Hey, look! More cool stuff I can't afford!

In my general perusals of the internet, I've stumbled across a little gadget that I'm finding myself somewhat taken with.

And, if the pledges it's racking up on Kickstarter are anything to go by, I'm not the only one.

The video on it's Kickstarter site is really comprehensive. Obviously, that bit is designed to convince me it's a good thing, that it's worth backing, and so it will have some element of bias in it. But until the thing has been finished and reviewed, it's all I've got by which to judge it.

Regardless of how the actual gadget turns out, I have fallen in love with the concept at it's core.

The Light Phone, invented by a company called Light, is a credit-card sized gadget that only receives phone calls.

Which sounds a bit useless. But there is a lot more behind it.

It's not a replacement for your smartphone. It's for when you want a break from it.

It works with the phone you already have. You download the app, you leave your phone at home. You don't have to put up with notifications from Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat or whatever else you have installed on your smartphone that will inevitably buzz at just the right time to interrupt an important conversation or ruin the mood.

More importantly, your friends don't. Or colleagues or boss or interviewer or lover. Or whoever else gets irritated when your face is in a screen all the time you spend with them.

Your phone calls get redirected from your phone to your Light Phone, so that if there is something really important happening, you can still be contacted. People can still get through to you in emergencies.

But that's it.

You don't have to deal with the rest of that crap. You don't have to worry about Twitter notifying you that someone else said something that doesn't pertain to you at all, and perhaps not even interest you in the slightest. Which my Twitter has been doing recently. I don't like it.

I do like the Light Phone.

I know I'm broke right now, but I'm contemplating getting one. Even though there are a load of other Kickstarters I want to back that I could get more stuff from for less money. Even though I'm skint enough to buy basically only Morrisons own brand food.

And pretty much everyone I know except my nan (who doesn't have a smartphone, so is still good company) will be getting one for Christmas.

I'm twenty two years old. My generation is the one that suffers most severely from smartphone addication. I think I'm reasonably distanced from my gadgets. I recently went a week without a laptop and craved Blogger more than anything else. I'm happy leaving my phone at home when I go out. But I am close to a lot of people who can't handle doing those things. Who will be sitting in a room full of close friends and stare at their phones.

I want one, even if it just to ward off potentially ending up like that.

And I want other people to have one. I want to not feel like a third wheel when I'm hanging out with one friend. Ever.

I love that this thing is so close to existing. It's cute and it's cool and, if it all goes right, could be saviour of many, many relationships.

People Are Flinging Shit At Me.

I've recently been introduced to a new smartphone app called Fling. If you don't know what it is, it's your generic photo-sending app but, instead of sending it to a specific person or group of people that you select, it flings it to a random 50 people who also have the Fling app.

A friend of mine told me she was enjoying it and advised me to have a look at it if I got bored.

Then I got bored.

I thought it sounded like a laugh. Honestly, my gut reaction to that description of it was somewhat naive. My first thought was how much we could learn about the rest of the world. I thought about all the things I didn't know about culture in other countries that I'd pick up from the things that strangers found interesting enough to share. I thought how cool it would be to take it round a museum and share the things that fascinated me with people who weren't there.

And after using it five seconds I realised that that's actually quite a childish thought.

Because obviously people aren't going to send interesting things. They're not going to send the kind of exciting things you'd get excited about. They're going to send photos of their duck faces and their genitals and, for some reason, their knees.

I've been using it for not even two days and I've lost count of the times I've seen "mycock4urtits". As if there aren't boobs aplenty to be found on the internet. Without the hassle of asking for them. Or risking having a stranger mock a photo of your dick. (Because that's what girls do. We judge them. I promise.)

And yet, I am going to keep Fling. I am going to try to resist the urge to send photos of "no one cares" scrawled on a Post-It note every time I get a selfie or a testicle. And I am going to take it to museums and galleries and parks and places that are exciting and interesting and I am going to try to use it to educate some strangers.

I'll probably fail. But, I'll also enjoy knowing that I tried.

Finally I Like Google Glass.

When I first read about Google Glass I thought it would be a bit shit. It is essentially a basic computer that you wear on your face, with the ability to connect via Bluetooth to your smartphone and use your GPS and FaceBook and things. It's a cool concept, but I didn't think I'd ever want one. Really, FaceBook pisses me off enough as it is. I don't need it literally on my face at all times. I really don't.

However, the more I read about Google Glass, the less shit it seems. App developers worldwide are looking at ways that they can make it useful. There are apps designed that will identify people for you, so that you can look at them and the database will tell you who they are, for example. That's a little bit stalkery, but useful for, say, people who have a lot of contacts and aren't too great at remembering names. There are apps being designed that will allow you to take photos by winking, which is kind of adorable and will probably result in many hilarious misunderstandings.

There are already gaming apps about. One that caught my attention was StarFinder, where the goal is to find the constellations in the night sky. Doesn't that sound just lovely? The Glass technology is also already capable of supporting multiplayer gaming, even though no apps have been developed for that yet. But it'll probably be pretty cool when they are, putting the reality into virtual reality.

And it annoys me that I'm starting to get excited about Google Glass. Because I already have glasses.

I don't like going to see 3D films because it's annoying as fuck to have to wear two pairs of glasses, even for just a couple of hours. I would definitely not like to be perpetually wearing two pairs of glasses, no matter what the benefits of Google Glass. So I finally start to like it and I can't even use it because I would have to sacrifice sight itself in order to do so.

And then I came across this, in which it is explained that Google Glass can be altered to fit snugly onto your glasses, and you will look like less of a prick than people just wearing the Glass headset.

Hot.

I'm officially smitten.

If I Needed Proof to Suspect We Were Living in a Video Game ... Mothafuckin' Pain Rays.

I am beginning to think that the Americans are the bad guys.

Alright, I'm not. They might be a bit slow sometimes, but they're not evil.

But they do have the kinds of weapons you would expect of Darth Vader and his dark side ilk. Over the past few decades, for instance, the US military has spent $120 million developing a pain ray.

And the fucker works.

Every aspect of the pain ray - officially titled the Active Denial - feels like it has stepped right out of some shithot sci fi. The key bit of hardware required to make it work is even called a 'gyrotron', which amplifies microwaves by rotating a ring of electrons held in place by cryogenically cooled superconducting magnets. The electrons and the microwaves resonate, and the resulting waves are passed to an antenna, which shoots the beam at the target.

That just sounds cool, doesn't it? In fact, it sounds so cool that I'm not entirely convinced it wasn't mashed together out of sciencey-sounding works by the writers of Futurama.

Actually, since the late 1980s, the Air Force Research Laboratory has been working with military contractor Raytheon Company to develop this beast of a machine.

The Active Denial target pain receptors called thermal nociceptors, which are less than 0.4mm beneath the skin. In a matter of seconds, the target feels as if the surface of their skin is being roasted. The sensation begins with a tingly warmth which rapidly becomes excruciating, a fiery torture encompassing the whole body until either the beam is switched off or you get the hell out of its way.

And then you feel fine again.

The intensity of the pain is such that the body's natural instinct will be to flee. Once said body is out of the line of fire, it just goes away. The pain subsides and you feel better. There are no measurable side effects yet seen, and research done on this gun has been exemplary in its depth and thoroughness. In more than 11,000 tests, less than ten people received any injuries from the Active Denial at all. Six of the injuries were blisters, none larger than a pea; the worst of the injuries were small burns, none more dangerous than a bad sun burn, easily dealt with and free of complications.

The Active Denial has been designed for use in prisons, war zones and riot situations. It causes less damage than current methods of subduing those who get violent, such as batons and tasers. Those currently in use have to be carted around on the back of huge trucks, but the developers have managed to scale them down to the size of a large rifle. They are working on making them more portable still, but the authorities are reluctant to use them.

All the research suggests that this thing is safe. Various experts support it. Its flawless performance is almost what makes it so scary that something with go terribly wrong. But, as far as non-lethal weaponry goes, this is some of the most advanced technology going.

And it is kind of mind-blowing.

It's a motherfucking pain ray.

Shi-min Fang; a science writer’s hero.

Alright, so I’m not a science writer, and I’m not even an aspiring science writer because I already know that I would get far too fangirly around all those physicists with their big, sexy brains to do it with any degree of serious professionalism. But I do like science and writing, and I respect more than anyone else the people who take risks to get the truth out there into the public sphere, especially when the risks are so high.

Shi-min Fang is a Chinese science writer who has risked far more than just libel cases (which are bothersome enough as it is) to expose the straight-up lies of some people in China. He has recently won the Maddox prize – which is typically awarded to people who promote science despite perhaps facing difficult or hostility in so doing – for exposing scientific misconduct in China.

Since 2000, Shi-min Fang has been exposing fraudulent ‘scientists’ who took advantage of China’s celebration of any science and technology to publicize nonsensical, pseudoscientific articles, flog fake medicines and carry out dangerous medical procedures without clinical trials. He has made it his business as a science writer to root out those who are fakers and expose them, despite whatever threats they offer him, using his website New Threads to make this information accessible to the Chinese general public.

Many have fought his allegations, no matter how truthful they were. He has been sued more than ten times and, due to the inefficiency and bias of the Chinese court, has even wrongly lost once, as well as being assaulted with pepper spray. In 2010 hired thugs attacked Shi-min Fang with a hammer with the intention of his murder when he challenged the efficacy of a surgical procedure developed by their boss as well as the heavily padded CV he used to persuade people of his worth. Shi-min Fang is responsible for opening up a forum for criticism and debate in a society that was otherwise devoid of such freedoms.

Despite all the dangers he has faced, he maintains that it was all worth it because of the good he has done for the scientific community and the general public in China. His one concern, he admits, is the danger faced by his wife and children.

Frankly, that takes balls. And he deserves that prize, and the £2000 that comes with it, and so much more.

And he is not the only one who does. He is one of many people who risk so much just to make the world a little bit more honest. Here is hoping that one day we won’t need people like Shi-min Fang. But until then, let’s just be glad they’re around.

The Future of Gaming is Oculus Rift!

Given the advances of gaming technology in recent years, there is little left preventing us really getting into the virtual world of our games.

Now Oculus VR has developed a virtual reality headset which is said to have the potential to hugely shift gaming as we know it a step closer to that ideal, which is especially impressive as it began life as a project on Kickstarter. It managed to raise nearly two and a half million US dollars and has been doing some pretty awesome shit with it.

Specifically, this awesome shit:

The Oculus Rift got loads of attention at its CES debut this year and was said by TechRadar.com to "easily surpass every other virtual reality headset". It is designed to make the player feel like they are actually in the virtual world, rather than looking at a flat screen or even a 3D screen. This will mean that gameplay changes will be necessary to implement the "head-tracking" technology, but that sounds nothing less than amazing and definitely not much of a sacrifice.

The technology works by providing a separate image for each eye, in the same way that eyes work in real life. The visuals that this creates have already been described as being "extremely fluid and natural" (TechRadar) and update at a pace of 60 frames per second. However, it does have the potential to cause unpleasant nausea in people who suffer from motion sickness. Oculus VR's representatives say that this is common among first-timers, but that most players get used to it.

Testing the developer kit

At the moment, a developer kit is being built so that the prototypes can be tested. For the time being, it has relatively low resolution (720p rather than 1080p) but, according to the Oculus VR website, apparently still "delivers a compelling, immersive 3D VR experience". The resolution will be improved in time for the launch of the finished product. The current prototypes work only on PC, but there are plans to expand it to mkae it compatible with Xbox, Playstation and Wii consoles in the future.

Sadly, we have missed out on being developers and the Oculus VR website advises against ordering a developer kit (unless you're a really hardcore gamer and want one just for its value as a piece of gaming history), which will be shipped out to testers in April 2013, but the consumer version is promised to "improve on almost every aspect of the developer kit".

In November 2012, it was announced that DOOM 3 BFG Edition and Hawken would be the first official Oculus-ready games. The developers hope that the technology will become popular and get integrated into other new titles and maybe have new games designed specifically for it. There is even talk, in the distant future, of improving the gear so that it can be used for other activities like watching films, although for now it is specifically for gaming.

Something that pleased me about the headset is that it is said to be surprisingly beneficial for the eyes; I have to wear glasses and I put it down to reading by moonlight and letting my eyes relax in front of close screen for many hours longer than is healthy. The Oculus Rift is designed to allow the eyes to focus as they would normally, converged in the distance at all times and able to relax without causing eye strain.

For now, Oculus VR is being somewhat vague about when the Rift will be launched to the consumer market and how much it will cost, but the website is adamant that they are "working tirelessly to make it available as soon as possible" and that it will "deliver the highest quality virtual reality experience at a price everyone can afford".

I personally think that, once this is commercially available and if it is even half as good as it is expected to be, I will retreat for a while from society and resurface some exhausting weeks later greatly dissatisfied by reality.

One Step Closer to Cyborgs

Of all the cool gadgets and gizmos and random weird shit that sci-fi promises us will happen eventually, there are few that are expected to be achieved within our lifetimes. Given that I am younger than Game Boys, this means that there a good few decades of innovation awaiting us before we're all going around in hover cars.

But recently, it has been revealed that Federico Parietti and Harry Asada from MIT have brought mankind one step closer to cyborgs.

Remember when Bender sported these bad boys...?

Well, what was not made clear in that episode was that they were invented much closer to now than to then. And that they work on humans as well as robots.

Parietti and Asada have developed the prototype of a pair of semi-autonomous arms that are worn like a backpack and extend around the body. They are designed to be intelligent enough that they can be of assistance without needing a lot of tricky programming; they will learn and anticipate what their wearer wants them to do, having been programmed to perform specific tasks.

The work is being funded by Boeing and the prototypes were shown at the Dynamic Systems and Control Conference in Florida earlier on this year. The arms are being designed to help factory workers with jobs that require two pairs of hands; they are supposed to increase efficiency by letting that guy who would usually be the second pair do something more important with his time than just holding stuff.

They seem like they would be really useful once they have reached a point that they are available to industries. However, it is only a matter of time beyond that before they become commercialised and nerds like me get their hands on them and do awesome cosplays of this dude!

The Most Amazing Person You've Never Heard Of: Norman Borlaug

79 years and 3 days before I was born, a brilliant man was born in America. In his lifetime, he won many awards for his achievements and saved so many lives that people lost count long ago. Yet, very few people know his name or why it is important.

Norman Ernest Borlaug received in PhD in plant pathology and genetics in 1942 and then moved to Mexico, where he researched wheat. The research he conducted in the team of plant pathologist George Harrar led him to develop various genetically engineered strains of wheat which was high-yield and disease resistant. His work there spanned sixteen years, during which time he bred many successful crops. Altogether his work meant that a lot more wheat could be harvested from any given crop and his work in Mexico alone saved at least a million people from starvation.

After that, his career took him through numerous starving communities including places in India, China and various countries in Africa. In each one, he studied and improved the crops so that more could be gathered and more people fed. In the mid-1960s, he started to spread his powerful crops in war-torn India, which saved millions more from acute famine. He took his crops to Pakistan where wheat yields nearly double and, in the space of three years, the country became self-sufficient and no longer depended on foreign aid in order to stave off starvation.

In 1970, Borlaug was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the world food supply. At that time, it was estimated that he had already saved over a billion lives.

When he retired from travelling through starving countries, he continued to teach and research to continue his legacy. His died of lymphoma at the age of 95 in December 2009. His achievements saved the lives of more people than you will ever know. He dedicated his life to easing the suffering of others and ending hunger in the world and no one can say that he did not achieve just that many times over. Throughout the course of his life, he was honoured with numerous awards and prizes for his work in helping others – and rightly so.

The sad thing is that so many people will never hear his name. He is no celebrity and he is not taught in schools, except to speciality students focussing on plant genetics. The amount of people he has saved from starvation increases every day as more and more people in developing countries survive on the crop strains that he developed and introduced to their ecosystems.

But the worst thing about people not knowing about Norman Borlaug and his amazing work is that it breeds so much ignorance among people who think they know about genetically engineered food. People campaigning against GM crops claim that it is harmful to people and that it will mutate them, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The fact is that people make ignorant comments about it and stupid people listen; then stupid people get into power and they take the crops away from all the people who are benefiting from them. That wouldn’t be a problem if this wasn’t something that was necessary to save lives. People are already starving even with GM crops – without them, the world would not be able to feed two thirds of its population.

It’s only thanks to people like Norman Borlaug that mankind is becoming truly self-sufficient. Maybe people should stop complaining and thank him.

Did you think I was going to shut up about the Higgs? You were wrong.

In this very month, the wonderful nerds at CERN announced the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson particle, for which they have been searching since the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, in order to confirm or debunk the Standard Model of the universe. They found it (more or less). The Standard Model works – the mathematics of it fit our universe in a way that explains it in a rather complex but understandable model. The Higgs boson was the last piece of the puzzle and now we have reasonable evidence that it exists.

At this point, it depresses me that a lot of people now say “So what?”

I heard some innocent person – who was actually trying to defend the expense and effort put into this research – reply “Well, because they were curious. They just wanted to know.”

And, to some extent, that is true, but that response could be said of any and all science and it strips it down into its absolute barest motive. There is no doubting that curiosity is at the base of every scientific experiment, every theory and deep in the heart of every person who has ever been interested in anything even remotely scientific. But to say that all of CERN and everything it has achieved has been only to satisfy the curiosity of a handful of nerds is to massively devalue all that it has done and all the benefits it has bestowed upon civilisation.

If you ask any random person on the street what CERN has achieved in its lifetime, they probably will not be able to give you an answer, unless by some tiny chance you asked someone as nerdy as I am. You might get someone moaning about how much it cost. But that is relative and, when you think about what it actually has achieved, you realise that all the money gone into it is actually piss in the ocean.

The science budget in most western countries is miniscule when you think about how much governments waste on other rubbish. Take, for instance, the now quite famous government spending chart from The Guardian in 2008, which shows quite clearly how more than £620.6 billion was divided between all the things for which the government wanted to pay. All money put towards science came under the heading “Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills”, which received, of all that money, only £3.3 billion. That £3.3 billion includes all medical research, space exploration, developments in technology and engineering as well as things like arts and humanities that need money to flourish and come under the same heading. That tiny fraction of government funds is not a lot of money, especially when you consider that science pays for itself sooner or later. The Apollo programme, for example, paid for itself fourteen times over. That means that for every $1 that the American government invested in the project, it put $14 back into the economy. On average, the American government earns 700% profit on money put towards NASA. Research in quantum physics led us to a better understanding of the way our world works; scientists exploited that to create the transistor, which is the building block of pretty much all modern technology, including phones, radios and computers. Pretty much any development in the understanding of how our universe works will lead to more improvements like this in our lives.

CERN has been around since the 1950s and the LHC was built between 1998 and 2008. Everyone – particularly those who have seen either my FaceBook page or Twitter feed – knows its most recent news, but many more of its achievements seem to have been completely forgot. The progressive achievements in particle physics are numerous; between 1973 and 2012 they found far more than just the Higgs boson. In 1984, two CERN physicists were awarded a Nobel Prize for their work there and the discovery of the W and Z bosons. And to anyone who says that now that the Higgs has been found that the LHC is now worthless and no more than a blight on the Swiss landscape, you’re wrong. It is now being used to study dark matter, one of the most mysterious things in physics, and could tell us more about the universe than any discovery in the history of science if its work in the future is half as successful as it has been so far.

The fact is that there are loads of things going on at CERN, but the discovery of the Higgs boson particle is the only one that has really been publicised because of the massive machine it took to find it. The real problem with these achievements is that they only really have relevance to those who know how to use them, those physicists who care about finding the answers and confirming models of the universe. But these are quite a small minority of the people; most people will happily take advantage of all these developments without really caring how or why it works. But that is not to say that these findings do not have a huge impact on your life.

I can guarantee that everyone reading this has used – in fact is using right now – the biggest thing to come out of CERN. I would very much like to dither for a while and let you squirm or maybe get a bit defensive and insist that of course you have not used this thing that is so popular because of course you would know that it comes from CERN if it was that amazing and that big a part of your life. But, actually, it is pretty amazing and you definitely use it.

A project called ENQUIRE was born in CERN in the late 1980s. It was based on the concept of hypertext and was designed so that researchers could share information from different parts of the word. In 1993, the World Wide Web became free and available to everyone and anyone.

No matter what else it does, CERN will always be the birthplace of the Internet. Think of all the money that has been saved and made because of the Internet, both by independent business, people and even governments and huge corporations. Think of everything that is on the Internet that otherwise humanity would not have. Forget the spam and the porn and the whining teenagrs complaining on FaceBook about how much they hate life even though they are luckier than any other generation. Think about how easy it is to share information, or to start up a business. Forget that without YouTube there would be no Justin Bieber and remember that without YouTube there would be no TED talks. Think about having a forum for your opinion and your thoughts no matter who you are or what you think. Think about a freedom of debate and a simple and easy way to connect with people just like you, no matter where they are in the world. Think about having global news at your fingertips whenever you want it and think about how seeing a silly reblogged meme face can make your whole day.

Think about the hypocrisy of some nutter blogging or tweeting about how the LHC is unnecessary and CERN is a waste of money and effort.

Now thank CERN for providing you with such an incredible gift given free to the rest of mankind and stop calling it the ‘God particle’.

Why Aliens Hate Us Already

Everyone knows that, no matter how small, there is a chance that aliens exist somewhere in the universe. There are loads of theories floating around, but anyone who knows anything about outer space (by which I mean scientists, the people whose job it is to study outer space; not pre-pubescent boys reading comic books or drunken idiots who see flashing lights in the sky conveniently near an airport) can pretty much guarantee that alien life forms may not be little green men and they certainly will not live on Mars. We have rovers on Mars and they have confirmed that the closest we will get to life there will be bacteria and that nothing intelligent is likely to be found there until it has had a chance to evolve for a few million years first.

But there is bacteria everywhere. There are tiny, ignorant, wriggly little life forms – the kind that you can find in cheese – pretty much everywhere in the universe and we are only starting to see them now because we have only recently managed to build technology that can see things that small in places that far away. There is a lot of water in space and where there is water there is precisely this kind of life. There are lots of other liquids which could also be a starting point for different kinds of life – kinds that thrive on something other than water. It is not unreasonable to believe that there are lots of tiny living things that, in a few billion years, could end up as fish. But that really is not the kind of life about which anyone cares.

If modern cinema is to be believed, the kind of alien life forms about which people care are the kinds that we can blow up. Even the films where they hold the secrets to the origins of life have some explosions and a fair amount of inter-planetary warfare. But, as every sadistic schoolboy will figure out by the time he hits his teens, there is no satisfaction in blowing something up if there is not risk that it will not find back. Unless it plays Dungeons and Dragons, but then only because it hilarious to see small children trying to create force-fields with their eyes.

For any kind of inter-planetary war to occur, alien life needs to be intelligent, by which we mean about as advanced as we are. In order for any kind of contact to be made – for nothing can be agreed between peoples, neither peace nor war, unless they have at least made contact – aliens need to be about as technologically advanced as we are. They can be no more than fifty years or so behind us and their technology must send and receive signals in the same way as we do, otherwise all our digital messages will be lost in space. In the same way that you need a phone to receive a phone call, if they do not have technology capable of receiving the data that we transmit then they simply will not get it and we will never make contact.

This means that if it is possible for us to make contact with alien life any time in the near future, then they must be at least as sophisticated as we are. A lot of people (and by people, again, I mean scientists; I mean people whose opinions on the subject are based on evidence and thus worth considering) believe that if any alien life form is going to contact us, they will be more advanced than we are. This makes a lot of sense; in terms of the age of our universe, we have not had this sort of technology for very long. When your solar system is 13.2 billion years old, fifty-odd years is not a lot of time.

This means that alien life forms capable to making contact with us already have better technology that we do, which means that they can receive all of the signals that we transmit already. If they want to, they can intercept our telephone calls, listen to our radio and watch our television programmes.

This is the worrying thing. They can access everything we have ever broadcast as soon as it gets within range of their planet. They will not only get the messages transmitted especially for them by the scientists involved in inter-planetary research. They will also get X Factor and TOWIE and all that other rubbish. Even programmes that suggest that there are intelligent human beings on Earth – take, for example, Criminal Minds or Bones, both featuring geniuses among their protagonists – will leave them with the impression that people are dark and murderous more often than they are kind and giving. Our documentaries lean far too heavily on Nazis and other fascists and our music channels feature a lot of semi-naked people considering that we are generally encouraged on this planet to wear clothes when out in public. Do we really want aliens getting all their information about us from The Jeremy Kyle Show? Or, worse, The Jeremy Kyle Show USA?

Chances are, the fact that we have not made contact with aliens does not mean that they are not out there. It could simply be that they have seen the state of our television and they have used it to judge us and hate us already.