Category: SFnal

MSNBC had a fascinating article today on a form of synthetic telepathy being developed by the US Army, to be used for creating voice mail and email:

To those who might be nervous about thought-based communication turning into a sci-fi comedy of errors, D’Zmura says not to worry. Mind-message composition would take specific conscious thoughts and training to develop them. The device would also have a on/off switch.

“When I was a kid I occasionally said things that were inappropriate, and I learned not to do that,” said D’Zmura. “I think that people would learn to think in a way the computer couldn’t interpret. Or they can just switch it off.”

The notion of learning to hide your off-topic thoughts from such a device, and how that might be accomplished, is interesting.

“But science fiction eventually becomes true, doesn’t it?”

Rhetorical question by Dr. Steven Wolf of Brooke Army Medical Center, in this story on attempting to regrow human limbs.

Would love to hear this group’s thoughts. :-)

CNN ran a story today on a Boston University professor who composes science songs, and they showed a short clip of him singing one about a black hole.

I of course had to search out the archive of all his songs.

They’re fun and made me laugh a lot. :-) “Bad Data” particularly cracked me up, though the clips his colleagues took of him surreptitiously performing “Superliminal Lover” are also not to be missed.

This article notes that physicists in Denmark have succeeded in teleporting “a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms” a distance of half a meter. I wish the article went into a bit more detail, but it is very interesting nonetheless.

What I love the most about really good science fiction ideas is knowing that they could become reality.

Superhuman senses through your tongue. How cool can you get?