SAN FRANCISCO, 10:54 AM, SAT JUL 19 | 21 POSTS IN THE LAST 24 HOURS | tips@io9.com | RSS
Posts Tagged “

Greg Bear

”
evolution

7 Totally AWESOME Theories Of Evolution From Scifi

If Ben Stein really wants to convince us all that evolution is a crock, he doesn't need to make a documentary and play semantic games with Richard Dawkins. He just has to sit us down and make us watch this episode of Star Trek: Voyager, where traveling at super-warp speed causes Janeway and Paris to super-evolve into lizards (and make lizard babies.) But it's not just Voyager — science fiction provides a ton of evolution theories that make intelligent design seem downright sensible. More »

5:02 PM on Wed Apr 30 2008
By Charlie Jane Anders
8,254 views, 57 comments

Latest by n/a: @Charlie Jane Anders actually while mutation may not always be positive, evolution -- ie., natural selection -- is always an improvement. It's just that what us humans consider an improvement and what Streptococcus considers an improvement are very different things. more »

steal this pitch

Your Face Cream Will One Day Eat The World

Artificial intelligences aren't going to take over Earth by building a bunch of robotic fashion models to karate-chop us to death. Instead, the A.I. takeover will come from a nasty nano-tech sludge that consumes all matter in its path to recreate itself endlessly. This "gray goo" scenario has popped up in novels by Walter Jon Williams, Rudy Rucker and Greg Bear, but it hasn't yet appeared in any major movies. Here's how we would tell a Hollywood-friendly "gray goo" story. More »

Feature

9:00 AM on Wed Feb 27 2008
By Charlie Jane Anders
1,344 views, 22 comments

Latest by radio1: I'd love Bloom or Blood Music to be a movie... more »

fictional trends

Science Fiction Farts of Death

Fart danger is everywhere recent science fiction. First there was Greg Bear's novel Vitals, in which an evil Soviet conspiracy leads to targeted biological mind-control attacks. How do you know somebody has been taken over by mind-controlling bacteria? They start farting. Doctor Who took this idea a step further. More »

11:42 AM on Fri Nov 16 2007
By Annalee Newitz
234 views, 1 comment

social control

Cop Block Comes To OnStar

SF writer Greg Bear, author of classics like Darwin's Radio and Blood Music, wrote a novel that predicted yesterday's announcement from OnStar that they would be installing systems that allow police to shut your car down. The OnStar system is called "Stolen Vehicle Slowdown," and when activated would slow down and stop a moving car that police believe meets "required criteria." Bear's imaginary system is called Cop Block, and it appears in his recent novel Quantico. In Quantico, police suspicion is aroused by anyone who does not have Cop Block installed in their cars. Sounds pretty close to real life. What Bear doesn't get into is what the blogosphere is buzzing about right now: what happens if somebody spoofs a signal to OnStar and starts shutting cars down on the freeway? It would be sort of like TV-B-Gone, except dangerously deadly. AP Photo by Douglas C. Pizac.

OnStar Will Soon Let Police Stop Your Car [via Technovelgy]

More »

3:15 PM on Wed Oct 10 2007
By Annalee Newitz
23 views, Comment