Category Archives: technology

Once More With Feeling–Or Maybe Twice More

How many times have you wished you could replay a scene from your life? Maybe your happiest memory, or a moment you don’t remember clearly enough, or perhaps a conversation with a crush, which almost certainly contained clues if only … Continue reading

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Perhaps We Shouldn’t Teach Robots After All

We all know the story: humans create robots, robots overthrow humans. It’s a trope almost as old as science fiction itself, first appearing in Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (the first work to use the word “robot”), and then in … Continue reading

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The Tricorder Will See You Now

If you feel faint on the Starship Enterprise or your head starts spinning around, Bones McCoy would crinkle his brow in concern, take a step back, and scan you with the medical tricorder, a handheld device with a detachable scanner, … Continue reading

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The Odds of Successfully Mining Asteroids

The Hoth asteroid field, which Han Solo improbably and awesomely navigates, is chock full of asteroids that contain valuable minerals and materials, including platinum. While I doubt there are any exogorths (space slugs) or mynocks (the winged parasites that live … Continue reading

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Wired for Bliss

In Larry Niven’s Known Space stories, humanity has advanced to the point of producing pleasure by tinkering with the brain, rendering other vices obsolete. “Wireheads” have electronic brain implants, “drouds,” that tickle their brains’ pleasure centers. Not surprisingly, people become … Continue reading

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Algae Power: Could Soylent Green Be the Future?

This post is written by guest blogger Beth Kelly, a Midwestern freelance writer with a passion for sci-fi and analog photography, as well as all kinds of other outdated and obsolete technology. She graduated from DePaul University with a degree … Continue reading

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Off to the Drone Races

One of the most iconic scenes from Return of the Jedi is the Endor speeder bike chase. Who could forget Luke and Leia whizzing through the forest, bumping into storm troopers and send them crashing into trees in a shower … Continue reading

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One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure, Thanks to Plasma

This post is written by guest blogger Beth Kelly, a Midwestern freelance writer with a passion for sci-fi and analog photography, as well as all kinds of other outdated and obsolete technology. She graduated from DePaul University with a degree … Continue reading

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These Walls Have Ears

In season 5, episode 10 of Fringe, the Observers, hot on the trail of Walter and the gang, use an “LQ-7 unit” in Nina’s office to reconstruct the conversation she had a few minutes earlier. The Observers stick sensors to … Continue reading

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Robo-Journalist Wins The Pulitzer

Okay, so that hasn’t happened yet, but the folks over at Narrative Science, a company that has created software that performs “automated narrative generation,” confidently predicts that its computer program will win the coveted prize by 2016. Let’s back up … Continue reading

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