Corvus.corax

In a laboratory tucked away in a corner of the Cornell University campus, Hod Lipson’s robots are evolving. He has already produced a self-aware robot that is able to gather information about itself as it learns to walk. Like a Toy Story character, it sits in a cubby surrounded by other former laboratory stars. There’s [...]

The post Robot evolution appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

What's on the NME Stereo this week, including The Killers, Arcade Fire and Blood Orange

It's 'Days Are Gone' vs 'The 20/20 Experience - 2 of 2' in race for the top spot

On Tuesday night, the FBI seized and shut down Silk Road, the digital black market where you could buy drugs, fake IDs and pretty much anything else illegal that could be fit into a FedEx box or a file. According to the feds the site's proprietor is alleged to be Ross William Ulbricht who is accused of a murder-for-hire scheme involving 1,670 bitcoins. That comes out to about $150,000. And here's the section from the criminal complaint outlining the charge (DPR refers to Dread Pirate Roberts, which is the name the site's owner went by online): 

Ulbricht was arrested on Tuesday night in San Francisco. Back in 2011, Gawker's Adrien Chen wrote a lengthy expose revealing all the different drugs you could find on the underground website, and this past August, Forbes published a lengthy piece on how elusive Dread Pirate Roberts had been and how dark his digital underground empire had become. According to the criminal complaint obtained by journalist Brian Krebs, prosecutors have charged Ulbricht with counts of computer hacking conspiracy, narcotics trafficking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy. The criminal complaint alleges that From February 6, 2011 to July 23, 2013 (a little over two years) there were more than 1.2 million transactions involving over 145,000 unique accounts which totaled approximately $1.2 billion in revenue and $79 million in commissions (at the current Bitcoin exchange rate). 

With the website seized, tech bloggers have been furiously googling for Ulbricht's public digital trail. Apparently, the man behind one of the most notorious black markets the world has ever seen uses LinkedIn:

And there are screencaps showing that he used that profile to publish a manifesto which hinted at his big plans to use the web to change the very nature of government and laws: 

The Silk Road was never just a one-man operation, though. And now the question shifts to how many people could be busted for this and who is and isn't safe. As Buzzfeed' John Herrmann points out, its shutdown has affected offline drug dealers who no longer have the money to cover their debts. He writes: 

In order to buy something on Silk Road, you first have to transfer funds to your account. Since these funds are Bitcoins, and since Bitcoin transfers are final and permanent, any money held in a Silk Road account is no longer available to the users who deposited it. 

So all that money in an account is just gone, kaput. And that's resulted in freakout and Silk Road users congregating in places like Reddit:

Another:

And no one knows who is and isn't safe. The cops have been onto Silk Road since 2011, the complaint says, and in those two years undercover agents procured over 100 purchases of controlled substances from the site, meaning there could be plenty of digital dealers who, like Ulbricht, are now in big legal trouble. 

Here is the full criminal complaint: 

Ulbricht Criminal Complaint by brianrbarrett

Nature News doi: 10.1038/nature.2013.13726

In 2009, as the Great Recession was still dragging on, a young man from Baltimore published his first novel, a devastating story about the human costs of industrial ruin. The Post named Philipp Meyer’s “American Rust” one of the top five novels of the year. The New Yorker included Meyer on its list of the 20 best writers under 40. And he won a Guggenheim fellowship.

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Praise from writers you’ve enjoyed might lure you into Matt Bell’s strange first novel, “In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods.” Lauren Groff, who wrote “Arcadia,” one of The Washington Post’s top five novels for 2012, calls it “glorious.” Jess Walter, whose “Beautiful Ruins” is still on our bestseller list, suggests that Bell has “invented the pulse-pounding novel of ideas.” And here’s Karen Russell, fresh from “Swamplandia!,” comparing him to Italo Calvino.

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Laptops are our indispensable lifeline to the majesty that is the Internet. We use them to work and play from anywhere in the world. But if you're like most people, you probably keep yours plugged in when you're at work or home. Stop doing that.

Why do some ideas rapidly take hold while most others fail? Turns out it’s the moment as much as the innovator. Consider Cubism… more»

“The man sitting in front of me is a mass murderer. He is a serial rapist and a torturer. We are chatting about the weather, his family, his childhood”… more»

The tropical moths produce ultrasound in response to bat sonar, which may serve as a warning or jam bat echolocation.

Nature News doi: 10.1038/nature.2013.13333

Cooking on a gas grill is more convenient than cooking with charcoal. It's also a lot less special. And, scientifically speaking, it creates less flavorful food.

Ninety-six percent of the universe is dark energy and dark matter. We know almost nothing about them. Now Lisa Randall says she has found a clue…. more»

Eight years have passed since Neil Gaiman published “Anansi Boys,” his most recent novel for an adult audience, and now his new story, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” marks the return of one of the fantastic mythmakers of our time. This is a slim work, shading toward novella length, best read on a shut-in rainy day or a sultry summer night to savor its wonder and nostalgia.

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The razors-by-mail service is experimenting with a new product. It is, in the polite terminology you might find on a drugstore shelf, a personal wipe.

If programmes to bolster STEM education are effective, they distort the labour market; if they aren’t, they’re a waste of money, argues Colin Macilwain.

Nature 497 289 doi: 10.1038/497289a

Phages in mucus aid immune system by killing invading bacteria.

Nature News doi: 10.1038/nature.2013.13023

My friend Jeff Simmermon talks in this video about cancer and depression. He nails it. Jeff explains,

I had testicular cancer in the spring of 2009. The cancer wasn't really the hard part, it was mostly the depression, combined with all the dumb shit that people had to say about it. I told this story at The Moth on February 13th, 2013 - the theme was "Love Hurts." A version of this was published in a cool book illustrated by Arthur Jones called "The Post-It Note Diaries," but this is pretty different. If you want to see more stories, art, or information about where else I might be performing, check out my blog at andiamnotlying.com.

neoteotihuacan:

A few months back, a small twitter hashtag got kind of crazy - #overlyhonestmethods

Its a hashtag full of scientists admitting shortcuts in research, along with the daily face palms and annoyances of a scientific lifestyle. Science is hard, yo. 

I decided to steal some of the more popular tweets from the trending hashtag along with some random images of scientists from Google image search and combine them. This is the result. it works, I think. 

The full album can be found here: http://imgur.com/a/x77kL

Albert Hirschman preferred doubt to theorizing. He rejected every ism, preferring small ideas and personal observations… more»

I fell for Søren Kierkegaard as a teenager, and he has accompanied me on my intellectual travels ever since, not so much side by side as always a few steps ahead or lurking out of sight just behind me. Perhaps that’s because he does not mix well with the other companions I’ve kept. I studied [...]

The post I still love Kierkegaard appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

The freakiest thing about horror flick Mama is Mama herself. Find out how the entity was made in this exclusive clip.

The crew from Sant'Agata has lost its collective mind. There's no other explanation for the Lamborghini Egoista concept.

At Warby Parker, co-founder Neil Blumenthal is trying to translate a nonprofit approach to vertical integration into a for-profit business that serves the middle-income masses.

Can a building have an ideology? Can a facade be fascist? Can a great architect be a war criminal? Consider Albert Speer… more»

If you thought the Mars One mission (a.k.a. the one-way ticket to the Red Planet in the name of reality TV) sounded oddly appealing, you were hardly alone. Newly released numbers from the Dutch company organizing the project show that the contest has already garnered almost 80,000 applications from over 120 countries around the world. "These numbers put us right on track for our goal of half a million applicants," Bas Lansdorp, the founder of Mars One, said on Wednesday. They also put Landsdorp and company on track to bring in a boatload of cash in the form of application fees. While the fees vary by country, these figures mean that if everyone paid the maximum fee, $75, then Space One could make up to $37.5 million on applications alone.

It also means that as many as half a million people are willing to spend the rest of their lives on a barren planet, hundreds of thousands of miles away from Earth. Announced almost exactly one year ago, the Mars One mission aims to select 28 to 40 candidates by 2015 to train for a one-way trip to Mars, scheduled to take off in September 2022, approximately a decade and a half before NASA plans its own manned mission to Mars. The final crew will be only four people, and the mission's organizers hope to raise the $6 billion or so needed for the trip while whittling down the candidate pool in what can only be described as a global reality TV event. Sounds pretty crazy right? Not to as many as 500,000 people, it doesn't. 

Truth be told, we find ourselves on the forefront of a new and very different kind of space race. Unlike landing on the moon, the ambition to land on Mars is hardly confined to NASA. As the space industry continues its shift from being a completely government-funded enterprise to a private-public partnership, we're seeing all kinds of new companies rise up to fill the demand of space travel. From Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, which recently made another successful test flight, to Elon Musk's SpaceX, which recently made its first successful delivery to the International Space Station (ISS), plenty of people want to get into the space business. And in business terms, trips to Mars are in high demand, and the supply is virtually non-existant.

Think of it like a new iPhone. The line is wrapping around the block with people willing to do almost anything to surrender themselves to the new product. Now, the folks at Mars One — possibly one day at Virgin Galactic and SpaceX — get to pick which customers get to enter the store first. Unlike an iPhone, however, you can't take a trip to Mars back to the store. 

An artist's rendering of the Mars One settlement (Image via Mars One)

Brinicles are bizarre, otherworldly structures that reach down from the floating sea ice into frigid Antarctic waters, creating black pools of death on the sea floor. Wired Science blogger Jeffrey Marlow reports on the strange phenomenon.

The officer in charge of running the Air Force's sexual-assault prevention and response division was just arrested on sexual-assault charges himself.