Very Soon, They'll Be Able to READ YOUR MIND

This is not a joke.

This is not an exercise in sensationalism.

This is not paranoia over government secrets.
This is Real, Uncensored, Scary Life.

The team of Yukiyasu Kamitani, from ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories (in Kyoto), has developed a way to read people's minds.  This is possible due to a combination of an active MRI machine and very complicated computer software.  

"By analysing the brain signals when someone is seeing an image, we can reconstruct that image," says Kamitani.

"This means that the mind reading isn't limited to a selection of existing images, but could potentially be used to "read off" anything that someone was thinking of, without prior knowledge of what that might be."

So here's the good news: 

For now, all the CIA will be able to pull from your head is the single blocks of letters which you're staring at.  They hold up a 5x5 card with a giant "A" on it, and their computers will show you thinking of a foggy, gnarled looking "A."

Not that intense.

Here's the scary part:

In the same way that most technologies have developed in a short span of time, so this technology will develop into a very intrusive instrument to "determine the truth," as I'm sure its Master's will reason.  Let your imagination wonder long enough on this subject, and I bet you'll feel at least a TINY bit hesitant toward unleashing a machine that decodes our very thoughts.  

In my opinion, there are some frontiers that should never be triumphed; some rules that should NEVER be broken.  Such a frontier is human thought; such a rule is personal privacy.

From newscientist

Rockets Used to Build Giant Bridge

Recently, a good friend of mine sent me some links to a website that claimed rockets were being used to build an enormous bridge in China. "Sure" I skeptically reply before following the links.

But now I'm a believer- They were actually using rockets to launch cables over the valley!  See, in order to build the bridge, large cables had to be spread from one "peak" to another.  While I would have suggested walking these cables from one mountain to the other, the Chinese came up with a better idea: Launch the cables to the other side at the speed of sound.

What an amazing way to use rocketry.


Here are the pics:

Cool New Technology

Here's the Vid:



This is awesome! They've recently developed a new microscope that can view atoms in motion! I'm blown away just thinking about it. Here's the article from newscientist:

"...Now Ahmed Zewail, a chemist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, has developed a way to produce faster, shorter electron pulses.

These can be used like a strobe light to reveal atoms in motion, letting electron microscopes capture more frequent snapshots, and producing high-resolution footage of atoms in motion.

Zewail is a past master at speeding things up. He was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry – studying chemical reactions just a few femtoseconds (billionths of a millionth of a second) long using pulses of laser light.

His latest work has now created another new field – ultrafast electron microscopy. Zewail's team use an oscillating laser to illuminate the cathode in their microscope with pulses of UV light about 100 femtoseconds long.

The cathode's surface has a high quantum efficiency, meaning it readily releases electrons when bombarded with photons. It converts the femtosecond light pulses into femtosecond electron pulses, of just a few tens of electrons.

Pioneering movies

Those short pulses act like a camera flash, creating a crisp image of the target specimen at a very precise moment in time. Zewail's research team can generate movies showing the picosecond (millionths of a millionth of a second) motion of atoms..."


Summary: They're breaking new ground, people. These scientists are effectively changing our most powerful microscopes from individual pictures to black & white movies. This is an epic upgrade to the way we view the minuscule.