Category: ideas

“Atwood has a foolproof plan to stop our increasingly intelligent and powerful machines from rising up and taking over control of the planet: Make sure any robots we build have an easy-access ‘off’ switch.”

“The crystals, measuring just 7.7 nanometers on average, pack together more densely than any other previous method. The result: three Blu-Rays’ worth of data can fit on one square inch of Sony’s new wonder-tape.”

“Here is the future, we are made to understand: we can either get on board or stand athwart it and get run over. The same kind of revolutionary rhetoric appears again and again in the new books on the digital humanities, from writers with very different degrees of scholarly commitment and intellectual sophistication.”

Megan Garber looks at the nature of sound, how acousticians are changing the way cities regulate noise, how engineers can alter sound levels in everything from earbuds to buildings, and how appliance manufacturers calibrate the noises their products make so that the sounds become marketing tools. (includes audio deconstruction of a vacuum cleaner)

Scott Samuelson: “I also teach Plato to nurses’ aides, soldiers, ex-cons, preschool music teachers, janitors, Sudanese refugees, prospective wind-turbine technicians, and any number of other students who feel like they need a diploma as an entry ticket to our economic carnival. As a result of my work, I’m in a unique position to reflect on the current discussion about the value of the humanities, one that seems to me to have lost its way.”

“Scientists are making significant strides when it comes to modeling computers on the power and efficiency of your brain, an ongoing project that could transform both health and computing.”

“Being snubbed by a luxury store only increases your desire for its goods, according to a new study.”

“What they’ve done–so far, anyway–really doesn’t live up to what most people have in mind when they think about mind reading. Then again, the stuff they actually can do is pretty amazing. And they’re getting better at it, little by little.”

“How do you change people’s minds when arguing the facts only seems to lead to polarization? Commentator Tania Lombrozo wonders how we can overcome our disagreements about teaching evolution.”

Sergei Gepshtein believes the cinema of the future might even be a shared, immersive experience, one in which the events seem to unfold all around the viewer. “You could enter it like architecture, and there could be other people in the same space,” he says.