Daniel Engber, for The New Yorker: I liked the Herzog movie, as well as Godard’s, which made a fetish of its glitchy, sloppy stereography. But I worry that films like these reveal an overarching and myopic ideology, in which 3-D serves as anti-art, or as a tool for the puncturing of spectacle. That mixes up 3-D…
John Hopkins University news release: In a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, researchers led by cognitive psychologist Jonathan Flombaum dispute standard assumptions about memory, demonstrating for the first time that people’s memories for colors are biased in favor of “best” versions of basic colors over colors they actually saw. For example, there’s azure, there’s…
Paul Halpern, on Medium, quoting Freeman Dyson: It is impossible to calculate in detail the long-range future of the universe without including the effects of life and intelligence. It is impossible to calculate the capabilities of life and intelligence without touching, at least peripherally, philosophical questions. If we are to examine how intelligent life may…
Natalie Wolchover, for Quanta Magazine: What if the Higgs mass, and by implication the laws of nature, are unnatural? Calculations show that if the mass of the Higgs boson were just a few times heavier and everything else stayed the same, protons could no longer assemble into atoms, and there would be no complex structures — no…
Quanta Magazine’s Natalie Wolchover interviews computer scientist Stuart Russell about the future of artificial intelligence: You could say machines should err on the side of doing nothing in areas where there’s a conflict of values. That might be difficult. I think we will have to build in these value functions. If you want to have a domestic robot in…
Vanity Fair’s Bruce Handy talks to costume designer Michael Kaplan about his experience with costume design, and how things have changed since his original stint with Blade Runner: I think I was the only one who read the script and felt that it should have an old Sam Spade, old gumshoe kind of feeling. When I…
Alex French and Howie Kahn, for Wired: Industrial Light & Magic was born in a sweltering warehouse behind the Van Nuys airport in the summer of 1975. Its first employees were recent college graduates (and dropouts) with rich imaginations and nimble fingers. They were tasked with building Star Wars’ creatures, spaceships, circuit boards, and cameras. It…
Press release from Douglas Mental Health University Institute, on ScienceDaily: A new study … shows that while video game players (VGPs) exhibit more efficient visual attention abilities, they are also much more likely to use navigation strategies that rely on the brain’s reward system (the caudate nucleus) and not the brain’s spatial memory system (the hippocampus)….
Monique Patenaude, for the University of Rochester’s NewsCenter: As social creatures, we tend to mimic each other’s posture, laughter, and other behaviors, including how we speak. Now a new study shows that people with similar views tend to more closely mirror, or align, each other’s speech patterns. In addition, people who are better at compromising…
Jennifer Oulette, for Wired: It is common to speak of a “fabric” of space-time, a metaphor that evokes the concept of weaving individual threads together to form a smooth, continuous whole. That thread is fundamentally quantum. “Entanglement is the fabric of space-time,” said Swingle, who is now a researcher at Stanford University. “It’s the thread…
A lot of ink is being spilled about this lovely indie game, and surely the technology behind it is notable, regardless of the actual gameplay. Raffi Khatchadourian, for the New Yorker: To build a triple-A game, hundreds of artists and programmers collaborate in tight coördination: nearly every pixel in Grand Theft Auto’s game space has…
As important as dreaming about exotic EM engines—perhaps even more so—is thinking about various more feasible technologies. After all, those are the technologies we’ll actually develop first. Astronomer Alastair Reynolds explores these questions in an article for Reuters: That said, any civilization willing to contemplate an interstellar expedition at close to the speed of light might…
Elizabeth Svoboda, for Nautilus: [Computational linguist Simon] Kirby took a unique approach to probing the origins of language: He taught human participants novel languages he had made up. He and his colleagues showed human subjects cards with different shapes and pictures on them, taught them the words for these pictures, and tested them. “Whatever they…
LSU microbiologist Gary King, writing for Popular Mechanics: If we want to grow life in the watery-subsurface of Mars, King says, the opening move is identifying the right spot to start. The scant amount of subsurface water recently discovered does not suddenly transform Mars into a fertile Eden. However, “there’s no reason to suspect that the entirety of…
Laura Hudson for Boing Boing: As counterintuitive as it sounds, there’s something about interacting with Taylor through text messages that can feel very intimate, perhaps because we’ve grown so accustomed to communicating our most personal thoughts with our friends through texts—and waiting for their responses with bated breath. While some mobile games intentionally frustrate players…
Brian McConnell, writing for Centauri Dreams: A spaceship that is mostly water will be more like a cell than a conventional rocket plus capsule architecture. Space agriculture, or even aquaculture, becomes practical when water is abundant. Creature comforts that would be unthinkable in a conventional ship (hot baths anyone?) will be feasible in a spacecoach. Meanwhile,…
fxguide’s interviews are technical and in-depth, and this one’s no different. This time out, Mike Seymour visited Lola VFX to interview several members of their team to discuss, among other things, their fine facial work on films such as Benjamin Button, The Social Network, and the Captain America movies. But I have to say, one of my favorite parts is this aside:…
Chi Luu, for JSTOR Daily: In expletive infixation, common obscene expletives or their milder variants, such as fucking/fuckin, freaking, flipping, effing, goddamn, damn (and bloody/blooming in British and Australian English contexts) are inserted productively into words to express a stronger vehemence. absolutely: abso-fucking-lutely, abso-bloody-lutely, abso-goddamn-lutely, abso-freaking-lutely Minnesota: Minne-fucking-sota fantastic: fan-bloody-tastic We can see how different expletives can be inserted…
Kate Samuelson, for Motherboard: [James] Wannerton has a rare form of synaesthesia known as lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, meaning that his taste and hearing senses do not operate independently of each other. As a result, for Wannerton every word and every sound has a distinctive flavour. Although the words and sounds do not usually bear any relation…
UPDATE: Wired’s Katie M. Palmer has weighed in, explaining in very clear terms why this project is pure fantasy. I’m still a dreamer, and thoughts of hard-to-explain advancements still get my heart racing… but in the end, it’s about the science, and dreaming alone isn’t enough to get us to the stars: The reason the…
Smarter Every Day’s Destin Sandlin was presented with a backward-steering bike as a kind of joke. But his utter inability to control it sent him on an 8-month obsessive quest to remap his brain. And, as the clickbait headlines say: you’ll never believe what happened next. But seriously, it’s fascinating to see that exact moment when…
PBS Space Time host Gabe Perez-Giz examines several beloved sci-fi ships (and other constructions) to find out which might provide the most realistic feeling of gravity. 2001: A Space Odyssey introduced a lot of people to the idea of rotation based artificial gravity, but in sci-fi, it’s far from the only one to implement the idea! Babylon…
UCL News: Realising how places connect geographically causes local maps in the brain to join, forming one big map which helps with planning future journeys, finds a new UCL study. Changes like this can occur when people vary their route to work during a tube strike, for example. Commuters may be familiar with the location…
Jonathan Webb, for BBC News: In many cases it begins with partial hearing loss, sometimes due to loud noise wearing out the hair cells that convert sound waves into neural signals, inside the inner ear. The brain adjusts to that loss of input by boosting certain types of activity, creating the impression of a noise…
Tom Jacobs, for Pacific Standard: The behavior that had the greatest protective effect, at least in this relatively small study, was “artistic activity,” such as painting, drawing, and sculpting. “Long ago, ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’ was a common expression,” Dr. James Galvin writes in a comment accompanying the study, which is published…