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Sure, sugar's bad for you. But should we establish a drinking age for sugary sodas? According to UC San Francisco pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, the answer is emphatically yes. He says that added sweeteners have health effects comparable to alcohol and tobacco, and should be regulated accordingly. In a comment piece for the journal Nature, Lustig and his colleagues argue that the state should selectively block access to sugar, using some pretty stiff rules. More »
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Harold Finch and John Reese track potential crime victims using secret databases and a ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure in the new series Person of Interest. Their world is filled with street corner cameras and espionage — but in the real world, cameras and databases are tracking your every move just as carefully, to the point where you couldn't disappear if you wanted to. More »
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Being outside gives us a sense of freedom and spaciousness, and as far as some German engineers are concerned, that means increased work efficiency. That's why they've invented a "dynamic luminous ceiling" that simulates working outside during a clouding day. More »
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Many corporate work environments are designed to encourage optimum efficiency. Managers want to encourage productivity with the amount of light and music, or discourage socializing by erecting walls. Do any of these tactics work at all? And if they do, how is your work environment influencing you? More »
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In a technological twist that could be interpreted as either practical or downright Orwellian, a San-Francisco-based startup has collaborated with TV companies to bring you a television that keeps tabs on what you're watching in an unprecedented way. Using the data it collects, your TV reports your viewing to websites and online advertisers in real time so as to personally tailor your web-browsing experience. (Or enslave you to The Man. One of those two things.) More »
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A group of scientists did an experiment where they were actually able to see the process of memories being rewritten in a person's brain — as a result of peer pressure. More »
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A research group have developed an edible RFID chip. It's possible that this could lead to the perfect way to track ethically produced food or count calories, or find out what every single person in a diner is eating so you can shame them for it. More »
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Social scientists have long known that people manage their reputations by modifying their behavior in public. But new research out of Australia now shows that this tendency to "act appropriately" extends beyond our actions and into our moral judgments. More »
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In a small Spanish town, people celebrate the summer solstice by walking over beds of hot coals. A team of scientists wondered how this fire-walking ritual could enhance group bonding, and discovered something extraordinary. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5797994&view=rss&microfeed=true Yesterday the Guardian ran an intriguing article by Amelia Hill about the rise of drugs that could enhance our moral sensibilities. And by "moral," what is generally meant is non-violent and empathetic to strangers, as well as future generations. Here's a chunk of interesting observations from it: More »
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Ever wanted to spend your day watching yourself in third-person shooter mode, seeing the world from behind your head or over your shoulder? Now you can, thanks to Korean artist Hwang Kim's CCTV chandelier, the ultimate surveillance accessory. More »
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You control your urges for violence and sex using a tiny tangle of neurons located in a very ancient part of your brain. Now it turns out that this knot of nerves, located in the hypothalamus, can be controlled with a new gene therapy technique that uses flashes of light. What this means is that scientists may be on the verge of turning us into mindless soldiers, unable to stop ourselves from attacking anyone or anything that gets in our way. But this discovery is also the perfect shutdown command for people who can't control their violent urges. Either way you look at it, in ten years, we could be manipulating people's most primal urges with beams of light. More »
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With the threat of today's protests looming in Egypt, on Thursday Egyptian authorities cut the nation off the internet. No online communication could pass in or out of the country. We investigated whether a similar lockdown could happen in America. More »
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Yesterday Facebook rolled out a new ad system where people's updates get converted into "sponsored story" ads fed to their friends. But this is hardly the first time advertisers have tried to feed us ads stealth-style. More »
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The power of coincidence may help identify the social ties of even the most privacy-conscious web user, a new study of image-sharing site Flickr suggests. More »
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IBM's wants to patent a geegaw called the "SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR CONTROLLING VEHICLE ENGINE RUNNING STATE AT BUSY INTERSECTIONS FOR INCREASED FUEL CONSUMPTION EFFICIENCY." In other words, the traffic light is in charge of when you stop and go. More »
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Exposure to the common hormone oxytocin, which is associated with feelings of trust and pleasure, makes people more likely to trust their government. A scientist says he's proven that authorities could use hormones, rather than promises, to gain public trust. More »
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Face-recognition technology is already helping surveillance cameras pick out individual faces of suspects, and even smartphone apps may soon allow you to ID strangers on the street. Privacy lovers could soon paint on anti-face-recognition camo that protects against being identified. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5510040&view=rss&microfeed=true Over at Foreign Policy blog Passport, we get the answer: It's England. Says Passport: More »
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Need another reason to be paranoid about companies and governments watching what you're doing online? A technology researcher has created a web tool that shows just how easy it is to identify you based on nothing more than a click. More »
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If you could slip a harmless substance into your town's drinking water that would prevent people from getting high on cocaine, would you do it? A new discovery means this is no longer a hypothetical question. More »
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You've probably already bought clothing with computer chips in it. You know those big white tags that you're supposed to cut out of the garment once you've bought it? Hold one up to the light - if you see a very obvious pattern in it like the one above, then it's got an RFID tag in it. Now tech market research group ABI Research has released a new paper showing that three times as many clothing items will be tagged with RFIDs by the year 2014. More »
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Dopamine is infamous as a pleasure-inducing brain chemical: It's the neurotransmitter released when you smoke a cigarette or snort cocaine. But a new study published today shows that dopamine is also key to keeping people terrified for long periods. More »
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Thousands of people last week discovered that Amazon had quietly removed electronic copies of George Orwell's 1984 from their Kindle e-book readers. In the process, Amazon revealed how easy censorship will be in the Kindle age. More »
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More than 500 employees of Keihin Electric Express Railway in Japan will be subject to "smile checks" every morning. Software will evaluate the quality of their grins, and alert them if they aren't looking happy enough. More »
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For every 100 girls born in China during 2005, 120 boys were born. A new demographic study shows that the biggest population control experiment in history has turned China's youth into the "male generation." More »
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Want to track your boyfriend's every movement? Just slip this GPS tracker into his breakfast, and it will stay in his system for 72 hours - while you track him online. And there's more. More »
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Recently, we asked whether designer babies were OK. I’d like to reopen that discussion, because it’s such a complex question, with no easy answers. So let me start by saying: No, obviously they are not. More »
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A recent poll by Spanish research foundation BBVA reveals that the majority of people in the developed world favor reproductive technologies like IVF. However, the majority are against using these technologies to choose the sex of children. Over at Sentient Developments, futurist George Dvorsky asks why this prejudice exists. He's "flabbergasted" that people are favor of mixing babies up in test tubes, but not in favor of choosing to implant a fertilized egg that will be male rather than female. He thinks that's just unreasonable. More »
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Right now, people all over the world are being made smarter through a simple food additive. The plan to unleash this additive on the world, called "the micronutrient initiative," has already boosted IQs in Pakistan by as much as 12-13 points. Is it really a good idea to put brain-changing additives in the food supply like this, even if it's for a good cause? More »
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A new pre-natal screening program in Denmark has halved the number of babies with Down's Syndrome. The success of the program, undeniably a form of eugenics, raises a number of questions about how far people should go with pre-natal screening - and what kinds of conditions merit termination of a pregnancy. More »
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Video surveillance is the hot new thing. Tech market think tank ABI Research has just come out with a new study predicting that the global video surveillance market will "expand from revenue of about $13.5 billion in 2006 to a remarkable $46 billion in 2013." In a press release only Philip K. Dick could love, ABI gushes excitedly about all the fun new uses of the vidcams and databases you could be manufacturing, buying, and selling to the surveillance-craving masses. More »
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If you want to spend your Friday evening contemplating the joys of alien-based paranoia, plus a little wrestling, then there's nothing better than a nice heaping of They Live. Released in the late 1980s, this ironic-paranoid classic was John Carpenter's giant fuck you to the Reagan Administration and social conformity of all types. Aliens have taken over, and are controlling all of the United States (and perhaps the whole world) by beaming a signal into everybody's mind that masks the true aliens, as well as the "obey" signs they've planted everywhere. In this awesome scene, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper puts on some sunglasses that allow him to see the truth. It's like the "taking the red pill" moment — suddenly the extent of his manipulation becomes clear. More »
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So you get a job in customer service, and your boss says your dealings with customers are going to be monitored for "quality." No, you won't be on CCTV — you'll be wearing a watch-sized device on your wrist that tracks your emotions by measuring heart rate, your location, body temperature, and skin moisture levels. This device will be sending your data via bluetooth to a central database. If you get too angry or too sleepy while dealing with a customer, your boss will be alerted with a message. Too much anger, and you might be fired. It sounds like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel, but it's actually a realistic application for a piece of technology called the BT2, released today by Exmocare. More »
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This is what a mass evacuation from a city looks like from space. Using satellites orbiting over Africa, human rights groups published UNOSAT satellite imagery to show, in very simple terms, the human cost of violence in the Chadian capital city of N'Djamena. Over 10,000 people are crammed on a bridge, trying to escape into the neighboring nation of Cameroon. The black dots are people, and the yellow dashes are vehicles, most likely trucks and buses. It's a chilling portrait of the human future, wracked with violence and recorded via space-based surveillance devices, taken on February 27. See the full map below. More »
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The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) has blocked the entire nation of Pakistan from looking at video-sharing site YouTube. Apparently the PTA is trying to prevent citizens from watching an anti-Islam viral video called Fitna made by right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders (pictured here, looking weirdly like an alien from This Island Earth). This is yet another sign that futurists who predicted that the internet would break down national barriers were dead wrong. Instead, nations have learned how to redraw their boundaries in cyberspace. [AP via Physorg] More »
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You can gage how busy New York City is by looking at all the people swarming in the streets, or by smelling the giant piles of trash they've left at the curbs. But there are ways to take stock of the city's populace that are far more revealing. For a new MoMa exhibit this month, MIT's Senseable City Lab chose to expose how talkative New York is by tracking lines of electronic communication into and out of the city. Their project is aptly named the New York Talk Exchange (NYTE). It's also inadvertently a portrait of digital surveillance, showing exactly how easy it is for people to use phone records to monitor which countries New Yorkers are ringing up. More »
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It's probably not a great idea to smoke while you do brain surgery and insert mind-control electrodes into little kids' heads. But that's how you can tell the Canuxploitation film Terminal City Ricochet takes place in a future dystopia. Besides implants that let the mayor to control your kids' brains using a video-game remote control, the authoritarian society also uses television, consumerist crap... and thuggish police led by the Dead Kennedys' Jello Biafra. Why is this movie not available on video? More »
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Security checkpoints could do a full-body scan and check your skeleton against the bone structures of known terrorists in a few years. A new patent, issued on Friday, covers a system that would scan some, or all, of your skeleton and compare it with a database of skeletons. The database would also pull up data such as your name, address, social security number, and passport number. Worst of all, you might not even know your skeleton is being scanned from a distance. More »
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What happens when Google street view is no longer content with showing incredibly detailed pictures of the outside of your house? This hilarious science fiction video by the Vacationeers follows Google's omni-cam to its most invasive extreme... and of course they posted it on YouTube. More »
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