they’re willing to wire their heads, but I’d not even be willing to shave some length off my thumbs to us my iPhone better, as this guy has. [engadget]
Sing to search
Ah, dammit … there’s a song on my hard-drive that I really want to listen to, but I can’t remember what it’s called or who it’s by. It’d be so much easier if I could just sing a few bars and have a program search the tune out for me.
Friday Free Fiction for 10th August
A slow week for free fiction, it appears … though I’m sure there was more that I didn’t hear about. Keep us posted, folks.
Strange Horizons has a new Tim Pratt story, “Artifice and Intelligence”.
Baen Books are making some of the stories from their delayed Libertarian anthology, Visions of Liberty, available for free; featured authors include the ubiquitous Robert Sawyer (“The Right’s Tough“), and Futurismic’s own Tobias Buckell in collaboration with Mike Resnick (“The Shackles of Freedom“).
Writers, editors and anyone else – if you want something you’ve written or published on the web for free mentioned here, drop me (Paul Raven) an email to the address listed for me on the Staff page, and I’ll include it in next week’s round-up.
Testing panspermia
Panspermia is the theory that life on Earth may have arrived in a nascent form from outer space, carried through the void as bacteria in comets or asteroids. It’s controversial, certainly, but persistent too (as well as being a classic science fiction trope). A Scottish scientist has decided to test the theory for plausibility by sending a chunk of rock into orbit and back on an ESA spacecraft, to determine whether microbes can survive not just the cold and vacuum of space, but also the violent physics of atmospheric reentry.
Update! This just in: Centauri Dreams pours water, or rather radiation, on the plausibility of panspermia.
The facts of the (anti)matter
Antimatter has powered countless science fictional starships, but has yet to be used as a propulsion method in reality. Reasons are manifold: firstly, it’s very difficult and expensive to make even the tiniest amount of it; and second, we’re still not entirely sure what it is or how it works. Centauri Dreams reports on the state of antimatter research, and hopes that someday we’ll be able to use it to move between the stars.
That said, successful Space Shuttle launches aside, we’re still short of a simple and affordable route to orbit, let alone our nearest stellar neighbours. JP Aerospace reckons it has an answer to getting us at least half-way there – namely making lighter-than-air flyers to ascend to a sub-orbital space station, from which super-light orbiters could be launched. It’s a low-budget lo-fi approach, but if it works, why not?
Still hungry for space-related stuff? Carnival of Space #14 is live at Universe Today.