Free Talk Live

This week science fiction writer Elizabeth Moon argues that everyone should be given a barcode at birth.

“If I were empress of the Universe I would insist on every individual having a unique ID permanently attached - a barcode if you will; an implanted chip to provide an easy, fast inexpensive way to identify individuals."

Clearly Moon is mad - mad enough to not be put off by the concept of 'empress of the Universe', let alone bar code everyone.
But it would make war more efficient ................... well that's OK then

"It is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"

Like a Swarm of Lethal Bugs: The Most Terrifying Drone Video Yet

An Air Force simulation says researchers are at work on killer robots so tiny that a group of them could blend into a cityscape.

Science writer John Horgan's feature on the many ways drones will be used in coming years is interesting throughout, and terrifying in the passage where he describes an effort to build micro-drones that are, as the U.S. Air Force describes them, "Unobtrusive, pervasive, and lethal."

Prof Stapel co-authored a paper published in Science magazine that said white people are more prone to discriminate against black people when they encounter them in a messy environment, such as one containing litter, abandoned bicycles and broken sidewalks.

"These findings considerably advance our knowledge of the impact of the physical environment on stereotyping and discrimination and have clear policy implications," the paper's abstract says.

To cheers and standing ovations from scientists, the world's biggest atom smasher claimed the discovery of a new subatomic particle Wednesday, calling it "consistent" with the long-sought Higgs boson -- popularly known as the "God particle" -- that helps explain what gives all matter in the universe size and shape.

One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events. This is likely an attempt to shed light on a faulty peer-review and publishing process.

Does questioning the idea of macroevolution, and random genetic mutation from species-to-species make you an ignorant, Christian-Conservative, fundamentalist nutjob who believes that a flying spaghetti monster created the universe? Or does being skeptical make you a REAL scientist? Are there more than two possible explanations for the origin of Life?....

More than 11,000 people have signed the Vienna Declaration which calls on the world’s politicians to let policies on illicit drugs to be guided by scientific evidence which proves the prohibition on drugs such as heroin is a failure. “I think there’s a real recognition in the scientific community that there’s an ethical obligation to start speaking out about this,” said Dr. Evan Wood of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS at UBC and a co-author of the Vienna Declaration.

At the heart of Apple's security architecture is the Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm (AES), a data-scrambling system published in 1998 and adopted as a U.S. government standard in 2001. The algorithm is so strong that no computer imaginable for the foreseeable future—even a quantum computer—would be able to crack a truly random 256-bit AES key. The National Security Agency has approved AES-256 for storing top-secret data. Now if they would provide a way to turn off the tracking function....