November, 2008

• Remote-control miscroscopic bio-bots
• Super-hydrophobic nano-coating never gets wet
• A shadow biosphere of alien life on Earth?
• Huge buried water glaciers on Mars
• 5 social media trends to watch out for

These and other links can be found at http://delicious.com/infomorph

Here's a preview of a particular morph (body) in EP -- the bouncer. Bouncers are adapted for microgravity environments, so they are more limber and have prehensile toes for grabbing things with their feet. This picture actually shows a bouncer in a gravity environment, using their feet to hold on. This piece is by Daniel Clarke, who's doing a bunch of our other sample character/morph pieces. (Click for bigger version.)

One of our writers, Lars Blumenstein, will be giving a workshop on EP at Dreieichcon, near Frankfurt in Germany this weekend. Details. Go Lars!

• DNA fiberoptics
• Biosensing carbon nanotube threads
• NASA tests deep space internet
• First optical photos of an exoplanet (see also)
• Review of Singularity Summit 2008

These and other links can be found at http://delicious.com/infomorph

George Dvorsky is liveblogging the Convergence transhumanist conference going on in California this weekend. Presentations cover things like whole brain emulation and AI, among other topics.

You can also cover people tweeting from the conference at #converge.

Sorry about the lack of posts this week. We've been waiting on some new artwork to come in so we can show you, and we've also been busy proofreading the EP layout and assigning chapters of future books to freelancers. In the meantime, here is some end-of-the-week apocalypse for you:

Over at Avatar | Anima, John Carter McKnight is liveblogging the Global Catastrophic Risks conference, which is going on today in California. (This is the sort of stuff Firewall would be interested in in EP.) So far he's covered Jamais Cascio on "Risks and Resilience" and Eliezer Yudkowsky on "Cognitive Biases in the assessment of Risk."

George Dvorsky is also throwing out live updates on twitter.


image credit: Jamais Cascio

Adam's been rocking the Shadowrun blog with daily posts, including some more notes on how Catalyst operates as a virtual office.

How to Destroy the Earth. A detailed guide.

• End of the web?
• Lasers for finding organic alien life
• Food in pill form
• Cloaking objects at a distance
• Ion shield for protecting spacecraft

These and other links can be found at http://delicious.com/infomorph

This piece by Bruno Werneck shows a swarm of Scum ships. The Scum are a faction of nomads with a strong libertarian streak and a fascination with body modifications. Scum barges are large colony ships that have been retasked as wandering black markets, traveling from habitat to habitat. They are typically accompanied by a swarm of smaller spacecraft. Click for a larger version.