Patrick Sisson, for Curbed: What were your influences for Blade Runner? For a city in 2019, which isn’t that far from now, I used the model of Western cities like New York or Chicago that were laid out after the invention of mass transit and automobiles, with grids and linear transport. I thought, we’re at 2,500…
Dan Goodin, for Ars Technica: The profiling works by measuring the minute differences in the way each person presses keys on computer keyboards. Since the pauses between keystrokes and the precise length of time each key is pressed are unique for each person, the profiles act as a sort of digital fingerprint that can betray…
Amy Maxmen, for Wired: Crispr goes well beyond anything the Asilomar conference discussed. It could at last allow genetics researchers to conjure everything anyone has ever worried they would—designer babies, invasive mutants, species-specific bioweapons, and a dozen other apocalyptic sci-fi tropes. It brings with it all-new rules for the practice of research in the life…
Christian Nutt, for Gamasutra: The catch? Gender will be randomly assigned, which mirrors Facepunch’s policy on race. If gender functions the same as race in Rust, it will also be tied to the player’s SteamID and unchangeable. “I would love nothing more than if playing a black guy in a game made a white guy…
Erika Hayasaki, for Pacific Standard: Salinas is peculiarly attuned to the sensations of others. If he sees someone slapped across the cheek, Salinas feels a hint of the slap against his own cheek. A pinch on a stranger’s right arm might become a tickle on his own. “If a person is touched, I feel it,…
Alexa Tsoulis-Reay, from Science of Us, talks with someone with profound Prosopagnosia: Say I showed you a bowl of fruit for 20 seconds. You would remember it as a bowl of fruit. If I let some time pass and asked you to tell me where the apple, pears, and bananas were positioned, you probably wouldn’t…
Nathan McAlone, for Business Insider Australia: Doppler Labs isn’t interested in blocking out all natural noise and pumping pre-recorded sound into your ears. The team wants to change the sounds that are coming in. They want you to customise your sonic world in exactly the way you want. Imagine being able to turn up the bass at…
Helen Thomson, for BBC: What would you do if you had 60 days of extra free time a year? Ask Abby Ross, a retired psychologist from Miami, Florida, a “short-sleeper”. She needs only four hours sleep a night, so has a lot of spare time to fill while the rest of the world is in…
Alastair Sooke, for BBC: Yet, if we’re honest, how much do most of us really know about its creator, the Dutch printmaker MC Escher (1898-1972)? The truth is that outside his homeland Escher remains something of an enigma. Moreover, despite the popularity of his fastidious optical illusions, Escher continues to suffer from snobbery within the…