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.
A meteor exploded in the atmosphere near Santa Fe, New Mexico just before 5 a.m. on the morning of July 31. Local amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft captured the event from his personal observatory using an all-sky optical video camera developed by Sandia National Laboratories that is specifically sensitive to the near infrared flashes that meteors create.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Photo: Michael McConnell, then-Director of National Intelligence, watches on in 2008 as President Bush announced the Protect America Act. White House file photo.
The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence.
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.
All kinds of of devices have been dubbed “sonic blasters” — from the Long Range Acoustic Device super loudhailer to the piercing Banshee to the Inferno (“most unbearable, gut-wrenching noise I’ve ever heard in my life” according to Wired.com’s own Sharon Weinberger).
But a new device, developed in Israel, merits the “sonic blaster” label more than most: the Thunder Generator really is a blaster, producing a series of ear-splitting explosions. Some are so loud they could be deadly.
