I’m ashamed to say that I’d have forgotten if it weren’t for Jamais Cascio, who is also (I presume) the source of the image:

Here’s another first at VCTB – the first time I’ve bothered reposting something I saw on YouTube.

Being an incorrigible science fiction reader, and leaning toward the harder end of the spectrum, I’ve heard plenty about nanofactories (or ‘replicators’, or ‘fabbers’ as they are sometimes called). But to actually see a visualisation of how one would work was pretty inspirational. Continue reading “A tour of a nanofactory”

Tuesday night saw the return of Cafe Scientifique to Portsmouth, with a presentation title that predictably stirred up the science fiction reader in me – “Is time travel possible?” Continue reading “Cafe Scientifique: Is time travel possible?”

Café Scientifique has started up again here in Portsmouth, and yours truly was there to catch the action. This event featured a talk by Prof. Ajit Narayanan, Head of the School of Computing at Portsmouth University, entitled ‘Can we find a mind gene?’

Continue reading “Cafe Scientifique: Can we find a mind gene?”

Where have all the readers gone? It’s a common refrain these days (especially among library staff, but that’s another post entirely), and no less so in our beloved genre. In the absence of hard facts and figures (if anyone can point me towards some, I’d be very grateful), it’s hard to make truly accurate statements about the situation, but the consensus seems to be that the genre, while arguably soaring in terms of quality of output, is losing sales year by year. Continue reading “Sf’s decline and the retreat from Enlightenment”

Looks like there’s an accidental religious theme to my posts this week, but I couldn’t let this one slip by without some commentary. If the destruction of an early-stage embryo is the destruction of a soul, as espoused by Dubya and friends, how many souls does a chimeric human have? Continue reading “Chimerism, or an embarrassment of souls”

I’ll admit to feeling a little smug when reading the rash of recent creationism/ID scare stories from the US recently. “Well, us Brits might not be all we’re cracked up to be,” I thought, “but at least we don’t have those problems over here.” Turns out I may have been making false assumptions. Continue reading “Creationism in the UK education system”

Talking about conscious machines often provokes visions of dark-future scenarios akin to those in the Terminator movies, where humanity is beseiged by robots which were, in a fit of typical human hubris, created in man’s own image. There are researchers trying to build conscious machines today, but their aims and ideas are as far from these science fiction movie nightmares as one could imagine – much more mundane, but at the same time quietly astonishing in their own right. Continue reading “Conscious Machines interview”

Is there an age beyond which parenthood is no longer an option? Science is increasingly saying no, although culture has a panoply of different opinions, which are not all as positive. Continue reading “New horizons for motherhood”

Current events show clearly that science can come under fire from many different angles: politics, religion and scaremongering media outlets. But does that mean it should become more obfuscatory, and hide behind a veil of secrecy to avoid the mudslingers? Continue reading “The language of secret science”