Tony Stark has been to a lot of cool places in that Iron Man get-up of his. But low Earth orbit might still be a bit beyond our operational flight envelope. Not so for the developers of the revolutionary RL Mark VI Space Diving suit.

A hi-tech ensemble consisting of augmented reality goggles, power gloves, control moment gyros, and a low-cost commercial space suit, the RL Mark VI will allow future thrill seekers and space tourists an experience that up until now could only be imagined in the boldest science fiction.

A joint collaboration between Solar System Express and Juxtopia LLC., two minority-owned hi-tech startups both based in Baltimore, Maryland, the RL MARK VI Space Diving configuration will allow the well-equipped space tourist of the near future the opportunity to actually return to Earth without their spaceship.

Space diving is the next big step beyond sky diving, and it is envisioned as a concept that would allow spaceflight participants a means of escape from a possibly disastrous on-orbit emergency, or perhaps just a new recreational activity for those no longer satisfied with merely jumping out of aircraft. The RL MARK VI would allow high-altitude jumps from near-space, suborbital space, and eventually low Earth orbit itself.

The first few flight tests of the MARK VI hardware will follow a profile very reminiscent to that of the recent record-breaking Red Bull Stratos dive of Felix Baumgartner, where the daring aerialist completed his plunge through the stratosphere with a soft parachute touchdown back on terra firma. But the ultimate goal of this futuristic project is far more radical than that. Eventually, through the use of modern “wing suit” skydiving technology and assisted by miniature aerospike engines attached to specially designed footwear, the space diver will end his spectacular glide through the heavens with a propulsive, power-assisted landing on two feet.

No parachute. At all. Just like Tony Stark does it in the movies.

In addition to Hollywood, the RL Mark VI also draws upon history for its inspiration. Major Robert Lawrence, United States Air Force, was America’s first African-American astronaut. Major Lawrence was killed on December 8, 1967 in a test flight at Edwards Air Force Base in California before his dream of flying in space ever came to pass. In his honor the principal design team at Solar System Express chose to use his initials for the product code name of this revolutionary new concept.

On October 2, 2012, the birthday of Robert Lawrence, Blaze Sanders, Chief Technology Officer of Solar System Express, ratified a licensing agreement with Dr. Jayfus Doswell, president and CEO of Juxtopia, for the use of Juxtopia’s Augmented Reality (AR) head mounted display technology.

Similar in functionality to Google Glass, Juxtopia’s AR Goggles are primarily intended to provide the space diver with a continuous stream of vital information that will keep him on course and within safe life-support parameters throughout the duration of his jump. These visually displayed real-time dynamic analytics will tell the jumper his heart rate, respiration, internal space suit temperature, and his external temperature as well. They will provide data on GPS location, elevation, and rates of acceleration and deceleration. An FAA radar display of the local airspace will always indicate his current relative position.

Example of the graphical symbology that will be displayed by the Juxtopia AR Goggles during a typical RL MARK IV space dive. Credit: Blaze Sanders, solarsystemexpress.com.

Unlike Google Glass there will be no video mode for these goggles. Instead they will work on the principal of “Optical See-Through,” much like the Heads Up Display on a modern fighter jet, that overlays numerical information and other visual symbology over the pilot’s view of the outside world. In the words of Dr. Doswell, “Video mode works fine for Hollywood, but in real life if you lose video during the jump then you’re flying blind and unlike in the movies there is no quick reboot option.”

The goggles will respond to voice commands specifically addressed to the name that the diver has designated for the RL MARK VI‘s system computer. Special software algorithms will filter the diver’s voice and eliminate all “false positives” such as wind, air, engine sounds and any other noise that is not human speech. The final result of this filtered audio signal is referred to as “pure speech.” Such audio commands will be used to turn the RL MARK VI’s systems on and off, to eject various hardware components from the diver’s body at different altitudes, to control suit cams and various lighting options, and to control voice communications to a ground control station.

In addition to voice commands, according to Dr. Doswell, “other human-computer interface modalities are being investigated for control of the MARK VI during its high speed decent as well.” Interfaces such as the electrical activity in your muscles harnessed by gesture control systems from MYO, and a distance only radio frequency sensor developed by Dr. Kuhlman at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

Modern fighter aircraft also employ specific audio outputs in cases of emergency or imminent danger. The MARK VI will be no different. Juxtopia is developing a culturally-specific system of programmable user preferences that will allow the diver to select his own audio alarms for any possible in-flight emergency and any other critical decision points such as altitude level or diminishing fuel state. This approach will help to enhance the international marketability of the MARK VI as well as ensure safety throughout the space dive for potential users from a variety of different cultures.

This video provides a taste of what space diving will be like:

Falling through the vacuum of space will be quite different than a dive that begins in the relative thickness of Earth’s lower atmosphere. There will be no aerodynamic forces acting upon the diver’s body that will allow him to stabilize his jump. This problem will be solved by a pair of gyroscopic boots and the fingertip controls built into the gloves of the diver’s spacesuit. Commands so issued to the control momentum gyroscopes built into his footwear will establish proper attitude and help to steady his fall through the airless void.

As a safety precaution a flat spin compensator will automatically actuate after more than five seconds if the diver is unable to maintain adequate manual control. As the diver descends through the upper atmosphere, eventually the air will thicken to the point where aerodynamic forces will allow him to control the attitude of his body. Olav Zipser, word-renowned skydiver and lead jumper on the FreeFly Astronaut Project, has praised the new suit.

“Your product would be a great way to stabilize my decent during the first 30 seconds of free fall, when there is virtually zero atmosphere,” he said.

CAD representation of the RL MARK VI’s gyroscopic boot prototype. Credit: Blaze Sanders, solarsystemexpress.com.

The final function of the diver’s gyroscopic boots will kick in as he nears the surface of the Earth, and he fires off his miniature aerospike thrusters to smoothly lower himself to the ground for a two-point upright landing.

Two different landing scenarios are presently under consideration: “a feet-down” landing where the aerospikes fire into action from an altitude of hundred feet, gently lowering the diver down to earth; and the much more daring and challenging “wing suit flare up” where the diver swoops within ten feet of pay dirt before pulling up sharply and then lighting off his thrusters to initiate his controlled descent to the ground.

Solar System Express intends to first test this propulsive landing capability somewhere around 2016, with a production model of the RL MARK VI coming to market about a year later. Until then any live tests of the system will conclude with traditional parachute jumps. Data collected during these jumps, along with rigorous control system testing and computer simulated recreations of each space dive, will enable Blaze Sanders and his team to refine the parameters and the protocols required for a text book propulsive landing.

CAD representation of the RL MARK VI’s high-intensity LED chest piece prototype. Credit: Blaze Sanders, solarsystemexpress.com.

Mounted on the front of the jumper’s space suit will be a “high intensity LED chest piece” powered by energy-storing super capacitors and equipped with miniature stereo cameras which will collect much of the data necessary for recreating the jump in a 3D computer simulation. When finally transferred to video all of this collected 3D data should easily yield the kind of YouTube upload that one can point to with pride for years to come.

The Gravity Development Board, a proprietary piece of hardware designed by Solar System Express, will serve as the main interface between the MARK VI’s three major components as well as the device which controls all critical systems.

According to Mr. Sanders, “The GDB will be the first space-rated open hardware electronic prototyping board, enabling any type of person to create space qualified hardware. The GDB will replace the Arduino Uno® as the preferred high-level prototyping environment, by being up to forty times faster, seventy percent smaller, having integrated high power drivers (capable of handling one hundred times the current), with more flexible Input/Output configurations, and yet be still much easier to program via 12 Blocks™, the powerful, intuitive visual language used for robotic programming. Engineers, artists, and designers are thus enabled to create any project they can imagine. Our quick release breakout board, the ‘Ejection Seat™,’ allows for easy prototyping, yet keeps the GDB form factor small and robust enough to use in New Space start-up product releases.”

Final Frontier Design, of Brooklyn, New York, is working with Solar System Express on a customized version of their low-cost Intra-Vehicular Activity IVA 3G spacesuit, first introduced to the public last year and successfully crowd funded through an online kickstarter campaign. The entire RL MARK VI ensemble, along with the 3G spacesuit and a protective thermal outer covering, will be put through a rigorous testing regime beginning in June of 2014. Ground based testing will commence with a series of thermal and vacuum chamber tests, and vertical wind tunnel tests to be conducted at the Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The protective thermal covering will be fashioned from lightweight layers of aerogel and NASA Space Shuttle-like flexible insulation blankets formed into a garment that will serve as the spacesuit’s outermost layer. This is the material that will protect the space diver from the heat of reentry as he plunges through the earth’s upper atmosphere. Solar System Express has already started conversations with several wing suit manufacturers interested in employing this revolutionary thermal technology into their product line.

The first tests at altitude should begin around July of 2016. They will commence with two-kilometer parachute jumps from a helium balloon-tethered tower that will comprise the major test platform of The LiftPort Group’s Lunar Space Elevator Project. Eventually near-space jumps from as high as 40 kilometers will be conducted by Olav Zipser and his FreeFly Astronaut Project using a specially modified rocket designed and manufactured by InterOrbital Systems of Mojave, California.

No firm dates have been set for suborbital and orbital testing but initial plans call for the use of a human medical robot prototype supplied by Juxtopia to be used as the test subject for these first jumps before real live space divers eventually become involved.

Blaze Sanders estimates the total development costs to bring the RL MARK VI to market at around $2.2 million. He has already invested about $100,000 of his own time and money into the project. In the next three years he expects to generate another $1.1 million dollars in revenue through sales of his company’s Gravity Development Board. He expects to generate additional revenue from a wide variety of sources including ongoing consulting fees, government grants and loans, angel investment, kickstarter campaigns, and technical consulting fees from motion picture productions already interested in the use of his technology, as well as a video game simulation also based on his revolutionary hardware.

Should he ultimately succeed then, who knows, one day he may end up just as rich and successful as Tony Stark himself. He’s already got the suit. And he’s prepared to take it to dazzling new heights.

For more information please visit www.solarsystemexpress.com and www.juxtopia.com. Read their joint press release at http://www.solarsystemexpress.com/press-releases....

This article originally appeared at Universe Today.

Those who feel that Alice Eve's underwear scene in Star Trek Into Darkness was gratuitous, this might make you feel better — director J.J. Abrams debuted a deleted, but equally gratuitous scene from the film of Benedict Cumberbatch showering on Conan last night.

Of course, this was deleted and Eve's disrobing stayed in, so your mileage may vary. On the other hand, it is BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH NAKED NUDE WET SHERLOCK SHOWER SCENE, so score a point for the ol' SEO.

Top image from Man of Steel.

Man of Steel

Zack Snyder discusses the movie's approach to Superman, starting with its traditional take on the Superman costume (give or take the darker blue tones and the absence of red briefs, but I feel like that's forgivable):

When they try to dress him up, put him in jeans and a T-shirt or a leather jacket with an S on it, I go: ‘What? Guys, it’s O.K. It’s Superman. He’s the king daddy. You should all be bowing down to him.' [Man of Steel will] respect the S... He’s a really cool mythological contradiction. He’s incredibly familiar Americana and alien, exotic, bizarroland, but beautifully woven together. All of us, in a weird way, are that same kind of contradiction — no one’s that simple. If you follow him back logically and try to understand him you end up at a scifi solution."

And producer Christopher Nolan acknowledges the irony that Snyder is making a movie about the original superhero after making a movie adaptation of the ultimate superhero deconstruction in Watchmen:

It’s ironic but it’s a very productive irony. You’re dealing with a filmmaker who has deconstructed this mythology and now has to reconstruct it. That’s a fascinating challenge for him... [Zack has an] innate aptitude for dealing with superheroes as real characters. That was what a new approach to Superman required. He understands the power of iconic images, but he also understands the people behind them."

There's a bit more at the link. [Comic Book Movie]

The Avengers 2

There's been a bunch of rumors going around over the past week that Black Panther will appear in the Avengers sequel, potentially as a new team member alongside the already confirmed Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. Various reports from the Cleveland set of Captain America: The Winter Soldier suggest that this is basically just common knowledge among the film's crew, which seems kind of unlikely but isn't totally impossible. There was also a recent radio interview with the Chairman of Cape Town Film Studios in which said chairman indicated that Marvel Studios wanted to film at least portions of The Avengers 2 in the South African city.

This has in turn been used as evidence that the next film will feature Black Panther and Wakanda, although it should be pointed out that, even if all this is true, Cape Town may not be portraying any part of Africa — after all, Chronicle was shot entirely in and around Cape Town for budgetary reasons, and that was set in Seattle. Oh, and there was also a random report a week or so ago that Black Panther was on some briefly glimpsed production grid of Marvel Studios's upcoming projects, with a supposed release date of 2015. Make of all this what you will, although I'd probably say that if you hear three insubstantial, implausible rumors all about the same thing, that still doesn't add up to a single believable rumor. So yeah, grains of salt all around. [Comic Book Movie]

Then there are wild, hard-to-believe rumors that exist only to contradict even wilder, even harder-to-believe rumors. Case in point: there have been some rumblings recently that Jeremy Renner would not be returning as Hawkeye and that the role would be recast, supposedly due to his mildly critical (and more or less accurate) comments about his role in The Avengers. Now there's a counter rumor — from Perez Hilton, of all people — that quotes an inside source as saying these rumors are entirely false and that Renner is still "very much a part of the Marvel family.” None of this involves a single on-the-record source, and while Marvel is certainly not above the occasional recasting (accompanied by, in Edward Norton's case, some less than classy public comments about their former employee), it's probably best to just assume that Renner will be back in the Avengers sequels until we hear something concrete to contradict that.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Toby Jones offers this vague hint about his returning character, Dr. Armin Zola:

"All I can say about it is that I was pleased to be brought back. I thought I might be—because you'd know better than I do—but Zola finds a way to defeat time and you won't be disappointed with the way that's been treated in the film, that's what I would say."

[Coming Soon]

Pacific Rim

Here's a behind-the-scenes featurette, entitled "Drift Space."

Mockingjay Parts 1 and 2

Summit Entertainment has released this brief synopsis for the final two films in the Hunger Games franchise, which are set to be directed by Catching Fire's Francis Lawrence and written by erstwhile Buffy the Vampire Slayer actor Danny Strong:

In MOCKINGJAY PARTS 1 & 2, we follow heroine Katniss Everdeen’s journey as she leads the districts of Panem in a rebellion against the tyrannical and corrupt Capitol. Ars s the war that will determine the fate of Panem escalates, Katniss must decipher for herself who she can trust and what needs to be done, with everything she cares for in the balance.

[Collider]

Transformers 4

Glenn Morshower recently revealed at the Texas Frightmare Weekend that he would not be returning to Transformers 4, despite the fact that Paramount included him in a recent official press release on the movie's cast. Morshower's announcement, in which he cited scheduling conflicts as the reason for his absence, actually seems to predate Paramount's most recent update, so it's possible it's since been resolved. We will of course bring you all the latest, up-to-the-minute updates on this most important of questions, unless we totally forget to do so like the time we promised we'd do the same with Josh Duhamel's casting. [TFLAMB]

Doctor Who

The wonderful Bernard Cribbins says he actually contacted the production team about a possible return in the 50th anniversary special, but he says it's not to be:

"No, I'm not. I rang Cardiff [where the Doctor Who production unit is based] a little while ago and said, 'Am I going to be involved?' and they said, 'Well no. We're shooting at the moment and maybe something later on but at the moment, no.' I would love to get back into it. It would be nice."

The most interesting part of that is "maybe something later on," which is probably just the production team being polite — or Cribbins softening their response — but it could conceivably be a hint that brief cameos from Doctor Who luminaries are still on the cards. Admittedly, that's a rather, shall we say optimistic interpretation, and Cribbins himself recognizes the inherent logistical challenges:

"I think it's impossible. They can't even think of including everybody who's taken part in Doctor Who from the beginning up until now. There'd be hundreds and hundreds, they'd all get twelve and a half seconds each [laughs]."

[Den of Geek]

Here's an interview with Chris Chibnall, who most recently wrote "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" and "The Power of Three," in which he discusses the possibility of returning for season eight. [Blogtor Who]

The Walking Dead

AMC CEO Josh Sapan says the show will run and run until it's no longer profitable, and possibly even a bit beyond that:

“We hope that zombies live forever and we’ve just begun to find out what the post-apocalyptic world is like, so that we’ll be sitting here at the Barclays conference in 2022 discussing the fact that Walking Dead is not over."

[Coming Soon]

Once Upon a Time

Co-creator Adam Horowitz says the show will still explore Storybrooke in the third season, even though the season two ended with almost every main character leaving town:

“Some people got on a ship, some stayed behind. And what happened to those who stayed behind is just as important as what’s happening to those on the ship. What’s going to happen to [Belle]? Who’s left with her? Who might she meet in Storybrooke?” Horowitz poses. “Those are all things that we intend to explore.”

[TV Line]

Arrow

Star Stephen Amell says there's still a long way to go before Oliver can claim the name Green Arrow:

There’s a reason why we don’t call [Oliver] Arrow, Green Arrow yet — because he’s not that person. He was a vengeful, stubborn myopic individual this year, and he has to grow, because his way didn’t work. He had moments of success but ultimately failed, so he’s got to become a better version of himself.”

He also suggests that Tommy's death will represent a serious challenge to Oliver and Laurel's recently rekindled romance, which, yeah, it really ought to:

“I would think that a gigantic caution flag has been thrown up, for him having any type of meaningful relationship with anybody. If Sara was a big wedge between [Laurel] and Oliver, I can only imagine what would happen because of Tommy.”

[TV Line]

On the assumption that there's really no logical way that this could refer to the Justice League, I invite you to figure out what Roy Harper actor Colton Haynes means by the following statement:

"A few of the most important DC characters are going to be coming to 'Arrow.' And quite possibly working in a team together."

[MTV Splash Page]

The Vampire Diaries

Showrunner Julie Plec says it still hasn't been completely decided how Claire Holt's Rebekah will divide her time between The Vampire Diaries and The Originals:

"We do have the ability to use Rebekah on either show in the beginning. We will see when we start writing how much of her we’ll see before she heads off to New Orleans. When we get back, we might see [Matt and Rebekah] still on their trip. When Matt gets back to Mystic Falls, his whole world will have changed. I can’t wait to see what comes out of that adventure and how he re-adapts to life at Mystic Grill."

She also says nobody in Mystic Falls will know that Bonnie sacrificed her life to bring Jeremy back to life:

"Nobody knows the truth. There’s going to be some explaining to do and it’s not necessarily going to make his return to his old life very easy."

[TV Line]

American Horror Story: Coven

Scream 4 actress Emma Roberts has reportedly joined the cast for American Horror Story's witch-centric third season, in which she will play "a self-involved party girl by the name of Madison." Her costars include returning players Jessica Lange, Sarah Paulson, Lily Rabe, Frances Conroy, and Taissa Farmiga plus new additions Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett, Patti LuPone, and Gabourey Sidibe. Just about the only male currently cast is actually Roberts' real-life boyfriend, returning cast member Evan Peters. [TV Line]

Warehouse 13

Here's a sneak peek at the next episode, "Instinct," which airs June 3.

Additional reporting by Katharine Trendacosta and Charlie Jane Anders.

Harvard engineers have a devised a technique for designing and producing intricate microscopic models, called "hierarchical microarchitectures," and the tiny sculptures it produces are nothing short of incredible.

Top image via Wim Noorduin/Harvard University

Via NPR:

The flowers sprout up spontaneously when a glass plate is dipped into a beaker filled with silicon and minerals (specifically, barium chloride). Then Wim Noorduin at Harvard coaxes the salts to spiral and swirl into smooth, curvaceous shapes, like vases, leaves and petals.

He sculpts the stems and blossoms by slightly tweaking the environment in which the crystals grow. Lowering the temperature makes the petals thicker. Bursts of carbon dioxide send ripples through the leaves and blossoms.

The result, writes Noorduin in the latest issue of Science, is "a bouquet of hierarchically assembled multiscale microstructures with unprecedented levels of complexity and precision." For a sense of scale, here are some of Noorduin's microflower sculptures lining the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, imprinted on the back of a penny:

But flowers are just the beginning. The ability to design and guide the fabrication of nanoscale structures in a manner similar to 3D-printing has enormous ramifications for fields ranging from optics to electronics.

For more info, and more pictures, visit NPR.

"What's "Captain America's shield made out of?" "Name me some of the stones in the Infinity Gauntlet!" "Where does the Dark Surfer trap Thanos and Captain Marvel?" BOOM! YOU JUST GOT SCHOOLED BY A LITTLE GIRL.

This is Mia Grace (according to the YouTube page this video originated from). Mia Grace is awesome. Try not to fall over when she shouts, "It's clobberin' time!"

[Via The Mary Sue]

Historians credit James Cook with discovering Australia back in 1770. But a long ignored discovery of five African copper coins in its Northern Territory, along with a map with an "X" on it, suggests somebody beat him to it — and by a long shot.

If validated, the coins could mean seafarers from distant lands reached Australia much earlier than previous thought.

The coins were initially found in 1944, and then sent to a museum in 1979 where they were identified. The Australian soldier who found them, Maurie Isenberg, marked an old map with an "X" were he stumbled upon them. Now, Ian McIntosh, an Australian scientist and professor of anthropology at Indiana University in the US, is planing an expedition in July to revisit the location.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Professor McIntosh and his team of Australian and American historians, archaeologists, geomorphologists and Aboriginal rangers say the five coins date back to the 900s to 1300s.

They are African coins from the former Kilwa sultanate, now a World Heritage ruin on an island off Tanzania. Kilwa once was a flourishing trade port with links to India in the 13th century to 16th century.

The copper coins were the first coins produced in Sub-Saharan Africa and, according to Professor McIntosh, have only twice been found outside Africa: once in Oman and Mr Isenberg's find.

Archaeologists have long suspected that there may have been early maritime trading routes that linked East Africa, Arabia, India and the Spice Islands, even 1000 years ago. Or the coins could have washed ashore after a shipwreck.

More.

Image: AAP.

This dazzling new scifi-themed music video by electro house musician Steve Aoki looks like it could be made into an actual movie. It features Angger Dimas, My Name Is Kay — and none other than Ray Kurzweil who adds his two cents about the future.

You might want to crank the volume — this song is sick.

Brush your teeth before downing a glass of orange juice, and you're gonna have a bad time. But why?

There are four main ingredients in most any toothpaste. Water, abrasives, fluoride and detergent. The detergent sodium laurel sulfate (SLS) is known for nerfing sweetness receptors, and clears your mouth of phosphilipids which usually prevent orange juice's bitter molecules from reaching your tongue's bitterness receptors. More more details, check out the ByteSizeScience video above, created by the American Chemical Society.

Martin Scorsese's Hugo helped introduce many people to the wonder of automatons — i.e., mechanical people and other figures. But there's a lot more to automatons than Scorsese's film revealed, including some things you won't believe people managed to make move long, long before robots.

Automatons were the predecessors of the early 20th century electronic robots, and here are some of the most wonderful ones.

Tipu's (or Tippoo's) Tiger

The strange, life-sized mechanical toy was created for Tipu Sultan, the ruler of the Indian Kingdom of Mysore in the 1790s. The soldier is a young Englishman named Munro. The mechanisms inside the tiger and the man's body make one hand of the man move, and emit a screaming sound from his mouth and little grunts from the tiger.

The automaton was discovered in the Sultan's summer palace in 1799 and sent to Britain. Now it's one of the most interesting artifacts of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Here you can see a 26-minute documentary about Tippoo's Tiger.

(Via Wikimedia Commons 1 - 2 and Victoria & Albert Museum)

The Robotic Monk

The 15-inch-tall clockwork Padre, the figure of the well-known miraculous monk San Diego de Alcalá, was made of wood and iron and manufactured by Juanelo Turriano, the mechanician of Emperor Charles V, in the 1560s. The monk can walk around, beating his chest, lifting his cross and praying silently.

According to legend, the son of the King of Spain, Don Carlos, fell down a set of stairs and was seriously injured. The Emperor himself was praying near his slowly dying son's bed and promised a miracle for a miracle.

Don Carlos began to heal and the king kept his bargain by having Turriano construct the small, penitent homunculus.

(via Blackbird Archive and Guzzle)

Digesting Duck or Canard Digérateur

The duck automaton was created by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739. It had over 400 moving parts in each wing alone, could flap its wings, drink water, eat kernels of grain and was able to poop them. The food was collected in an inner container and pre-stored feces was sent out, of course, but Voltaire was really impressed, and wrote "without Vaucanson's Duck, you have nothing to remind you of the glory of France." It's a little bit weird, but less than these robots from the late 19th and the early 20th centuries.

A mistaken representation of how the Duck worked

In the early 1840s it was repaired and could be seen at the Exposition Universelle at the Palais Royal in Paris in 1844. Later it disappeared and was spotted in the 1880s among the collection of a museum in Krakow. A fire destroyed the building and only the partially destroyed wings have survived. In 1998, a copy was displayed at the Museum of Automatons in Grenoble.

(Via Wikimedia Commons and Historianet)

The Mechanical Turk

This fake chess-playing machine was constructed by Wolfgang von Kempelen (Kempelen Farkas) in 1770 to impres the Empress Maria Theresia of Austria. The machine was able to play chess games with human opponents. It was secretly operated by talented chess masters, but it was believed to be an automaton for decades.

The original machine was destroyed in a fire at an American museum in 1854.

John Gaughan, an American manufacturer of magician equipment, built a new Turk with the original chessboard, which was stored separately and not destroyed in the fire.

(Via Wikimedia Commons and a book of Karl Gottlieb von Windisch, 1783)

The Writer

Three automatas were built by Pierre Jacquet-Droz, his son Henri-Louis and Jean-Fréderic Leschot between 1768 and 1774. The last and the most complex of them was the writer, which is able to write any text up to 40 letters. The text is coded on a wheel where characters are selected one by one. The robot boy uses a goose feather to write, which he inks from time to time. His eyes follow the text and the head moves when he uses the ink.

(Via A Blog To Watch)

The Musician

The first of the three Jaquet-Droz automatons is a female organ player who could play the custom-built instrument quite well.

(Via Wikimedia Commons/Rama and Automates and Merveilles)

The Draughtsman

The draughtsman is another Jaquet-Droz automata that could draw four different images: a portrait of Louis XV; Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI as the royal family; a dog with Mon toutou ("my doggy") written beside it; and Cupid driving a butterfly chariot. The young child also moves on his chair, and occasionally blows on the pencil to remove dust.

(Via spacezilotes and Wikimedia Commons/Rama)

Joueuse de Tympanon or The Dulcimer Player

This automaton onstructed in 1784 by Peter Kintzing and David Roentgen, the cabinetmaker of Louis XVI, for Queen Marie Antoinette at Versailles.

It is said that the hair is the Queen's hair and the dress was sewed from one of Marie Antoinette's dresses.

The tunes played by the small player were written by the Queen's music teacher, the German Christoph Willibald Gluck.

(via The Cultural Legacy Of Marie Antoinette, EskaWorld and Elisandre - L'Oeuvre au Noir)

The Mechanical Trumpeter

Constructed in 1810 by Friedrich Kaufmann in Dresden, Germany, the Trumpeter in Spanish costume had leather bellows for lungs and reeds which imitated the sound of a brass instrument.

(Via Acousmata and Cybernetic Zoo)

The Ethiopian Caterpillar

The Swiss watchmaker Henri Maillardet's creation was produced in partnership with watchmaker Jaquet Droz around 1820; only six are known to exist. It has 11 ring segments, framed by seed pearls, decorated with gold-set rubies, turquoise, emeralds and diamonds. Its underside is coated with champlevé black enamel. One caterpillar was sold three years ago at a Sotheby's auction in Geneva for $415,215.

(Via Vimeo)

Zashiki Karakuri

These small, mechanized puppets were used in Japanese homes from the 17th century to the 19th century. The most common zashiki karakuris were tea-serving automatas.

A plan of a tea-serving robot from 'Karakuri Zuii', 1796

(Via Karakuri, My Internet Corner and AnRy Artesania)

Archer Karakuri

Calligrapher Karakuri

In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. Sounds obvious today. But in 1968, a full year before ARPANET made its first connection? It was downright clairvoyant.

Sometimes a vision of the future can be so accurate that it's hard for those of us living in the future to understand what made it visionary in the first place. In the late 1960s the human side of networked computing wasn't a given. Few people looked at the hulking machines of the time and thought that they'd be great dating facilitators some day. The ARPANET was created for resource sharing between academics and other serious-minded people. In their early days, these networks weren't seen as a tool for something like ordering a pizza or sharing cat GIFs with someone halfway around the world.

Connecting People

The human element—the idea of average people interacting with computers, but more importantly with other people — was not a front-of-mind concern for the people who laid the foundation of the internet as we know it. Which is what makes a 1968 paper that predicted the extent of that human element so special.

The paper was written by J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, illustrated by Rowland B. Wilson, and appeared in the April 1968 issue of Science and Technology. The article includes some of the most amazingly accurate predictions for what networked computing would eventually allow. Granted, amazingly accurate with a retro-futuristic twist that keeps it firmly a product of its time.

Take the light-pen. The top image shows off a late-'60s light-pen and rather presciently imagines how computer-augmented romance might take off. The computer, we see, improves the man's drawing in such a way as to make his proposal less repugnant. The self-correcting stylus may not exist yet, but OkCupid and other digital matchmakers are a mainstay of our digital lives.

The article rather boldly predicts that the computerized networks of the future will be even more important for communication than the "printing press and the picture tube"—another idea not taken for granted in 1968:

Creative, interactive communication requires a plastic or moldable medium that can be modeled, a dynamic medium in which premises will flow into consequences, and above all a common medium that can be contributed to and experimented with by all.

Such a medium is at hand—the programmed digital computer. Its presence can change the nature and value of communication even more profoundly than did the printing press and the picture tube, for, as we shall show, a well-programmed computer can provide direct access both to informational resources and to the processes for making use of the resources.

The paper predicts that the person-to-person interaction that a networked computer system allows for will not only build relationships between individuals, but will build communities.

What will on-line interactive communities be like? In most fields they will consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common location, but of common interest. In each field, the overall community of interest will be large enough to support a comprehensive system of field-oriented programs and data.

Google Now, Back Then

The article even hints at the veritable Internet of Things (which ostensibly justifies the high cost of gadgetry, or "data-gathering instruments"):

In each geographical sector, the total number of users—summed over all the fields of interest—will be large enough to support extensive general purpose information processing and storage facilities. All of these will be interconnected by telecommunications channels. The whole will constitute a labile network of networks—ever-changing in both content and configuration.

What will go on inside? Eventually, every informational transaction of sufficient consequence to warrant the cost. Each secretary’s typewriter, each data-gathering instrument, conceivably each dictation microphone, will feed into the network.

The idea of technology as a buffer is certainly an appealing one. And in theory, things like email can provide us with that buffer. When it comes down to it, you only have to check your email when you want to, and no one is forcing you to respond. This kind of brush-off, of course, is a little harder to do when an insurance salesman physically knocks on your door.

Licklider and Taylor called their futuristic buffer tool OLIVER, a kind of individualized automated personal assistant used by everyone. OLIVER acts intelligently, learning what should be prioritized for its user.

A very important part of each man’s interaction with his on-line community will be mediated by his OLIVER. The acronym OLIVER honors Oliver Selfridge, originator of the concept. An OLIVER is, or will be when there is one, an “on-line interactive vicarious expediter and responder,” a complex of computer programs and data that resides within the network and acts on behalf of its principal, taking care of many minor matters that do not require his personal attention and buffering him from the demanding world. “You are describing a secretary,” you will say. But no! Secretaries will have OLIVERS.

At your command, your OLIVER will take notes (or refrain from taking notes) on what you do, what you read, what you buy and where you buy it. It will know who your friends are, your mere acquaintances. It will know your value structure, who is prestigious in your eyes, for whom you will do what with what priority, and who can have access to which of your personal files. It will know your organization’s rules pertaining to proprietary information and the government’s rules relating to security classification.

Some parts of your OLIVER program will be common with parts of other people’s OLIVERS; other parts will be custom-made for you, or by you, or will have developed idiosyncrasies through “learning” based on its experience in your service.

In an age of telegrams and phone calls, the authors imagined computer networking as a fantastic replacement for inefficiencies. Even business trips, they insisted, would be a thing of the past.

You will not send a letter or a telegram; you will simply identify the people whose files should be linked to yours and the parts to which they should be linked-and perhaps specify a coefficient of urgency. You will seldom make a telephone call; you will ask the network to link your consoles together.

You will seldom make a purely business trip, because linking consoles will be so much more efficient. When you do visit another person with the object of intellectual communication, you and he will sit at a two-place console and interact as much through it as face to face. If our extrapolation from Doug Engelbart’s meeting proves correct, you will spend much more time in computer-facilitated teleconferences and much less en route to meetings.

If OLIVER and the paper's other online efficiencies sound familiar, it's because they're basically the endgame of Google Now and Siri: Technology that knows you so well, it does your thinking—and in some cases, living—for you.

A Digital Utopia

In the end, Licklider and Taylor predict that all of this interconnectedness will make us happier and even make unemployment a thing of the past. Their vision of everyone sitting at a console, working "through the network" is stunningly accurate for an information-driven society that fifty years ago would've looked far less tech-obsessed.

When people do their informational work “at the console” and “through the network,” telecommunication will be as natural an extension of individual work as face-to-face communication is now. The impact of that fact, and of the marked facilitation of the communicative process, will be very great—both on the individual and on society.

First, life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity. Second, communication will be more effective and productive, and therefore more enjoyable. Third, much communication and interaction will be with programs and programmed models, which will be (a) highly responsive, (b) supplementary to one’s own capabilities, rather than competitive, and (c) capable of representing progressively more complex ideas without necessarily displaying all the levels of their structure at the same time-and which will therefore be both challenging and rewarding. And, fourth, there will be plenty of opportunity for everyone (who can afford a console) to find his calling, for the whole world of information, with all its fields and disciplines, will be open to him—with programs ready to guide him or to help him explore.

The primary question, they insist, is whether everyone can afford to be online. Once that hurdle is surpassed, the impact of this brave new world on society as a whole will be positive:

For the society, the impact will be good or bad, depending mainly on the question: Will “to be on line” be a privilege or a right? If only a favored segment of the population gets a chance to enjoy the advantage of “intelligence amplification,” the network may exaggerate the discontinuity in the spectrum of intellectual opportunity.

On the other hand, if the network idea should prove to do for education what a few have envisioned in hope, if not in concrete detailed plan, and if all minds should prove to be responsive, surely the boon to humankind would be beyond measure.

The article is a fascinating explanation of networked computing tech written mere months before the internet's first sputtering breaths. Again, many of their predictions don't read as terribly futuristic to those of us here typing away in the early 21st century. But that's precisely what makes them so astounding.

You can read the entire paper online [pdf]. Many thanks to Morten Bay for sending this article my way.

I personally am not the biggest fan of fan fiction, as some of you might know. But rest assured that the Scanners "Head Asplode" pic I've used to lead off this article doesn't come from a place of distaste as much as pure shock at Amazon's insane, bold, and genuinely brilliant plan to sell legal fan fiction.

The service will be called Kindle Worlds, and here's how it works: Amazon has purchased the licensing rights to shows/books like Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and more. People can write their fan fiction based on these properties and make them available on Amazon legally (on Kindle, obviously) —but more importantly they can sell them. Proceeds will go to the rights-holders, and if the authors' works consists of over 10,000 words, the authors get the standard book royalty rate of 35% of total sales.

This is completely insane, people. Amazon has just figured out how to make fan fiction legal, and get the original creators paid for it, the authors of the fan fics paid for it, and themselves paid for it.

And it's going to work. I have zero doubt about this. Most fan fic authors would jump at the chance to legally write for their beloved franchise, but with a possibility of getting paid and perhaps even recognition from the creator? It's going to be an instant, phenomenal success. The only question now is which properties are more interested in cash than in maintaining their integrity. I guarantee you Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars will have a lot of company by the end of 2013.

Here's Amazon's official press release:

SEATTLE—(NASDAQ: AMZN)—May 22, 2013—Today, Amazon Publishing announces Kindle Worlds, the first commercial publishing platform that will enable any writer to create fan fiction based on a range of original stories and characters and earn royalties for doing so. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment division for its New York Times best-selling book series Gossip Girl, by Cecily von Ziegesar; Pretty Little Liars, by Sara Shepard; and Vampire Diaries, by L.J. Smith; and plans to announce more licenses soon. Through these licenses, Kindle Worlds will allow any writer to publish authorized stories inspired by these popular Worlds and make them available for readers to purchase in the Kindle Store.

Amazon Publishing will pay royalties to both the rights holders of the Worlds and the author. The standard author’s royalty rate (for works of at least 10,000 words) will be 35% of net revenue. As with all titles from Amazon Publishing, Kindle Worlds will base net revenue off of sales price—rather than the lower, industry standard of wholesale price—and royalties will be paid monthly.

In addition, with the launch of Kindle Worlds, Amazon Publishing will pilot an experimental new program for particularly short works—between 5,000 and 10,000 words. For these short stories—typically priced under one dollar—Amazon will pay the royalties for the World’s rights holder and pay authors a digital royalty of 20%.

Beginning today, interested writers are encouraged to visit Kindle Worlds (www.amazon.com/kindleworlds) to learn more and get a head start on writing. In June, the Kindle Worlds store is expected to launch with over 50 commissioned works from authors such as #1 New York Times best-selling author Barbara Freethy, Bram Stoker Award-winner John Everson and RITA Award-winner Colleen Thompson. At that time, the Kindle Worlds self-service submission platform, where any writer can submit completed work, will also open.

World Licensors benefit from Kindle Worlds because:

• It’s an entirely new way to monetize their valuable franchises
• It allows them to extend their Worlds with new stories and characters and more deeply engage with existing fans, while also reaching new audiences
• Amazon Publishing will work with them to establish content guidelines that balance flexibility and openness for writers with what’s reasonable for the franchise

“Our books have generated a massive amount of fan fiction, and we see this as an evolution in publishing and a valuable way of broadening our brands and engaging fans,” said Leslie Morgenstein, President Alloy Entertainment. “When working with Amazon Publishing on this scale, we know we’re in good hands and everyone will benefit.”

“Seeing Pretty Little Liars fans adapt and create their own stories is both exciting and flattering and I think what Amazon Publishing is offering through Kindle Worlds is a great way to reward their ingenuity,” said Sara Shepard, author of Pretty Little Liars.

Writers benefit from Kindle Worlds because:

• Amazon Publishing has already secured the necessary licenses to write about any Kindle World
• They can earn royalties writing about established characters and universes
• The Kindle Worlds self-service submission platform is easy to use

“I loved writing the characters in this world, the dynamics of the friendship between the four girls as they deal with life-threatening situations,” said Barbara Freethy, writing in Pretty Little Liars. “I also really enjoy the ongoing mysteries and surprising twists that always keep the reader guessing. It’s great that Amazon Publishing has given those who put passion into fan fiction the opportunity to commercialize this work.”

And readers benefit from Kindle Worlds because:

• They can find a stream of new stories in Worlds they love
• They can discover new Worlds and corresponding great new stories
• As with all Kindle books these are “Buy Once, Read Everywhere”—they can read on Kindle or Kindle Fire as well as with a free Kindle app for all of the most popular devices and platforms

“At Kindle, we’re not only inventing on the hardware and software side of the business, we’re inventing new ways to create books,” said Philip Patrick, Director, Business Development and Publisher of Kindle Worlds. “Our goal with Kindle Worlds is to create a home for authors to build on the Worlds we license, and give readers more stories from the Worlds they enjoy. We look forward to announcing additional World licensing deals in the coming weeks.”

Amazon Publishing is engaged with additional rights holders from different areas of entertainment—books, games, TV, movies and music—and looks forward to announcing future deals soon. To get started writing works in licensed properties, visit www.amazon.com/kindleworlds for submission guidelines and updates on licensed properties.

[Via Deadline]

This is the oath of the Green Lantern Corps: “In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight!” It’s a lot better than “We are terrible at our job of being space cops,” but it’s less accurate, too, unfortunately.

In semi-honor of Geoff Johns final Green Lantern comic, coming out today, here are nine reasons we’d be better off having Starsky and Hutch policing the galaxy.

1) They Don’t Discriminate in Their Recruiting

Often, discrimination is a bad thing when it comes to job interviews. But the Green Lanterns don’t discriminate on race, species, or sex — but they don’t discriminate on talent, aptitude, mental health, skill level or anything else, wither. Whenever a Green Lantern dies, his/her/its ring flies off an finds a new candidate, whether they want to or not, and whether they’re ready or not. See, the police force applicants to take psych exams before they’re allowed to become cops. The Guardians — the little blue people who created the Green Lantern Corps — are not so careful. Sure, Hal Jordan was a pretty good Green Lantern… at least until he went crazy and personally killed most of the Green Lantern Corps and the Guardians. So that was a bad call, but arguably the Guardians hiring a dude named Sinestro is even worse. They might as have given a power ring to dudes named Nefaria, Darth Sidious, or Evil E. Evilton. Even after Sinestro had tried to kill the Green Lanterns and the Guardians for years, the Guardians gave him another Green Lantern power ring and forced him into the corps — against his will. Good call, guys.

2) They Have a Weakness to Yellow

For almost the entirety of the Green Lantern Corps existence, they have had one weakness — the color yellow. There was an impurity in the giant Green Lantern that powers their rings, so any time the Lanterns tried to manipulate or fight anything colored yellow, they’d be weakened or possibly even completely ineffective. Imagine if regular cops couldn’t arrest people wearing yellow. Not only would this be ridiculously inefficient, every bad guy on the planet would be wearing yellow cardigans before the week was out. It’s ridiculous that of all the DC universe’ bad guys, only Sinestro figured this out... eventually.

3) They Have Terrible Incarceration Policies

That giant lantern/battery I mentioned that powers all the rings? Well, the Guardians of the Universe decided to store Parallax, the embodiment of the yellow emotion of fear, and one of the most powerful and evilest beings in the universe, in that giant lantern. It’s the reason the Green Lanterns’ rings were so weak against yellow, because Parallax was tainting their entire power supply from the inside. Now, I know this isn’t exactly like jailing a criminal inside the police armory, but I still wonder why the Guardians chose to incarcerate the gravest enemy inside their space police’s power supply as opposed to, say, a small room next to their space police’s power supply, of even any other single place in the goddamned universe.

4) The Guardians Are the Worst

The Guardians of the Universe are very devoted to guarding the universe, as their name might suggest. However, they are fucking terrible at their jobs. Besides the number of genocidal maniacs that manages to end up in the Green Lantern Corps, the Lanterns were actually the Guardians’ second attempt to make a space police force, and the first was even worse — a group of robots called the Manhunters, who of course decided that every single organic life form needed to die. Recently, the Guardians realized the Green Lanterns were also flawed (no kidding) and decide to make a new, Third Army, which was less interested in keeping the peace as much as it was destroying the existing Green Lantern Corps, and killing or recruiting (by parasitically taking over their minds) any soul who got in their way. Oh, the and Guardians created the Third Army out of a dude called the First Lantern, a being who taught the Guardians about the Emotional Spectrum until they imprisoned him for millions of years. So they made their army out of a supremely powerful being who hated the Guardians and everything they’d ever created. Good call there, guys.

5) They Hired a Squirrel

One of the Green Lantern Corps members was an alien squirrel named Ch’p. He was killed when a truck ran over him. This is why police officers do not deputize squirrels.

6) They’re Way Too Committed to The Lantern Motif

The name Green Lantern strikes fear into the hearts of evil-doers every where… but also some confusion. This is because the Green Lanterns almost never, ever carry lanterns around — they have rings. But they’re not called Green Rings, they’re called Green Lanterns. The name comes from the Lanterns they use to charge the rings, which they seldom carry around in the same way you don’t bring your cellphone charger with you every single time you leave the house. Technically, the Green Lanterns are calling themselves “Magic Ring Extension Cords Corps.”

7) They’re Not Even the Noblest Color on the Emotional Color Spectrum

One of Geoff Johns’ greatest accomplishments was adding powers and leagues assigned to each color in the ROYGBIV scale, meaning green was no longer some arbitrary color choice the universe really liked, but just one of many. Unfortunately, this means the Green Lantern Corps — powered by the “green” emotion of willpower (don’t ask) — aren’t technically good guys anymore, at least when compared to the Blue Lanterns (hope), the Indigo Tribe (compassion) and the White Lanterns (life). If the universe had a police force, wouldn’t you rather them be led by compassion instead of willpower?

8) Hal Jordan Had Sex with a 14-Year-Old Girl

In all fairness, Arisia is an alien who is over 250 Earth years old. But on her home planet, she is merely 14, and she look, acts and thinks like a teenager. Gross.

9) No, Seriously, the Guardians Are the Worst

Again, the Guardians have appointed themselves as the people in charge of the universe, and as such they have absolutely zero oversight. That’s how all the above stuff managed to happen on their watch, and often with their express approval. But here’s more horrible shit they decided whil osteinbly trying to keep the peace in the galaxy:

• Destroying all magic and magic-using people in the universe

• Hiding and ignoring the prophecy about the Black Lanterns, thus dooming many, many people who were unprepared for the attack

• Ceding the safety of entire star systems because of politics

• Left the most evil being in the galaxy, Darkseid, alone, because it was too hard to defeat him, and then destroyed all records of them getting their ass kicked

• Exiled Hal Jordan for an entire year because he was protecting Earth “too much”

And that’s not counting Guardians like Scar, who went crazy and tried to help bad guys like Nekron destroy all life in the universe. At the moment, the Guardians aren’t even just unsympathetic, they’re actually evil, what with their “trying to kill their own police force” business. Thanks for “protecting” the universe, guys. You’re doing a great job.

Rebecca Sugar is the powerhouse writer and musician behind many of the best Adventure Time episodes, and now she has her own show, Steven Universe! And you can watch the entire pilot, right here, right now. Do it. It's amazing.

Behold the Crystal Gems, a gang of female superheroes and their buddy Steven, who isn't allowed to be in the gang until his gem is activated (but even then we're not sure they would let him join in the crime-fighting right away). This adorable dynamic is complimented by the great style and supremely witty storytelling. This is our new show.

Even as the U.S. is lashed by hurricanes and tornados, the disaster that most people worry about isn't a super storm. It's economic collapse. How do you prepare for a catastrophe like that? We asked a founder of the American Preppers Network, as well as economist Brad DeLong. Surprisingly, they agreed on an answer.

I spoke with Tom Martin, a former truck driver who is a founder and VP of the American Preppers Network (APN), a group that helps preppers organize and exchange ideas online. "Prepper" refers to disaster preparation, and the people are ready for civilizational collapse. Contrary to popular belief, Martin said, "Preppers aren't about 'the end of the world,' but 'the end of the world as we know it.'" He added that "people always forget the 'as we know it' part. This is about major changes, whether good or bad, and being prepared for them."

Martin said that people often become preppers in response to recent disasters, such as Hurricane Sandy or the tsunami in Japan. But one concern that doesn't go out of fashion is the need to prep for an economic disaster. An economic disaster, he said, could be caused by "anything — an earthquake, a terrorist attack." So what does he do to prepare? A prepper's main concern in economic disaster, Martin explained, is the food supply chain.

Most stores only have supplies for about three days, and in a disaster those supplies will disappear within hours. So a good prepper wants to have a long-term supply of both food and water, just in case the economy is in chaos and there simply isn't an infrastructure in place to get supplies out to everyone.

But what exactly is an "economic disaster" anyway?

UC Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong told io9 via email that there are "different kinds of economic disasters," and gave us a fascinating overview of how each one might happen, as well as what we might want to do to deal with them:

The first is a disaster for the real economy—interesting how we use that phrase to distinguish the real economy from the financial economy—that has a financial disaster, collapsing asset values and wealth, as a consequence. Here the problem is not in finance, and cannot be fixed by anything in finance.

The second is a disaster for some kind of money or wealth—dollars become worthless relative to pounds, or collapsing risk tolerance means that junk bonds become nearly worthless relative to treasury bonds. This is, overwhelmingly, simply a redistribution: the same stuff is being made by the same people in the real economy, but some of the people whose financial wealth led them to assume that they had control over that stuff were wrong, and conversely those whose financial wealth was in the form of money that retains its value find that they have received a large windfall. This is a big problem if your wealth is in the form that is on the losing side of, say, the German hyperinflation of 1923. But the solution to this kind of problem is simple: diversification. Diversify your wealth across as many possible asset classes as you can, and you will be nearly invulnerable.

Then DeLong got to the type of economic disaster that most preppers are probably concerned about. And his ideas for dealing with it were quite prepper-friendly, albeit sometimes tongue-in-cheek:

The third kind of financial disaster is a financial disaster that as a consequence affects the real economy as well—one that does not just redistribute real wealth, but destroys it, with the financial collapse and redistribution somehow ripping large holes in the social division of labor and in the web of production, work, and enterprise.

On an international level, what we should be doing is topping off the funding of the IMF, because it is the organization that exists to backstop various forms of money and to quickly resolve or contain whatever panic happens from the sudden realization that it appears that some particular form of money is about to become worthless.

On a national level, we need to be requiring that banks have much higher equity and much lower debt in their capital structures—for the principal source of panic is always a run on the bank, which happens when people rightly fear that the bank is undercapitalized and the last people to try to pull their money will get nothing.

On an individual level—well, the things you stockpile if you are scared of a total collapse of the social division of labor are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition. And joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not a bad idea either. A lust for gold seems to me at least be the product of an awful lot of fuzzy thinking: actual resources that you can use to produce useful commodities are no longer worth anything, and the obligations of the US government are no longer worth anything, and yet people are supposed to still be willing to respect your property right to your gold? If you want gold under such circumstances, much better to have secured control of MREs and simply charge people 5 pounds of gold for a meal.

In other words, when the real economic collapse happens, it's better to be a prepper than a goldbug.

As for Martin, his ideas for dealing with economic disaster are a lot more practical for ordinary people than allocating resources to the IMF and regulating banks' capital structures. I asked him what a prepper city might look like, and he said one simple thing they needed was "more cabinet space for supplies." After all, if there's a disaster that shuts down water and food supplies to a geographically isolated city like San Francisco or Manhattan, those "tiny cabinets" you see in most apartments won't hold enough to keep people healthy for more than a day or two. And of course there is almost nowhere for people in cities to store enough water.

In addition, Martin said, cities facing disaster need to marshall their considerable resources better than they do. "New York City is surrounded by barges, so why didn't the mayor put people on them after 9/11 to get them out of the city?" Martin asked. "Do you know how many people you can fit on a barge?" In the case of Hurricane Katrina, where there were widespread evacuations that failed, he asked, "Why didn't the mayor simply use all the cars in every single car dealership to get people out? Why let those cars sink under the flood waters when they could be used for evacuation? I'd use every single resource."

These ideas are simple but effective, and they raise an important question that DeLong hints at as well. Why don't we value the resources that we'll actually need in a disaster, as opposed to ones that will be worthless, like gold or unused cars?

Annalee Newitz is the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. She's also on book tour! See her tonight in Seattle, and next week in Chicago and Atlanta. Click here for dates and places!

Want to take a very bizarre vacation? Not worried about putting a trespassing arrest on your record? Pennsylvania’s Raven Rock Mountain Complex might be the destination for you.

The United States built the mysterious Raven Rock Mountain Complex in the early 1950s, to allow for the continuation of the U.S. Government should a widespread nuclear attack occur. The site can hold 3,000 people comfortably, and there are rumors that amenities include a fully-stocked Starbucks on site, and a tunnel to Camp David. But what's the truth about Raven Rock, and what's a big stinking lie?

A Cold War Relic

Devised and built soon after the USSR successfully detonated its first nuclear bomb in 1949, Raven Rock Mountain Complex is just outside the small town of Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. While the position is obscure, the out-of-site location is within close proximity to the Pentagon, the White House, and Camp David.

Originally, Raven Rock was designed to house high ranking government officials and up to 3,000 individuals for 30 days should a global catastrophe occur, as part of the United State's Continuity of Government Plan during the Cold War.

While the site likely does not maintain enough supplies to house 3,000 people in the post-Cold War era, Vice President Cheney probably "hunkered down" in Raven Rock during the weeks following September 11th.

Currently, Raven Rock is known by several names, including Site R and the Alternate Joint Communication Center. And Raven Rock contains everything necessary to carry on key communication services and allow for Navy, Air Force, and Army decision-making, should dialogue cease or a rapid change in the chain of command within the United States Executive Office occur.

The Department of Defense recently made the Raven Rock Mountain Complex an official part of the Pentagon. That designation places a number of unusual restrictions on the site. According to the Federal Register, one of the more unusual restrictions forbids the taking of pictures or even drawing sketches of the Raven Rock facility:

Furthermore, it shall be unlawful to make any photograph, sketch, picture, drawing, map or graphical representation of the Pentagon Reservation and Raven Rock Mountain Complex without first obtaining the necessary permission.

The facility does appear on Google Earth — but you can't find it with a direct word search.

What is at Raven Rock?

If you happen to be in the area, you can get reasonably close, but don’t expect to be able to enter the complex. Several civilians live in the rural homes surrounding the complex. I would consider that a super-safe zip code.

At least four stadium entrance-like portals dot the outside of the facility, portals that burrow directly into Raven Rock Mountain. Height-wise, Raven Rock is closer to a hill than a mountain, as the summit of Raven Rock is a little over a kilometer high.

Near the top of the mountain lies a high-powered communications array, to carry out the facility's current mission of maintaining lines of communication with all branches of the military.

Once inside the complex, word-of-mouth accounts paint a picture of a small city built inside a cave-like environment. At least 5 three-story buildings are present, with the buildings connected by a series of roads accessible by car.

Due to the nature of the sixty-year-old underground base, far-fetched rumors about the facility abound. One of the less bizarre rumors suggests that there's a tunnel to the nearby Camp David, but there's no evidence to support the tunnel's existence.

Raven Rock garnered its own parody website - whitehouse.gov1.info - which touts souvenir coins, guided tours for visitors, and claims the facility has a fully-stocked Starbucks on the premises.

Raven Rock also plays a role in the video game Fallout 3, a role harkening back to the facility's Cold War roots. In Fallout 3, the Raven Rock Mountain Complex is the home of the Enclave, the last vestige of the United States government.

While rumors abound, the Raven Rock Mountain Complex is a necessary site in the world climate we live in. The fact facility can be found via Google Earth takes away some of its mystique — but the compound remains practically impenetrable, and for good reason.

Top image is of two possible portals into the Raven Rock Mountain Complex, with the satellite image via Google Earth. Second image is a satellite image of a communications array near Raven Rock via Google Earth. Sources linked within.

Whenever you imagine any kind of altered reality — from dreams, to drug trips, to warp speed — the main image is always a tunnel, ringed by regular geometric patterns. And most of us see those odd, tunneling patterns at some point in our lives. What exactly is it about our brains that creates them?

There's a certain area in the brain that is the first stop for visual information. This visual cortex, called V1, is awash with nerves that interact with each other near-instantaneously. There are neurons that encourage activity among others, and neurons that inhibit activity among others. The combination of the both of them firing - say, during a drug trip - creates some interesting, and regular, patterns.

These patterns, though, don't create the tunnel effect. The tunnel springs from the fact that the visual system needs to perceive more than just a picture of contrasting values of light and dark. It also needs to perceive contour. The neurons in V1 are linked up in structures called hypercolumns. Each neuron in a hypercolumn perceives a different edge value. One neuron in a hypercolumn would perceive the vertical edge that two walls make when they come together. Another would detect the horizontal edge that a wall makes when it meets the floor. Although the neurons in each hypercolumn can interact with each other, they can't interact with all the neurons in the next hypercolumn. They can only interact with some, and the selective links between the columns are what scientists believe gives us the ability to perceive smooth, continuous curves.

It also means that, when we are hallucinating a pattern, we don't see the just the pattern. We create a symmetric pattern that comes together at certain angles. The interaction of the nerves in each hypercolumn causes an otherwise flat honeycomb or grid to curve around a central point in our vision. We see a tunnel, because our brain connects up that way.

Top Image: Garish

Second Image: Ksd5

Via Plus Magazine.

With much of our attention focused the rise of advanced artificial intelligence, few consider the potential for radically amplified human intelligence (IA). It’s an open question as to which will come first, but a technologically boosted brain could be just as powerful — and just as dangerous – as AI.

As a species, we’ve been amplifying our brains for millennia. Or at least we’ve tried to. Looking to overcome our cognitive limitations, humans have employed everything from writing, language, and meditative techniques straight through to today’s nootropics. But none of these compare to what’s in store.

Unlike efforts to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), or even an artificial superintelligence (SAI), the human brain already presents us with a pre-existing intelligence to work with. Radically extending the abilities of a pre-existing human mind — whether it be through genetics, cybernetics or the integration of external devices — could result in something quite similar to how we envision advanced AI.

Looking to learn more about this, I contacted futurist Michael Anissimov, a blogger at Accelerating Future and a co-organizer of the Singularity Summit. He’s given this subject considerable thought — and warns that we need to be just as wary of IA as we are AI.

Michael, when we speak of Intelligence Amplification, what are we really talking about? Are we looking to create Einsteins? Or is it something significantly more profound?

The real objective of IA is to create super-Einsteins, persons qualitatively smarter than any human being that has ever lived. There will be a number of steps on the way there.

The first step will be to create a direct neural link to information. Think of it as a "telepathic Google."

The next step will be to develop brain-computer interfaces that augment the visual cortex, the best-understood part of the brain. This would boost our spatial visualization and manipulation capabilities. Imagine being able to imagine a complex blueprint with high reliability and detail, or to learn new blueprints quickly. There will also be augmentations that focus on other portions of sensory cortex, like tactile cortex and auditory cortex.

The third step involves the genuine augmentation of pre-frontal cortex. This is the Holy Grail of IA research — enhancing the way we combine perceptual data to form concepts. The end result would be cognitive super-McGyvers, people who perform apparently impossible intellectual feats. For instance, mind controlling other people, beating the stock market, or designing inventions that change the world almost overnight. This seems impossible to us now in the same way that all our modern scientific achievements would have seemed impossible to a stone age human — but the possibility is real.

For it to be otherwise would require that there is some mysterious metaphysical ceiling on qualitative intelligence that miraculously exists at just above the human level. Given that mankind was the first generally intelligent organism to evolve on this planet, that seems highly implausible. We shouldn't expect version one to be the final version, any more than we should have expected the Model T to be the fastest car ever built.

Looking ahead to the next few decades, how could AI come about? Is the human brain really that fungible?

The human brain is not really that fungible. It is the product of more than seven million years of evolutionary optimization and fine-tuning, which is to say that it's already highly optimized given its inherent constraints. Attempts to overclock it usually cause it to break, as demonstrated by the horrific effects of amphetamine addiction.

Trailer for Limitless

Chemicals are not targeted enough to produce big gains in human cognitive performance. The evidence for the effectiveness of current "brain-enhancing drugs" is extremely sketchy. To achieve real strides will require brain implants with connections to millions of neurons. This will require millions of tiny electrodes, and a control system to synchronize them all. The current state of the art brain-computer interfaces have around 1,000 connections. So, current devices need to be scaled up by more than 1,000 times to get anywhere interesting. Even if you assume exponential improvement, it will be awhile before this is possible — at least 15 to 20 years.

Improvement in IA rests upon progress in nano-manufacturing. Brain-computer interface engineers, like Ed Boyden at MIT, depend upon improvements in manufacturing to build these devices. Manufacturing is the linchpin on which everything else depends. Given that there is very little development of atomically-precise manufacturing technologies, nanoscale self-assembly seems like the most likely route to million-electrode brain-computer interfaces. Nanoscale self-assembly is not atomically precise, but it's precise by the standards of bulk manufacturing and photolithography.

What potential psychological side-effects may emerge from a radically enhanced human? Would they even be considered a human at this point?

One of the most salient side effects would be insanity. The human brain is an extremely fine-tuned and calibrated machine. Most perturbations to this tuning qualify as what we would consider "crazy." There are many different types of insanity, far more than there are types of sanity. From the inside, insanity seems perfectly sane, so we'd probably have a lot of trouble convincing these people they are insane.

Even in the case of perfect sanity, side effects might include seizures, information overload, and possibly feelings of egomania or extreme alienation. Smart people tend to feel comparatively more alienated in the world, and for a being smarter than everyone, the effect would be greatly amplified.

Most very smart people are not jovial and sociable like Richard Feynman. Hemingway said, "An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools." What if drunkenness were not enough to instill camaraderie and mutual affection? There could be a clean "empathy break" that leads to psychopathy.

So which will come first? AI or IA?

It's very difficult to predict either. There is a tremendous bias for wanting IA to come first, because of all the fun movies and video games with intelligence-enhanced protagonists. It's important to recognize that this bias in favor of IA does not in fact influence the actual technological difficulty of the approach. My guess is that AI will come first because development is so much cheaper and cleaner.

Both endeavours are extremely difficult. They may not come to pass until the 2060s, 2070s, or later. Eventually, however, they must both come to pass — there's nothing magical about intelligence, and the demand for its enhancement is enormous. It would require nothing less than a global totalitarian Luddite dictatorship to hold either back for the long term.

What are the advantages and disadvantages to the two different developmental approaches?

The primary advantage of the AI route is that it is immeasurably cheaper and easier to do research. AI is developed on paper and in code. Most useful IA research, on the other hand, is illegal. Serious IA would require deep neurosurgery and experimental brain implants. These brain implants may malfunction, causing seizures, insanity, or death. Enhancing human intelligence in a qualitative way is not a matter of popping a few pills — you really need to develop brain implants to get any significant returns.

Most research in that area is heavily regulated and expensive. All animal testing is expensive. Theodore Berger has been working on a hippocampal implant for a number of years — and in 2004 it passed a live tissue test, but there has been very little news since then. Every few years he pops up in the media and says it's just around the corner, but I'm skeptical. Meanwhile, there is a lot of intriguing progress in Artificial Intelligence.

Does IA have the potential to be safer than AI as far as predictability and controllability is concerned? Is it important that we develop IA before super-powerful AGI?

Intelligence Augmentation is much more unpredictable and uncontrollable than AGI has the potential to be. It's actually quite dangerous, in the long term. I recently wrote an article that speculates on global political transformation caused by a large amount of power concentrated in the hands of a small group due to "miracle technologies" like IA or molecular manufacturing. I also coined the term "Maximillian," meaning "the best," to refer to a powerful leader making use of intelligence enhancement technology to put himself in an unassailable position.

Image: The cognitively enhanced Reginald Barclay from the ST:TNG episode, "The Nth Degree."

The problem with IA is that you are dealing with human beings, and human beings are flawed. People with enhanced intelligence could still have a merely human-level morality, leveraging their vast intellects for hedonistic or even genocidal purposes.

AGI, on the other hand, can be built from the ground up to simply follow a set of intrinsic motivations that are benevolent, stable, and self-reinforcing.

People say, "won't it reject those motivations?" It won't, because those motivations will make up its entire core of values — if it's programmed properly. There will be no "ghost in the machine" to emerge and overthrow its programmed motives. Philosopher Nick Bostrom does an excellent analysis of this in his paper "The Superintelligent Will". The key point is that selfish motivations will not magically emerge if an AI has a goal system that is fundamentally selfless, if the very essence of its being is devoted to preserving that selflessness. Evolution produced self-interested organisms because of evolutionary design constraints, but that doesn't mean we can't code selfless agents de novo.

What roadblocks, be they technological, medical, or ethical, do you see hindering development?

The biggest roadblock is developing the appropriate manufacturing technology. Right now, we aren't even close.

Another roadblock is figuring out what exactly each neuron does, and identifying the exact positions of these neurons in individual people. Again, we're not even close.

Thirdly, we need some way to quickly test extremely fine-grained theories of brain function — what Ed Boyden calls "high throughput circuit screening" of neural circuits. The best way to do this would be to somehow create a human being without consciousness and experiment on them to our heart's content, but I have a feeling that idea might not go over so well with ethics committees.

Absent that, we'd need an extremely high-resolution simulation of the human brain. Contrary to hype surrounding "brain simulation" projects today, such a high-resolution simulation is not likely to be developed until the 2050-2080 timeframe. An Oxford analysis picks a median date of around 2080. That sounds a bit conservative to me, but in the right ballpark.

Top image: imredesiuk/shutterstock.

Australian researchers have isolated an immune system cell in salamanders which helps it regenerate missing limbs and damaged organs — and they suspect the same thing could work in humans, too.

Salamanders, or axolotls, are unique among vertebrates in that they’ve got remarkable regenerative powers. Adults can literally regrow and restore function to any part of the body, including the spinal cord and heart — even parts of the brain. Moreover, the regenerated tissue is scar free; once repaired, the new tissue looks almost the same as it was before.

Mammals obviously can’t do this. When we suffer tissue damage, the growth response is severely limited, while also being subject to scarring.

Now, thanks to the work of James Godwin and colleagues at Monash University's Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute, scientists are one step closer to figuring out how to transfer the salamander’s regenerative powers to humans.

A crucial part of the healing process involves the presence of macrophages — a major immune system cell type that patrols tissues and gobbles-up foreign invaders, like bacteria and fungi. What’s more, they also play an important role in determining the mode of repair and instigating the tissue regeneration process.

Godwin et al. determined this after they got rid of all the macrophages in the salamanders they were experimenting upon. Devoid of these immune cells, the salamanders completely lost their ability to regrow limbs. In a manner of speaking, they suddenly became mammal-like — left with stumps and scarred tissue.

But then, after the macrophages were re-introduced, their regenerative capacities were restored, and the salamanders were able to grow their limbs back.

"Previously, we thought that macrophages were negative for regeneration, and this research shows that that's not the case — if the macrophages are not present in the early phases of healing, regeneration does not occur," he said in a press statement. "Now, we need to find out exactly how these macrophages are contributing to regeneration. Down the road, this could lead to therapies that tweak the human immune system down a more regenerative pathway."

The researchers theorize that chemicals released by the macrophages are crucial for regeneration. And indeed, this is the next phase of their research. Their ultimate goal is to reverse-engineer these techniques into human therapies — a medical breakthrough that could lead to treatments for heart and liver diseases associated with scarring (fibrosis). It could also lead to therapies for the treatment of spinal cord and brain injuries.

Read the entire study at PNAS: “Macrophages are required for adult salamander limb regeneration.”

Image: National Geographic/Stephen Dalton/Animals Animals—Earth Scenes.

Note: We included a snippet of Star Trek, "Amok Time," Because T'Pring is arguably being forced to marry Spock against her will.

Musical accompaniment: DJ Paul V, "Might Like Ghosts Better"

Additional reporting by Katharine Trendacosta and Amanda Yesilbas

We've always thought aye-ayes looked like a little like horrendously malformed koalas. In fact, they're actually lemurs — lemurs with the freakiest fingers we've ever seen.

In this, the latest in Ze Frank's outstanding "True Facts about _______" nature series, we investigate the aye-aye, its nightmarishly awesome middle digit, and, well, its general weirdness.

[Via Ze Frank]

Now that a Star Trek movie is #1 at the box office again, everybody's looking back at the history of Star Trek films. And one meme I've been hearing a lot is that Wrath of Khan, formerly the sacred cow of Trek films, is overrated. Here's why that's not true.

Massive spoilers for Wrath of Khan ahead...

When Wrath of Khan came out, it felt like Star Trek had gotten a brand new warp core. Compared to The Motion Picture, it seemed jaunty and action-packed and filled with danger and skin-of-your-teeth escapes. The dialogue was sparkly, the starship battles were exciting, and there was an actual villain, with monologues.

Now, when you watch Wrath of Khan, it does feel like a slow boil. It takes like 45 minutes for the first actual confrontation between Kirk and Khan to happen, and during those 45 minutes the only "action" involves the Kobayashi Maru test and Khan capturing Chekov and Captain Terrell. From then on, Kirk is constantly trying to stay one step ahead of Khan, but it's a psychological battle of wits rather than a "ticking time bomb" thing or a kickpuncher thing.

To a large extent, this is because Khan comes from a different era in film-making. The original Star Wars is similarly slow to build up — true, there's a space battle in the opening moments, but then it's a long time before we even meet Luke Skywalker, and a much longer time before Luke gets to the Death Star. Rewatch the original Alien, and it feels like a slow, creepy tease as well.

(And I've often thought that one reason some people don't like Wrath of Khan is that they're watching the "Director's Cut," which restores a bunch of non-essential footage that slows things down, like getting to know Scotty's nephew.)

But the theatrical cut is not slow-paced in the sense of "padded." There's no single scene where nothing happens, and each scene moves pretty briskly except when the movie wants to show off some cool visuals. The characters get time to breathe, and the film is definitely talky, but no scene outstays its welcome, for the most part.

So Wrath of Khan is definitely a product of its time, and will inevitably feel as dated as every other film from 30 years ago. Another feature that probably hasn't aged well: Some of the dialogue is a little stagey, particularly the scene between McCoy and Kirk in Kirk's apartment, and some of Khan's conversations (as opposed to his monologues.) There's a slightly stilted, declamatory quality to the acting that feels very much in keeping with the original TV series.

But even if you do find Wrath of Khan old-fashioned or ponderous, it's still a great movie. And here's why.

People misidentify their own biggest flaws

To a large extent, this film is a character study of Kirk and Khan, and the action proceeds from the mistakes that both men make. A lot of what looks like slow pacing is actually heavy lifting the movie is doing to set up the decisions that lead to two starships getting more and more junked.

Kirk's big mistake, of course, is not raising his shields the moment it becomes obvious there's something wrong with the Reliant, the Federation starship Khan has taken over. Kirk is being cocky and gets "caught with his britches down." But prior to that moment, absolutely everybody's biggest worry about Kirk is that he's been wasting his talent for command sitting behind a desk — not that he's gotten too overconfident or complacent.

There's even a scene where Spock keeps insisting that Kirk must retake command of the ship — because Spock would be fine as captain for a "training cruise," but Kirk should command if there's real action. Kirk keeps demurring, until Spock says the thing about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few. The irony, of course, being that if Spock had stayed in the captain's chair, he'd almost certainly have raised those shields in time. So Spock winds up endangering the many for the sake of the one.

And after that, Kirk is forced to confront the possibility that he really is too old to command a starship — the linchpin of the movie, from Kirk's perspective, is the scene with Carol after he's met his son and been marooned by Khan. Kirk lets a vulnerability show, that's different from the usual "I'm losing my command" angst and is more about losing your edge. It's hard to build a compelling science fiction adventure movie around fears of aging and decay, but TWoK pulls it off — and all of that careful set-up is a big part of why.

And for all his flaws as an actor, Shatner is great here — he shows different sides of Kirk's personality depending on whether he's talking to nervous cadets or his oldest friends. And it's largely through Kirk's performance that you see how outwitting Khan isn't just the source of the movie's "fuck yeah" moments, but also how Kirk becomes rejuvenated and regains his mojo, once and for all. Kirk's mojo is a "use it or lose it" type deal, and this film takes great pains to show how the use of it restores it to him.

Meanwhile, the film shows Khan being clever enough to run rings around Kirk — except that he won't let go of his vengeance, and he thinks he has something to prove about his superior intellect. The same way Kirk has something to prove about regaining his command.

He comes very close to getting away with the Genesis Device, the film's McGuffin, and being able to set himself up as a dictator on a brand new planet, teeming with life. Joachim keeps offering him the chance to abandon the pursuit of Kirk and rebuild his life, but the "wrath" thing is a serious character flaw at this point. Except that, in the film's most famous scene, Kirk tries to manipulate Khan into coming down inside the barren planet Regulus to chase after him, and Khan decides... not to. Kirk and Spock, by convincing Khan that the Enterprise is helpless, have outsmarted themselves a bit.

And Wrath of Khan isn't just a great character study of two old warriors — one who feels like he's being consigned to the past, the other feeling like he can't let go of it — it's also a great psychological thriller, which starts off slow and creepy and slowly builds to these two men using huge starships and a terraforming machine to try and crush the life out of each other.

And "explain it to them" has to be the best way of commanding someone to fire photon torpedos ever.

It's a solid science fiction movie

Star Trek: The Motion Picture spends approximately five hours too much on long majestic shots of the Enterprise in drydock or in space. Robert Wise really wants you to know that this is one sweet-looking vessel. But TMP does bequeath to TWoK a certain love of the starship porn, which it hits just hard enough to lend a sense of majesty to the proceedings. And this is a film that definitely benefits from practical spaceship models, ILM at the top of its game.

And there are shots of people loading photon torpedos into tubes, without any of the main castmembers present. In some of the bridge scenes, you hear people talking and doing their jobs in the background. The Enterprise is a busy ship.

And all of the love and adoration bestowed on the starships, both inside and out, helps make the submarine-style combat in the film feel way more visceral and exciting — the final sequence in the nebula, with both ships flying blind, still has a hell of a kick. And it remains one of the more clever space combat scenes, with each ship catching the other by surprise and firing wildly at each other.

By and large, Star Wars has dogfights, Star Trek has submarine battles — and this is probably the best submarine-style battle Trek ever did, with each ship giving as good as it gets until they're both just shreds.

And even though it arguably gets lost a bit in all the fighting, Wrath of Khan does have a science fictional conceit that pays off, both thematically and in a plot sense — the McGuffin isn't just a McGuffin. Just like Serenity is a movie about the ethics of experimenting on people (River Tam, the people on Miranda), Wrath of Khan is a franchise picture that brings up an ethical question — another reason why all those "talky" scenes are worthwhile.

The Genesis device is a terraforming miracle, which can spontaneously generate life overnight on a barren planet — but it could also be used as a weapon, and everyone from Dr. McCoy to David Marcus freaks out over the potential misuse of this in the wrong hands. Meaning Starfleet's hands, possibly — but then Khan gets a hold of it, and the term "wrong hands" gets massively redefined. And yet, in the end, when Khan finally does use it as a weapon, it kills almost nobody (except Spock, temporarily) and it creates something beautiful: whole new life.

So maybe, the film suggests, even when science is misused or perverted, the effects may turn out to be positive in the end — if you have a long enough or accelerated time horizon.

As Carol Marcus herself says to Kirk, the results of the Genesis device will make you feel "young as when the world was new." And in fact, the Genesis device is exactly like the metaphorical rejuvenation that Kirk undergoes in this film. People have to die for Kirk to feel young and alive again, just as the Genesis device is destructive as well as creative.

And that's really the crux of why Wrath of Khan still holds up as a science fiction movie, not just as a Star Trek movie — it's got a Big Idea wrapped up in it, which is fully integrated with a big, intense character arc that's fundamentally about universal human experiences like growing older and coping with your past. So that at the end, when Spock makes the ultimate (temporary) sacrifice, and Kirk breaks those glasses, it feels like a huge emotional punch as well as the culmination of a big journey that we've taken with some old, old friends.

Images via TrekCore

Get a better look at the evil soul-sucking baddies Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and director Edgar Wright are teaming up to fight in their new apocalypse comedy The World's End. This will be the finale to the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy, and while we haven't even seen the movie yet, we already miss this trio. Hopefully the end of the Cornetto trilogy doesn't mean the end of these three fellas working together.

The World's End premieres on August 23rd.

[Via Yahoo]