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Hopefully the technology will become available in consumer devices at a point when it still has the power to impress us with a charge that can last a few days.

mh ... as if "the establishment" would ever let it be, the first opportunity will see indictment unless he's gotten loyalists into key and core positions by then, and then still , there's clinton cash, and there's old money ... even Faceberg is crumbling ... i suppose Amazon would be up next, they had apple, microsoft, google, now Faceberg ... besos hasnt paid his pound of billion yet to the powers that be ... gotta keep these fookers in check before they get cocky, right
https://www.futurity.org/democ...
btw, they actually needed a survey to figure it out ... i think there's a problem with democracy if a democratic party sues an intel leaking platform in order to gag them to save democracy ... it sounds (to me in my twisted weird head) very un-democratic ... if there's nothing to leak (as the control freaks here would say while they plant another camera in your street) then why worry ?

yes, worrying about AI that might be a threat in 500 years is like worrying about the Sun burning out in 5 billion years. good point. we should also stop talking about global warming while we are at it.

We cannot build a computer that can model a bug's brain activity, let alone something a million times more complicated like a human brain

http://www.futurity.org/why-ar...
rather, once we are able to model any nervous system we are well one the way,

Lots of health links collected by me: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Iain Banks should look into iodine, vitamin D, eating a lot more vegetables, medically supervised vegetable juice and/or water fasting, and a variety of other things (beyond what is in mainstream medicine might be helpful, too). While once you have cancer getting rid of it is iffy, some things can still help, including preventing it from coming back again if you do manage to get rid of it somehow. See especially:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx

And see also these other links:
http://theiodineproject.webs.com/cancerandiodine.htm
http://www.futurity.org/health-medicine/vitamin-d-helps-body-put-brakes-on-cancer/
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART03060/Treating-Cancer-With-Integrative-Medicine.html

And:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2098363/Fasting-help-combat-cancer-boost-effectiveness-treatments.html
"In every case, combining fasting with chemotherapy made the cancer treatment more effective. Multiple cycles of fasting combined with chemotherapy cured 20 per cent of those with a highly aggressive form of cancer while 40 per cent with a limited spread of the same cancer were cured."

Mix that approach with a high-phyto-nutrient diet (including certain mushrooms), eliminating refined sugar and refined starch, eliminating food additives, supplementing with vitamin D and iodine, and some other related changes, and maybe there is some small chance of Iain Banks getting several more years of good health.

And so we can get at least one more fantastic Culture novel. :-)

I love his writing. I hope we can figure out a way to help him with all this post-scarcity technology like he wrote about and which we already have to some small degree (like the internet), whether he would choose to use that time to write another novel or not.

But the health advice above is generally good for anyone who wants to minimize cancer risk and maximize health. And I could only put all that together thanks to the internet and similar post-scarcity technology like Google and web servers and personal computers and all the advances in nutritional science made possible by less expensive testing and the accumulation of medical research knowledge and so on. Which is all the stuff implied in his books. Even if much of Earth may perhaps be oblivious to it all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_of_the_Art
"'Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.'"

This isn't the exact study I was thinking about, but it makes some of the same points: http://www.futurity.org/science-technology/sexually-precocious-super-flies-decoded/

There are two major hurdles that come to me immediately that make the kind of study you suggest practical:
1. Evolution doesn't happen quickly, it takes many generations. Using fast breeding species, like flies, is one way to get some results in a "reasonable" period of time. You can also look at historical accounts: breeding wild dogs into the range of dogs we see today, for instance. We can predict that breeding small dogs with other small dogs will eventually get you really tiny dogs, can you imagine something like a teacup chihuahua surviving in the wild?
2. The interesting parts of evolution are pretty much random. The feathers that appeared on dinosaurs could not have been predicted, they just happened one day and now we have birds. Around the time of the industrial revolution there were white moths who could camoflage themselves on the predominantly white trees in the area (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution). Luckily for them, there was a freak mutation that turned some of them black, allowing them to hide against trees covered in coal dust. A scientist would predict that these moths would just go extinct (or at least not live around coaly areas) but the unexpected changes have altered their evolutionary course completely.

http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html

Another indirect datapoint about the link between autism an vitamin D deficiency: http://www.futurity.org/health-medicine/higher-autism-risk-for-march-conception/

It may also turn out that some children are better at dealing with excreting heavy metals and other toxins than others for whatever reasons. See also Dr. David Brownstein on Iodine and Dr. Joel Fuhrman on vegetables and children's nutrition.

A book on dealing with tough times when all else fails:
"Dark Nights Of The Soul: A Guide To Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals"
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC

Good luck!

...since the one in the story appears dead.

Expectation of extraterrestrial life built more on optimism than evidence
http://www.rdmag.com/News/2012/04/General-Science-Expectation-Of-Extraterrestrial-Life-Built-More-On-Optimism-Than-Evidence/

Is the search for ET pie-in-the-sky fantasy?
http://www.futurity.org/science-technology/is-the-search-for-et-pie-in-the-sky-fantasy/

We Really Hope ET is Out There, But There’s Not Enough Scientific Evidence, Researchers Say
http://www.universetoday.com/94838/we-really-hope-et-is-out-there-but-theres-not-enough-scientific-evidence-researchers-say/

Direct optical imaging *has* been achieved with Beta Pictoris: http://www.futurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/beta-Pictoris_1.jpg . Also see the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Pictoris

Yes I'm aware of that, but a fuzzy blob of light is not "Direct imaging ala popular sci-fi" that I was speaking of. Very impressive, but not what I'm talking about.

Direct optical imaging *has* been achieved with Beta Pictoris: http://www.futurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/beta-Pictoris_1.jpg . Also see the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Pictoris

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

If you haven't seen it before, you should add Futurity to your web reading rotation. It is a website dedicated to news stories about American university research, and (no surprise) headlines today with this mobility story.

Perhaps the original poster was going for the Serbo-Croatian "lud" (crazy), pronounced the same as lewd or lude?

The "justice" system sure has enough insanity these days, that lud is appropriate.

(At least we have this new research to explain some of it - although old-fashioned cases have a good deal of explanatory power themselves.)

Here's a site with a video of Robofish in action.

But I suppose you have to slam the black man, in case he slams your women, huh?

Typical, someone raises a question about what the government is doing, but because the president is black then anybody who questions him must be racist right? "You're a racist" is such an effective way to censor people these days.

I hope you recognize the irony of just how incredibly racist it is to call "racism" when nothing racist was even hinted at.

Asshole.

A study shows a greater chance of that than you might think. http://futurity.org/top-stories/bias-colors-opinion-on-obama-policies/

The models were coded using assumptions, and we are talking about a chaotic system that is difficult to predict 7 days in advance let alone 70 years. In fact many of these models are based on models of ocean currents recently shown to be wrong. Not that anyone seems to care.

Then, of course, is the question of other factors that might be understated. Solar activity increased in the past 50 years too, but now we have had 18 months and that activity has vanished. Temperatures have historically increased and decreased with the increase and decrease of solar activity. It is an accepted factor in global warming, but looking at Mars and Jupiter it is strange how much extraterrestrial climate change is happening at exactly the same time. Maybe they have underestimated the Sun's importance.

My problem is this: "Climate change" is no longer a real science. The one thing that the hacked emails proved is that Climate Change has become far too political to be called a science. You don't need stolen emails to prove that proponents of the current climate change theory are doing what they can to stifle debate. When the debate is gone, there is no science.

I am willing to admit when I am wrong, but it is not time for that yet. Solar activity may be approaching a minimum, and if it does, it will prove me right or wrong. But I am sure-- damned sure --that if global temperatures fall with the solar activity, a good many of the current scientists echoing the conventional wisdom will adjust their models to prove that they were right all along.

Check out more information on this article at futurity.org: http://futurity.org/earth-environment/seafloor-dynamics-at-work-splitting-continent/