Valleys and Troughs

This is how the World Ends.

From ctrl+alt+del comes artist Tim Buckley's vision of the apocalypse: a pirate robot fighting a ninja zombie riding a t-rex. Yep. That pretty much covers everything.

VALLEY

NASA's Puffin concept not quite a flying car, but still awesome.

We've long considered the greatest disillusionment of adulthood to be the realization that we will not likely live to see flying cars (if anyone ever will) as promised so often in our youth and discussed here before. Yet NASA refuses to let the dream wholly die, and if their latest incarnation of the personal flying machine isn't quite what we had in mind, we're not exactly going to split hairs. And so we have the Puffin:

The Puffin is something of a personal V-22 Osprey, complete with vertical-takeoff and landing capability (but minus the squad of
Marines). But rather than tilting the rotors forward for horizontal
flight, the whole craft -- cockpit and all -- pitches forward, meaning the pilot flies from a prone position. During takeoff and landing the tail splits into four legs that serve as landing gear, and flaps on the wings deploy to keep the aircraft stable as it lifts and descends.

Let's be clear about this. We are completely behind this effort, and believe wholeheartedly that anything which brings us closer to personal, everyday flight is a major step toward the pinnacle of human achievement. And with a theoretical top speed of 300 miles an hour and a maximum altitude of 30,000 feet the Puffin, at least in concept, is formidable. But it's really more of a miniaturized helicopter than an actual flying car. This is a delicate but significant distinction. Flying cars are sleek, they are round, one operates them as one would a car that is simply not at the mercy of gravity. To wit:

This is of course one of countless fictional incarnations of the flying car, but it's a fairly true representation of what we're looking for. And we know we're not alone in this. Whether or not NASA's vision of the flying machine is a stepping stone on the path to realizing our dreams remains to be seen. We can only hope that in the future toward which we are going, we won't need roads.

VALLEY?

via popsci

Scientists announce finding new "super-earth" for the win.

It always astonishes us when we come across news like this and find that it hasn't resulted in mass hysteria or the founding of new religions. Or at least more media coverage than is devoted to how many women Tiger Woods has had sex with. A super-earth! Have we not collectively dreamed of finding something like this since the dawning realization that the universe did not, in fact, revolve around our own planet? We have. The details:

Astronomers have discovered a new Earth-like planet that is larger than our own and may be more than half covered with water, according to a study published Wednesday in the science journal Nature.
The so-called "super Earth" is about 42 light years away in another solar system and has a radius nearly 2.7 times larger than that of our planet, according to the study by the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.
The discovery of the planet, called GJ 1214b, represents a "major step forward" in the search for worlds similar to the Earth, added the University of California's Geoffrey Marcy in a commentary also in Nature.

Jaysus. There are all sorts of reasons why researchers are hesitant to imagine that life may exist on the euphoniously named GJ 1214b, including estimates that the surface temperature ranges upwards of 500 degrees fahrenheit. Yet the density of the planet suggests that it is made up of about 75% water, which is encouraging. The research also points to "tantalising hints that the planet has a gaseous atmosphere." Man. That actually is pretty tantalizing. We certainly aren't alone in believing that nothing represents all the glorious possibilities of our existence more than finding life somewhere outside of earth, and findings like this are encouraging at the least. Now pardon us while we take to the streets to indiscriminately set cars on fire.

VALLEY for all mankind.

via yahoonews

Morning Marginalia: Lamborghini Ankonian concept.

Because it is just so beautiful and it looks more like the Tumbler than any car we've ever seen, we point you to a new concept designed by Slavche Tanevsky for Lamborghini, the Ankonian.

Even if it never gets made, someone out there is moving things in the right direction. Good times.

VALLEY

via askforcars

Thing we didn't know we needed: inhalable chocolate.

We've never considered chocolate to be a particularly difficult food to eat. In fact it may be the single-easiest food there is in this regard: you don't even have to chew it, all you have to do is move your tongue around slightly and swallow. Well, thankfully, there are those who are never satisfied with the status quo, with mediocrity, and they have forged into a bold new field of hassle-free consumption: inhalable chocolate.

In 2007, David Edwards, a biomedical engineer at Harvard University, gave his students a project: Develop a way to inhale food, rather than chewing and swallowing it. “They took a whiff of everything from pepper to carrots and coughed a lot,” Edwards says. Last fall, he introduced Le Whif, a lipstick-size inhaler that drops a delicious, one-calorie chocolate taste on your tongue.

That's right. Delicious chocolate taste, the inarguable simplicity of breathing, and only one guiltless calorie. There is nothing about this that could better. Edwards is also developing a technique by which a tuberculosis vaccine could be administered using Le Whif, so there are life-saving implications here as well. In the annals of things we didn't know we needed, inhalable chocolate may prove to be an item so fantastic and revolutionary we'll soon find ourselves as a society wondering how we ever lived without it, a and everything that existed beforehand will seem like a shadowy memory of a world little-worth remembering. The future is beautiful, and chocolatey, for everyone.

VALLEY

via popsci and lewhif

A century of broken promises: everything we've never had.

Those of you who have followed us for a while will recognize that we one of our greatest passions is maintaining awareness of the fact that we are still living without so many of the wonders promised us in our youth - summed up perfectly in the idea of the flying car. We almost admire the poor bastards alive in the fifties who looked forward to a glorious future of cities on the moon, food capsules for dinner, you get the idea. All lies. Well, turns out we're not alone. Our kindred spirits at Gizmodo outline author Paul Milo's book Your Flying Car Awaits, which catalogues the shattered dreams of a generation. On flying cars:

For futurists, this one's an oldie but a goodie. By 1909, forecasters believed that soon, someone would combine, like peanut butter and jelly, the newfangled airplane to the equally cutting-edge automobile. For a century the flying car has been one of those perennially just-around-the-corner innovations, and while work continues on a viable prototype, don't expect to see your Honda become airborne anytime soon. Although NASA has done some work on creating a "sky highway," an electronic corridor in the sky to be used by pilots of small craft, the effort is still at a very preliminary stage.

Yeah. If there's anyone we can look toward to fulfill our visions of the future, it's the people who are shutting down our entire space shuttle fleet. That's the kind of forward-thinking that's going to bring us places. Like to Russia, to ask them if we can have a ride to the space station, you know, whenever they get a chance. Christ. Now if you'll excuse us, we have a book to buy from Amazon.

TROUGH.

MIT to rework robot apocalypse from the ground up.

We can't stress enough how frustrated we are that the future is taking so long to get here. So we tend to applaud the efforts of pretty much anyone working to realize the visions we were promised in our youth, which have largely existed only fictionally to date. And yet we are not without scruple; we understand that certain pursuits are almost destined to bring about our own destruction. Turns out MIT, which heads the Mind Machine Project, has no such reservations:

After 50 years and countless dead ends, incremental progress, and modest breakthroughs, artificial intelligence researchers are asking for a do-over. The $5 million Mind Machine Project (MMP), a patchwork team of two dozen academics, students and researchers, intends to go back to the discipline's beginnings, rebuilding the field from the ground up. With 20/20 hindsight, a few generations worth of experience, and better, faster technology, this time researchers in AI -- an ambiguous field to begin with -- plan to get things right.

They plan to get things right. Awesome. Sounds bulletproof to us. We can't manufacture a printer that consistently just works and these clowns are giving themselves five years to build a robot that can read children's books. What could possibly go wrong? At least President Obama, for one, is prepared to do what is necessary. Man, we love that guy.

TROUGH

via popsci

Space tourism. Yeah, that's happening.

We've long believed that money can in fact buy happiness, and now we know its price: $200,000. Richard Branson, British Virgin frontman and unapologetic megalomaniac, is the kind of guy we can really get behind: fabulously wealthy, but with a magnanimous desire to fulfill the fantasies of entire generations and get rich doing it. Basically Batman without (as far as we know) the vigilantism. Five years after Branson's SpaceShipOne became the first privately-owned vessel to reach space (where does the time go?), commercial space flight is a beautiful reality. Late Monday (or early Tuesday, we can't be sure. It's England), Virgin Galactic unveiled SpaceShipTwo, the craft that - for a small fortune - will bring you to the stars. Or at least fairly close:

At 60-feet long, with both windows and overhead portholes, it will seat eight people — two pilots and six passengers — who will experience about five minutes of weightlessness. At maximum altitude, astronauts will be able to see the curvature of the Earth, a view that until now only few people have been able to experience.

Hard to believe. We point out pretty often here the disparity between what we were promised as children - flying cars, jetpacks, etc. - and what is actually available in the endless tedium that is daily life. A $200,000 price tag notwithstanding, commercial space flight is a pretty monumental step in the direction of our dreams. One might almost say a giant leap, if one was so inclined. Man. Good times.

VALLEY

via TimesOnline

Glowing prairie voles will save marriage, finally.

It's no secret that the institution of marriage is under threat in America, of all places, beset on all sides by the evils of boredom and irrelevancy and idiocy and you get the idea. And let's not forget the gays, right? Right? Just ask Hi Caliber. Anyhow, researchers at Emory University have taken some pretty bold steps toward understanding the secrets of monogamy, and it involves infusing the DNA of prairie voles with the gene that allows jellyfish to glow. Naturally. The voles were chosen because behavior-wise, they are not so dissimilar to us. They mate for life, share child-rearing duties, and even "cuddle," which is fantastic. And so:

The scientists are studying the genetic of monogamy, and voles serve as a model of human behaviors like cheating or mate competition. In this experiment, they've linked the glowing gene to a gene suspected to control their impulse to cheat on their mate. If you glow, you're not going to stray. But if you can't be seen in the dark, then the Ms. Vole might have reason to worry.

Well the possibilities here seem pretty encouraging. We've long awaited the arrival of elective genetic modification (we have yet to be presented with a compelling argument as to why this would not be the greatest thing ever. Ever wanted to dunk? Exactly). So despite the fact that scientists are hesitant to fully embrace all the implications of this research - they always are, aren't they - we feel confident that this is at least a step in the right direction, a direction in which we will all look like weird blue Avatar mutants but not cheat on each other ever again. Sounds good to us.

VALLEY

[via popsci]

Highlight of the night: unimotorcycle.

That is the Uno Bike, a one-wheeled electric motorcycle that operates along similar gyroscopic principles as the Segway. So yeah, that's happening. It actually exists, instead of mouldering in the purgatory that engulfs seemingly all concept vehicles, thus we are maintaining today's theme of delivering on futuristic visions. Which brings a nice closure to the day, we feel. The only drawback, if it can really be called one, is that at speeds above 20 mph a second wheel extends forward for stability. Which is probably for the best. The future... is now?

VALLEY

via gizmodo