Aug 29, 2010
From October 21st to 26th, Graz’s Elevate Festival once again stimulates new ways of thinking and listening through an extraordinary combination of electronic music, art and political discourse. Elevate highlights the role and importance of social movements as well as progressive initiatives in civil society and the importance of generating positive change in our society as a whole. At the same time, Elevate presents many live acts that offer fascinating odysseys into innovative worlds of sound far off the beaten path.
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Jul 28, 2010
By Eliot Van Buskirk
In a never-ending race to react to minute fluctuations in stock prices faster than anyone else in the world, financial firms have gone to extraordinary lengths to build the fastest possible networks, processors and software.
They measure their success by the nanosecond, which is the amount of time it takes light to travel a scant eight inches through a fiber-optic cable. While that might seem absurd to those of us still stuck on sluggish and overpriced consumer net connections, their obsession will, one day, likely become our gain.
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Jun 21, 2010
Frank Fenner doesn’t engage in the skirmishes of the climate wars. To him, the evidence of global warming is in. Our fate is sealed.
We’re going to become extinct,” the eminent scientist says. “Whatever we do now is too late.”
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May 4, 2010
Game playing in the village of Teci, on Yasawa Island, Fiji./Robert Boyd
Human behaviors are often explained as hard-wired evolutionary leftovers of life on the savannah or during the Stone Age. But a study of one very modern behavior, fairness toward total strangers one will never meet again, suggests it evolved recently, and is rooted in culture rather than biology.
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Mar 14, 2010
An extra-tall wave struck a cruise ship off the Mediterranean coast of Spain this week, claiming two lives and injuring one person on board. Though the wave may not qualify as a “rogue wave,” it could have been created by the same forces.
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Mar 9, 2010
‘We don’t want anybody just turning a radio telescope on the sky and sending their own messages to the source.’
by Jon Ronson
If we are ever contacted by aliens, the man I’m having lunch with will be one of the first humans to know. His name is Paul Davies and he’s chair of the Seti (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Post-Detection Task Group. They’re a group of the world’s most eminent scientists and will be, come the big day, the planet’s alien welcome committee. His is an awesome responsibility, and one he doesn’t take lightly.
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Mar 8, 2010
Micah Frank, born 1977 in Columbia, Missouri, is a New York City based composer, sound designer and live performer developed Tectonic system to create realtime synthesis based on data from seismic activity.
Tectonic is a sound sculpture created in real time by earthquakes as they occur across the globe. A tightly integrated system between Max/MSP, Google Earth and Ableton Live processes a stream of real-time data that is translated into synthesis and sample playback parameters.
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Feb 8, 2010
Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included
The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.
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Dec 25, 2009
By Khadija Sharife
Resource-rich Angola was once known as the scene of Africa’s longest-running civil war. Today, life expectancy hovers around 44 years — not unlike that of an average Briton living in the 1800s. Over 70% of the population lives in poverty, and the country has one of the highest child mortality rates in the world. And the nation’s lifetime dictator of 30 years, Jose Dos Santos, leader of the liberation-party-turned-permanent-government, the MPLA, does not appear to have lost his lust for the throne.
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Dec 19, 2009
Isotopic analysis of the gases krypton and xenon suggest that much of Earth’s atmosphere came from outer space, not inner space.
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