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Although supervillains tend to cause their mayhem in the private sector, a handful of superpowered schemers find more success pulling strings inside the government. How might supervillains change the American political landscape? For one thing, we'd have more lightsabers. More »
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Though optimistic pundits have declared Twitter largely responsible for social uprisings like Arab Spring, the microblogging network is hardly going to usher in a more liberated future. It's a business, after all, and it bends to the law like every other business does. Over at Foreign Policy's Passport, Uri Friedman counts the ways that Twitter looks more like a tool of the present than a harbinger of better tomorrows. More »
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If you want to win over your political adversaries, first make sure you look like a giant baby. According to a slightly bizarre new psychological study, we're way more open to opposing ideas if they come from a baby-faced person. More »
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Evidence continues to mount that your political leanings are determined, to some extent, by aspects of your biology. The latest installment in this emerging area of research comes from the University of Nebraska, in a study that looks at peoples' responses to certain forms of visual stimuli — politically themed or otherwise. More »
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Tomorrow's the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, and you'll probably be hearing a lot of talk about families and family values. But science fiction and fantasy readers know that families come in all shapes and configurations. More »
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Next week, the Senate could be meeting to vote on the Protect IP Act (PIPA), the bill that many people are warning could damage the Internet. It's a horrible prospect — but this isn't the first time that Congress has tried to sacrifice a technology at the behest of corporate lobbyists. More »
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Usually, when a political figure is photographed in disreputable company, he tries to cover it up. But when pictures surfaced of Russian blogger and protestor Aleksei Navalny meeting with Voldemort, the Terminator, a "gray" alien, and even that notorious lout Bender, he displayed them proudly on his blog. More »
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For the last several decades, boot-headed performance artist Vermin Supreme has been running for political office on the platforms of zombie awareness and mandatory dentifrice for all Americans. More »
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You're watching a brief but compelling excerpt from an interview with SF-giant Isaac Asimov. Originally aired in 1988, the conversation touches on such topics as the future of creativity in education, the necessity for scientific inquiry, and the vilification of intellectualism. It is absolutely incredible how many of the interview's topics, and Asimov's points, are as relevant today as they were 24 years ago. More »
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It is the year 2251. All is well on Earth – food is plentiful, climate ills are cured, and war is nonexistent. Humanity left its home decades ago, with the United Nations of Earth currently on the 20th round of colonization. How would you go about convincing a new round of colonists to brave the hazards of space? More »
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As if the synchronized weeping and lachrymose snowstorms weren't enough, North Korean state news is now reporting that divinely anointed flocks of magpies have been flocking to a monument of Kim Jong-Il's father, Kim Il-sung. On December 18, a few dozen magpies landed near a memorial statue in Unsan county and just would not leave. More »
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Ben Masterton-Smith, recipient of the inaugural RIBA Norman Foster Traveling Scholarship in 2007, visited North Korea for a period of architectural and spatial research. More »
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Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour uses science fictional imagery to discuss her people's stateless condition, so her work was always bound to cause some controversy. She's done a host of short films playing with science fiction movie themes, and commenting on Middle Eastern politics. More »
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You might think that democracies work best when people care and know about the key issues. But a new study argues that for a democracy to function at all, you need lots of ignorant people blindly siding with the majority. More »
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The UN's latest Climate Change Conference recently concluded after two weeks of intense negotiations in Durban, South Africa. There's going to be a new agreement to address climate change, but does that really mean anything? Let's break down what happened. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5868551&view=rss&microfeed=true Christianity teaches that the saved will live together, and many Christians believe in the Rapture, when the chosen few will be lifted up, leaving just their clothes behind. So how should Christians feel about ideas like Transhumanism and the Singularity, which involve another way to transcend your physical form and possibly live forever? These are questions with no easy answers — which is why it's so fascinating to listen to the IEET's podcast on the topic with theologian Brent Waters, author of This Mortal Flesh: Incarnation and Bioethics and From Human to Posthuman: Christian Theology and Technology in a Postmodern World. Warning: Deep philosophical topics ahead. More »
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Why has fantasy gotten so gritty and violent? Why are we so obsessed with Game of Thrones and book sagas about severed limbs and dirty deals, instead of epic quests involving elves and singing swords and Ultimate Evil? Writer David Chandler shares a fascinating theory over at SFSignal. More »
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U.S. Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich calls himself a futurist, and never tires of prognosticating. Beloved of Future Shock author Alvin Toffler, who coined the term "futurist," Gingrich co-authored a "conservative futurist" book in 2006 called The Art of Transformation (available in paperback for $70.00 on Amazon). He's also a fan of alternate history, and has written a number of bestselling alt.history novels. (We reviewed his novel 1945 here.) More »
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After failing to secure a plot of land for his reptilian pets, a snake charmer named Hakkul released a bunch of his wriggling companions — including several venomous cobras — inside a tax office in India's Uttar Pradesh state. According to the serpent tamer, he had been promised a plot to keep the reptiles, but the officials' ongoing demands for bribes forced him to play his hand. More »
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If you've been wondering just what's wrong with unemployed people, and why they won't just go get a job, then Ursula K. Le Guin has some answers for you. In the time-honored tradition of fantasists and fabulists, she's phrased her answers in the form of a fable. More »
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The congressional supercommittee responsible for trimming 1.5 trillion dollars from the US federal budget has failed to deliver, triggering a decade-long, 1.2-trillion-dollar budget-slash set to begin in 2013. More »
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You can't really be a fully fledged sexist prat without also being kind of a bad scientist. The science supporting the idea that women are less rational than men is looking flimsier all the time. So it's probably not a surprise that the outrageously sexist science fiction story that blew up the Internet, "Womanspace", is bad science as well as bad gender politics. More »
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Some economists are referring to our current economic malaise as the "Lesser Depression" — but it could be getting worse soon. Europe is unraveling, China's October output fell off a cliff and the U.S. Supercommittee is about to push a round of austerity. More »
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Every year the U.N. releases its Human Development Index, a widely-respected ranking of nations based on levels of health care, education, economic growth, and other factors. But now, says one analyst, the long-respected ranking system has to be overhauled. Its definition of "development" is outdated because it doesn't take into account whether any of that development is sustainable from an environmental perspective. So which nations would rise to the top of the HDI if sustainability were taken into account? Chuluun Togtokh, a Mongolian environmental scientist and development policymaker, decided to find out. More »
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Congress is expected to approve three spending bills by week's end that would grant the National Science Foundation a 2.5% bump in it's 2012 budget. More »
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Frank Miller's had an interesting career trajectory. First, he was the guy who pumped out oodles of unimpeachably classic comics. Then he was Hollywood's new golden boy with the success of Sin City and 300. His star began to fade with the missteps that were All-Star Batman and Robin and The Spirit. And now — with the release of the absolutely head-scratching Holy Terror and the blog post below — he's sold his wardrobe and donned the tin-foil pajamas and tissue-box loafers sold exclusively at Wild-Eyed Rufus' Paranoid Menswear Emporium. More »
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By now you've almost definitely heard about Rick Perry's painfully awkward, potentially campaign-ending gaffe during Wednesday night's Republican debate. (You haven't? Here, have a few helpings of sympathetic embarrassment.) More »
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A while back, we were asking Batman writers how the Caped Crusader would respond to Occupy Wall Street, and we tried to reach Frank Miller, writer of Batman: Year One, The Dark Knight Returns and All-Star Batman and Robin. More »
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Yesterday, San Fransisco residents had a number of choices to make in their mayoral election. Using the new Ranked Choice Voting system, voters were called on to select their top three candidates from a field of sixteen instead of casting a vote for a single candidate. What exactly is Ranked Choice Voting, how does it work, and is it a better way conduct elections? More »
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Yesterday afternoon, voters in Mississippi took to the polls to vote on Initiative 26 — aka "the Personhood amendment." The ballot measure proposed to amend the state's constitution to redefine "person" to mean "every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the equivalent thereof." If approved, the amendment would have given fertilized eggs the same legal rights and privileges of infants and adult humans, making abortion illegal in the state of Mississippi. More »
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The White House has responded to two petitions asking the US government to formally acknowledge that aliens have visited Earth and to disclose to any intentional withholding of government interactions with extraterrestrial beings. More »
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We hear a lot about slowing climate change by recycling, cutting fossil fuel use, and just generally limiting our carbon footprints. But scientists and engineers believe there could be solutions that go beyond that. These are so-called geoengineering solutions, which include everything from squirting particles into the stratosphere to cool the planet, to creating massive carbon sinks that would pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Until recently, such solutions were regarded as wildly speculative. But now they are gaining traction — especially among politicians and policy-makers who previously rejected environmental conservation plans. More »
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We already live in a world where corporations are regarded as legal persons — but what happens if corporate personhood becomes more valid than that of organic beings? That's the provocative premise of a new story by Vonda N. McIntyre, called simply "Supreme Court of the United States Defines Personhood." More »
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Earlier today, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg postponed his plan to evict the Occupy Wall Street protestors from Zuccotti Park. But what would Batman do in this situation? If protestors were occupying a major park in Gotham City, potentially disrupting business, including WayneCorp operations? How would the Caped Crusader respond? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5849977&view=rss&microfeed=true Remember how the internet was going to create a whole new class of creators, who were going to be supercharging our economy by noodling on their laptops? Those people are hurting, thanks to a one-two punch of economic meltdown and the phasing out of old jobs like "video-store clerk" and "newspaper writer." Turns out the Information Age isn't so hot for middle-class culture industry types after all. Former io9 reporter Scott Timberg has a great rundown of the lost potential of the "Creative Class" over at Salon.com. More »
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Apparently Boehner isn't alone. Turns out millions of other white, conservative men are skeptical of climate change science; and those who self-identify as having a firm understanding of global warming are even more prone towards climate change denial. More »
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Over at the World Policy Institute, celebrated SF author Neal Stephenson has a great essay that's basically a call-to-arms to fiction writers to start collaborating with scientists. They can do this partly by writing more hopeful stories about the future — but more importantly, by writing stories about massive engineering projects, like Mars bases, that could conceivably be implemented. More »
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Singapore has embarked upon the excavation of an underground oil reserve, expanding the city's industrial port beneath the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It is "no ordinary construction site," the BBC tells us, but an elaborate project of engineering and infrastructure currently underway "several hundred feet underground, below the seabed in Singapore." More »
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It turns out that something as simple as the clothes you wear can have a profound effect on how people see you, right down to what ethnicity you are. A newly published study chronicled an experiment where social scientists showed subjects pictures of faces that varied between different tones and ethnicities, either paired with a business suit or a janitor's outfit. Faces in the white collar outfit were more likely to be seen as white, and those in the blue collar outfit were more often described as black. More »
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