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Posts Tagged “

Futurism

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mad science

A Chinese Cure for Internet Addiction

It's the future of nanotech pseudo-science and rehab all rolled into one strange package. Fritz Hoffmann took this picture for National Geographic in Guangdong province capital city Guangzhou. Apparently these strange masks, which remind me of something out of a cyberpunk anime, are "nanometer wave machines" used to cure addiction. The person second from right is being cured of "internet addiction." Other treatments include isolation and electro-shock. More »

3:41 PM on Thu May 8 2008
By Annalee Newitz
1,174 views, 22 comments

Latest by Torley: The quack klaxons are in full blare - they're really trying to get people addicted to these helmets before selling them as a new fashion trend. :p more »

freaky polymers

Crispy Noodles Fuel Next-Gen Hydrogen Cars

Crispy noodles are the missing link between today's carbon-emitting cars and tomorrow's clean hydrogen cars. It turns out that the structure of crispy noodles — rigid, twisty, and porous — perfectly matches that of a new polymer developed to trap and reuse hydrogen atoms in new "green" cars. University of Manchester researcher Peter Budd helped develop the polymer, which he calls a 'polymer of intrinsic microporosity,' or PIM. And he explains it entirely in terms of noodles. More »

1:15 PM on Tue May 6 2008
By Annalee Newitz
455 views, 7 comments

Latest by jood42: Religion and science finally merge in an acceptable way! more »

dystopia

The Sunset Splendor of Ozone

This glorious picture of the sunset by Eschipul in Houston reveals a sky flooded with ozone, a form of airborne pollution. In fact, the American Lung Association just ranked Houston number 5 for ozone pollution in its annual list of most polluted cities. Pollution makes sunsets extra-beautiful, as you can see in the two other sunsets (below) from more "winners" on the ALA's list. More »

6:08 PM on Fri May 2 2008
By Annalee Newitz
48,736 views, 35 comments

Latest by CmdrHunt: @strider_mt2k: So true. Nice one with the Indian crying! That's old school nostalgia right there. more »

futurism

A T-Shirt to Get You Ready for the 2012 Olympics

With everybody freaking out about this year's Olympic Games, the only thing a future-thinking person can possibly do is focus on the 2012 games — and this "Apocolympics 2012" tee from Terratag is the perfect thing (modeled by a guy from London dance troupe Renegade Dance). UK company Terratag makes a ton of amazing, future-minded designs with a trippy manga sensibility. They've got an entire line of mecha and gundam shirts, including ones with laser eyes. See more cute dancers in more cute robo-future tees, below. More »

12:38 PM on Fri May 2 2008
By Annalee Newitz
1,678 views, 13 comments

Latest by bluewyvern: That guy is stepping on his pants. STOP STEPPING ON YOUR PANTS! more »

mega history

Meet the "Partisan Generation" That Gave You LSD, Conan, and Joseph Campbell

With the recent death of Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD, it's a perfect time to travel back in time and assess how Hofmann's generation helped shape their future — in other words, our present day. Luckily the Boston Globe's Joshua Glenn is here to help you sort it all out. In a recent post on his Brainiac blog, Glenn writes about the "Partisan Generation," which includes Hofmann as well as Joseph "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" Campbell. This generation, born 1904-13, also includes a generation of science fiction writers who made SF mainstream. More »

8:20 AM on Thu May 1 2008
By Annalee Newitz
1,111 views, 21 comments

Latest by laughingacademy: He doesn't associate A.E. van Vogt with science fiction? Must not have read Slan. Its the ultimate fanboy fantasy: the hero is a member of a scorned but gifted minority whose parents die to save his life and leave him more »

roflcon

Are Tron Guy and Xkcd the Future of Celebrity?

If you ever watched the Star Wars Kid and Homestar Runner, or gawked at the Tron Guy and web comic Xkcd, you're changing the future of celebrity. You're building a world where Paris Hilton and Tom Cruise will be replaced by captioned pictures of cats and clever comics about algebra. At least, that was the premise of a conference held over the weekend at MIT called ROFLCon, which brought together the web's most famous meme-disseminators to prove that In The Future, Fame Will Be Different. Will it really? More »

8:20 AM on Tue Apr 29 2008
By Annalee Newitz
2,318 views, 35 comments

Latest by jmaynard: @perun99: no one is aching to be with Tron Guy With all due respect, sir or ma'am: How do you know who does or does not want to be with me? @Metropolis: I know I really dont need to see the Tron more »

dystopia

Life Expectancy Going Down in the United States

In some parts of the United States, medicine has not improved the average life expectancy — and in fact, the average lifespan has been going steadily downward since the 1980s. No, immigration is not to blame for these shifting numbers. These are U.S. citizens in hundreds of different counties whose lives are getting shorter while many other people's lives get longer. A study published on Monday in PLoS Medicine shows where in the U.S. lives (especially women's lives) are getting shorter — and where they're getting longer. In these maps, dark red regions are those of decreasing life expectancy, and dark green regions are areas where it's increasing. Light red means life expectancy is lower than average but not decreasing; and light green means higher than average but not increasing. White is average. So what is killing people at younger ages now that didn't kill them in the 1970s? More »

3:56 PM on Wed Apr 23 2008
By Annalee Newitz
4,859 views, 50 comments

Latest by ragsnotriches: It's disgusting and morally reprehensible that the richest country in the world is literally eating itself to death while untold millions starve because they were unlucky enough to be born in a "poor" country. more »

pseudo science

The Pseudo-Sciences You're Most Likely to See in the Next 50 Years

For every scientific breakthrough, you can expect a new branch pseudo-science that will mirror genuine science in some distorted way. In the nineteeth century, the young branch of engineering that spawned electrical current also spawned quack "electrotherapies" that promised to heal you with the amazing powers of electricity. And phrenology (reading your personality through bumps on your head) became popular just as neuroscience and psychiatry were taking their first baby steps. What new psuedo-sciences can you expect in the twenty-first century? We've got some ideas. More »

1:40 PM on Wed Apr 23 2008
By Annalee Newitz
6,216 views, 26 comments

Latest by Silver_Back: @Jeff-Minor: Or a dreaded LOLCat virus! O_O more »

rant

Future Scenarios that Don't Look Like SciFi Are Wrong

Science fiction is the go-to genre when you're looking for a glimpse of the future. Joel Achenbach makes a persuasive case in the Sunday Washington Post that the best way to stay in front of the dizzying pace of technological progress is to keep up on your Star Trek and take what Arthur C. Clarke wrote to heart. He also quotes Foresight Nanotech Institute President Christine Peterson, who says, "If you look out into the long-term future and what you see looks like science fiction, it might be wrong. But if it doesn't look like science fiction, it's definitely wrong." More »

9:29 AM on Tue Apr 15 2008
By Michael Reilly
2,977 views, 28 comments

Latest by Ubik2501: Even the "soft" SF writers get a lot of things right. For instance, Philip K. Dick predicted that an absurdly high proportion of the internet would be used for porn and cybersex in _Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said_, and more »

replaced by machines

Will Efficient Social Software Take Your Job Away?

Social software sites like Flickr and Digg aren't just distracting you from your job — they could actually make your job disappear in the next high tech economic revolution. Get ready to retrain yourself right now. A new book by NYU interactive telecommunications professor Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, is a good place to start. Although Shirky predicts the demise or extreme downscaling of a lot of familiar jobs right now — everything from design to procedural legal work — he's also got a lot of telling observations about the future of work, social relationships, and even politics, based on years of researching how people communicate online. We cornered Shirky on IM and asked him about the future of our jobs in a world where everyone can publish and collaborate online for free. More »

4:30 PM on Fri Apr 11 2008
By Annalee Newitz
9,690 views, 21 comments

Latest by Asari: The creative firm i work for occasionally farms out projects overseas. One time, a highly-respected creative team from overseas spent two weeks working only on one project. they didn't come up with anything decent, and the client was not happy. So my more »

found footage

Laurie Anderson's Petrochemical Arms

One of the weirdest moments in pop music has to be the brief, early-1980s rise to fame of radical alterna-electro-artist Laurie Anderson. Her eight-and-a-half minute song "O Superman" (whose complete video you can see here) caught on in England and then spread to the U.S. With her androgynously-modded voice, multi-media performance style, and mad-scientist hair, Anderson was like some kind of cyber-alien in the days before most people knew what "cyber" meant. In "O Superman," she sings about nukes, computers, and the future. Anderson is still writing great music, mostly performing to an artsy crowd. But for a brief moment in 1981, she was a mainstream pop star. Eventually, this music video showed up on VH-1, in a shortened version. [Laurie Anderson]

5:38 PM on Wed Apr 9 2008
By Annalee Newitz
2,885 views, 39 comments

Latest by brianeisley: I've worshiped Laurie Anderson for over 20 years. Seen her perform three times and planning the fourth. And I have just about everything she's ever released, including the incredibly rare Home of the Brave movie on VHS, plus bootlegs of more »

design

Office in an Ice Vault

You've already seen the Japanese office with bizarre U-shaped partitions and a portable desk for global nomads. Experimental office space is all the rage. That's why Gyro, a brand advertising firm based in Philly, filled their bare-bones concrete offices with these giant translucent pivoting screens that look like ice vaults. Left open, they create one giant room; closed, they partition off meeting areas and hallways. I hear they're great for storing zombies, too. [Duggan Morris Architects ]

8:40 AM on Mon Apr 7 2008
By LISA KATAYAMA
3,068 views, 4 comments

Latest by Tiwa: this one is winning so far in my office of the future...let's hope the next one tops it. more »

mad robotics

Suburb-Eating Robots Run on Fat Reclaimed from Liposuction

It may look like a smiling mecha puppy of vast proportions, but this suburb-eating robot is a vicious destroyer of suburbs and suburbanites whose giant legs pulverize housing tracts in order to plant new forests. The creation of Australian firm Andrew Maynard Architects, the suburb-eating robots will be deployed to clean up abandoned, decaying suburbs in Australia when peak oil forces people to stop driving cars and move into the urban centers. These mega-bots are going into production in 2019, and their engines will be fueled entirely by human fat. More »

7:00 AM on Mon Apr 7 2008
By Annalee Newitz
1,914 views, 18 comments

Latest by montsnmags: @MickyK: Nah, mate, it's real, and you bastards better watchyerarse because by "outer suburbs" we mean "everywhere not 'ere" and by "fat buggers" we mean you. We figured that if we crossed a retired car-assembly robot (well, we're not making more »

dystopia

A Twelve-Layer Freeway Clover for Los Angeles

If you have too many cars on the freeway, the best thing to do is go vertical and build a skyscraper road system. Here is one possible way to do that, layering roads on top of each other until the traffic thins out. Perfect for Los Angeles, where it often takes three hours to cross town on the freeways. [Core Form-ula via Next Nature]

7:00 AM on Fri Apr 4 2008
By Annalee Newitz
2,111 views, 78 comments

Latest by Klebert L. Hall: @92BuickLeSabre: Possibly. I find there are good things about living in the city, but I would never own property there (unless I was absurdly rich). I like not having to see, hear, and interact with my neighbors, which my 5.25 acre lot more »

futurism

Data Mining Software Predicts How Depressing the Future Will Be

Try reading the news today and not getting depressed about the future. We're looking at tomorrows full of climate change, looming pandemics, and overpopulation. But just how unhappy do these possible future trends make us? Alberto Pepe, a computer scientist at UCLA wanted to find out. So he collected 10,741 public 'time capsule' emails that people mailed in 2006 to their future selves on FutureMe. Pepe mined the data for 'mood' words — words like "angry," "discouraged," or "happy," tallied them all up, and assigned each email a mood category. And the results tell us exactly which years people think will be the most horrible. More »

9:30 AM on Thu Apr 3 2008
By Michael Reilly
1,255 views, 15 comments

Latest by 92BuickLeSabre: @albertopepe: "We are notoriously good at predicting the future." So you do feel this is a useful/interesting tool for actually imagining how good/bad the future is going to be? And not just an interesting measure of how perceive the future more »

futurism

Mental Illness on the Rise Throughout the Globe

It's become common sense to admit that war can make soldiers crazy — the condition has been called everything from "shell shock" to "post traumatic stress disorder." But now a study published yesterday offers concrete evidence that war drives civilians crazy too. In the first nationwide study of civilian mental health in war zones, a group of researchers in Lebanon surveyed thousands of people in that country to correlate their exposure to war with the likelihood that they would develop a mental illness. The results don't bode well for the future mental health of the globe. More »

12:45 PM on Tue Apr 1 2008
By Annalee Newitz
1,064 views, 26 comments

Latest by MarlboroTestMonkey7: Last week I saw german tv documentary which interviewed families on both sides of the Israel/Palestine conflict, I felt sorry and in despair because their unwillingness to see a way out, replacing all rational argument for a peaceful resolution with more »

to-do lists for futurists

20 Things You Can Put on Your To-Do List Now to Change the World in 100 Years

To-do lists are a great way to plan your week, and it turns out they're also not a bad tool for futurists either. We've put together 20 to-do list items that anyone can use to stop environmental disaster, speed the invention of artificial intelligence, jumpstart a moon colony, and help everyone become posthuman. Usually it seems like ordinary people can't contribute to massive projects that require scientific minds as well as philosophers and other specialists. But there are actually a lot of things you can do. Over the past week we've posted four separate to-do lists for futurists, and now we bring them all together so you can print them out, tuck them in your pocket, and start checking items off to change the world. More »

3:22 PM on Fri Mar 21 2008
By Annalee Newitz
16,132 views, 8 comments

Latest by Cheap Shot: @Grey_Area: I believe global warming and disease will help population control. Living off-world would be the best way to handle this problem but we would probably overpopulate another planet again within time. Humans grow more than twofold. We're like tribbles.[www.trekfrontier.com] more »

to-do lists for futurists

This Time Next Year, You Could Be Posthuman

Pundits from Bill McKibben to Susan Greenfield have written scare manifestos about the horrors of a posthuman future where everybody has souped-up DNA and can change their sexes like changing clothes. But here at io9, we are all about the posthuman future: we want to download data directly into our brains, grow a new set of arms (and then take them off again), get cybernetic implants that let us feel electro-magnetic fields, and house nano-colonies in our guts that keep us cancer-free. Plus, we want to have emotional relationships with robots that go beyond hurling our cell phones across the room and crooning to our spastic Linux boxes. If you want to be posthuman too, or transhuman or cyborgian, you'll be waiting a long time. But we've got five things you can put on your to-do list today to make all of us more posthuman by this time next year. More »

1:18 PM on Fri Mar 21 2008
By Annalee Newitz
6,168 views, 26 comments

Latest by ginocoolowski: Wait wait? We are talking about Implants, and we are giving ourselves the most mundane things "Opens car doors, can log into your computer" thats stuff I can do now in fractions of a second. What we need are implants more »