I’m not saying it’s aliens, but…

Originally shared by K.B. Burnfield

Astronomers may have found giant alien ‘megastructures’ orbiting star near the Milky Way

Whoa…

A large cluster of objects in space look like something you would “expect an alien civilization to build”, astronomers have said.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish a report on the “bizarre” star system suggesting the objects could be a “swarm of megastructures”, according to a new report.

Here’s the link to the source of this story and its even more interesting and exciting:

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-most-interesting-star-in-our-galaxy/410023/

https://richarddawkins.net/2015/10/astronomers-may-have-found-giant-alien-megastructures-orbiting-star-near-the-milky-way/

Full of good stuff for one of my works-in-progress.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-humans-could-become-our-own-walking-hard-drives

Via Larry Panozzo: a cunning plan to hack the nervous system in order to help chronic pain, PTSD and other issues. 

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/biomedical/bionics/darpa-wants-to-jolt-the-nervous-system-with-electricity-lasers-sound-waves-and-magnets

So I have a mid-future SF setting on simmer where technology has become a lot “softer” (read: more organic, in the background, largely unnoticed). As part of that, I’d like to have a mesh network of genetically-engineered microbes exchanging P2P wifi signals. They’re in plants, animals, people, and so the Net is everywhere. 

My problem is, what stops these microbes evolving back into non-wifi-enabled microbes that would have an advantage over the wifi-enabled ones (because they wouldn’t be using energy to broadcast radio signals, and would get to use it for themselves)? What advantage is there to a microbe in being part of a mesh network?

Lacerant Plainer, Peter Smalley: any thoughts?  

From BBC Future, a summary of the many different reasons that people are building downwards.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150421-will-we-ever-live-underground

Relevant to my New Stability setting.

Originally shared by Laston Kirkland

Good article tying IOT, 3d printing, and collaborative commons together

http://whartonmagazine.com/issues/summer-2015/welcome-to-the-third-industrial-revolution/

I currently have two fictional settings in development along these lines (by which I mean I may get round to writing stories in them someday, and am having fun playing with the ideas).

One is a supers setting, in which a rogue scientist has used the CRISPR/CAS9 gene-modifying technique in scientifically (more-or-less) credible ways to create babies with superpowers. She’s discovered and shut down, but now the government has these babies. They can’t just kill them, and… it would be kind of a waste. How about raising them to be loyal?

No way that could go wrong.

The other setting is a mid-future one, where the answer to “should we do these things?” has become “no” in a post-capitalist society that’s turned away from constant change in favour of the New Stability. Before they reached that point, though, there was a lot of biotinkering, and the results are still around. People just don’t think about them much (like we don’t think about the social and technological changes brought about by industrialism, because we grew up with them).

Originally shared by Eduardo Suastegui

We Can Edit Genomes, Create Synthetic Life, and Remake the World. But Should We?

http://www.popsci.com/we-can-edit-genomes-create-synthetic-life-and-remake-world-but-should-we

Sounds like they used fMRI, so we’re a little way from a portable, always-on emotion reader, but it sounds like one would be feasible.

Via Larry Panozzo.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150811103648.htm