Enter the Cyber-dragon

Lying there in the junk-mail folder, in the spammy mess of mortgage offers and erectile-dysfunction drug ads, an e-mail from an associate with a subject line that looked legitimate caught the man’s eye. The subject line said “2011 Recruitment Plan.” It was late winter of 2011. The man clicked on the message, downloaded the attached Excel spreadsheet file, and unwittingly set in motion a chain of events allowing hackers to raid the computer networks of his employer, RSA. RSA is the security division of the high-tech company EMC. Its products protect computer networks at the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, most top defense contractors, and a majority of Fortune 500 corporations.

The parent company disclosed the breach on March 17 in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The hack gravely undermined the reputation of RSA’s popular SecurID security service. As spring gave way to summer, bloggers and computer-security experts found evidence that the attack on RSA had come from China. They also linked the RSA attack to the penetration of computer networks at some of RSA’s most powerful defense-contractor clients—among them, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and L-3 Communications. Few details of these episodes have been made public.

(via Vanity Fair)

Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson

BLDGBLOG: Aestheticizing these sorts of disasters can also have the effect of making climate change sound like an adventure. In Fifty Degrees Below, for instance, you wrote: “People are already fond of the flood… It was an adventure. It got people out of their ruts.” The implication is that people might actually be excited about climate change. Is there a risk that all these reports about flooded cities and lost archipelagoes and new coastlines might actually make climate change sound like some sort of survivalist adventure?

Robinson: It’s a failure of imagination to think that climate change is going to be an escape from jail – and it’s a failure in a couple of ways.

For one thing, modern civilization, with six billion people on the planet, lives on the tip of a gigantic complex of prosthetic devices – and all those devices have to work. The crash scenario that people think of, in this case, as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed; your ability to feel confident about your own – and your family’s and your children’s – safety would be gone. People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario.

It’s easy to imagine people who are bored in the modern techno-surround, as I call it, and they’re bored because they have not fully comprehended that they’re still primates, that their brains grew over a million-year period doing a certain suite of activities, and those activities are still available. Anyone can do them; they’re simple. They have to do with basic life support and basic social activities unboosted by technological means.

And there’s an addictive side to this. People try to do stupid technological replacements for natural primate actions, but it doesn’t quite give them the buzz that they hoped it would. Even though it looks quite magical, the sense of accomplishment is not there. So they do it again, hoping that the activity, like a drug, will somehow satisfy the urge that it’s supposedly meant to satisfy. But it doesn’t. So they do it more and more – and they fall down a rabbit hole, pursuing a destructive and high carbon-burn activity, when they could just go out for a walk, or plant a garden, or sit down at a table with a friend and drink some coffee and talk for an hour. All of these unboosted, straight-forward primate activities are actually intensely satisfying to the totality of the mind-body that we are.

So a little bit of analysis of what we are as primates – how we got here evolutionarily, and what can satisfy us in this world – would help us to imagine activities that are much lower impact on the planet and much more satisfying to the individual at the same time. In general, I’ve been thinking: let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.

Because a lot of these supposed pleasures are really expensive. You pay with your life. You pay with your health. And they don’t satisfy you anyway! You end up taking various kinds of prescription or non-prescription drugs to compensate for your unhappiness and your unhealthiness – and the whole thing comes out of a kind of spiral: if only you could consume more, you’d be happier. But it isn’t true.

I’m advocating a kind of alteration of our imagined relationship to the planet. I think it’d be more fun – and also more sustainable. We’re always thinking that we’re much more powerful than we are, because we’re boosted by technological powers that exert a really, really high cost on the environment – a cost that isn’t calculated and that isn’t put into the price of things. It’s exteriorized from our fake economy. And it’s very profitable for certain elements in our society for us to continue to wander around in this dream-state and be upset about everything.

The hope that, “Oh, if only civilization were to collapse, then I could be happy” – it’s ridiculous. You can simply walk out your front door and get what you want out of that particular fantasy.

(via BLDGBLOG)

Growing a Brain in a Dish

Source.

That doughnut shape decorated with bright green spots, some connected by red pathways, amidst sky blue neighbors could be an artist’s creation, but is the result of a creative scientific attempt to grow an active brain in a dish, complete with memories. Really.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh published this stunning study in the journal Lab on a Chip {the full paper can be accessed here.} When I first learned how to grow cells in a lab, the technique of tissue culture, the idea of even growing brain cells was a far-fetched dream, much less brain cells capable of forming networks, complete with biological signals.

How did they do it?

To produce the models, the Pitt team stamped adhesive proteins onto silicon discs. Once the proteins were cultured and dried, cultured hippocampus cells from embryonic rats were fused to the proteins and then given time to grow and connect to form a natural network. The researchers disabled the cells’ inhibitory response and then excited the neurons with an electrical pulse.

Zeringue and his colleagues were able to sustain the resulting burst of network activity for up to what in neuronal time is 12 long seconds. Compared to the natural duration of .25 seconds at most, the model’s 12 seconds permitted an extensive observation of how the neurons transmitted and held the electrical charge, Zeringue said.

(via Dean’s Corner

)

adsertoris:

Metalosis Maligna (by floriskaayk)

For decades, metal has played an important role in the medical field. Whether it be used for artifical hips, steel rods, braces, or surgical screws, doctors and surgeons have used implanted metal, to help mend and repair our broken bodies.

A few years ago, something very strange and bizzare occurred. It was documented by medical professionals and here is the Video. The very metal implanted in our bodies can actually start to grow out of control. As the bone, muscle and tissue start to recede, it is replaced by this growing metal. The result is a grotesquely disfigured, part human, part mechanical form. This medical condition is referred to as Metalosis Maligna.

Humans are not the only victims of Metalosis Maligna. This disease can attack animals who have had metal surgical implants as well. Doctors and scientist world wide are racing to find a cure, before it reaches epidemic stages.

www.metalosis.com

Metalosis Maligna is a fictitious documentary, by Floris Kaayk , about a spectacular yet viciously “disabling disease which affects patients who have been fittedwith medical implants. Sourcing from such implants a wild metal growth ultimately transforms human patients into mechanical looking constructions.”

This way to the video

Via next nature.

Metalosis Maligna from floriskaayk on Vimeo.

(Source: heatnap)

A funny film adaptation of Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out Of Meat”.

moviesinframes:

Stalker, 1979 (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)

By 20buckspin

(via fuckyeahsciencefiction)

StarFox? StarFox 64!

(via monstermadeofeyes)

pcoolsongs:

takudeath:

macro55:

eclecticbanana:

samuraifrog:

(via cocksandcowboys, lj7stkok)

Mr. R. Robot esq.

Reminds me of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination

robot-heart:

Fourth Dimensional Vision (by Dennis Calvert)

(via adsertoris)

monstermadeofeyes:

iwumbo:

(via cosmichaos)

This reminds me of electric sheep comix for some reason.

gifanime:

(via mimikasu, robocide)

Ah, this will do nicely; another short story inspiration puzzle-piece.

Now, all I have to is write the god-damned thing.

lucyphermann:

(via dontfuck)

fuckyeahsciencefiction:

legoexpress:

Verne’s Projectile (by Sir Nadroj)

monstermadeofeyes:

ianultra:

[via]