A photo posted on reddit shows a woman shopping at a store who put together a Starfleet uniform from the Star Trek universe seemingly by accident. The pattern of the sweater matches the basic design of a Starfleet uniform, but it’s her choice and placement of a Christmas tree brooch that resembles a standard issue Starfleet combadge& … Read More → "A woman put together a Star Trek uniform outfit seemingly by accident"

McClellan is preparing for the Cybathlon, the first ever cyborg Olympics, coming to a stadium in Zurich in October 2016. In these games, the competitors will use advanced technologies to compensate for disabilities like paralysis and limb amputation. In the cycling race, for example, paraplegic competitors will use electrical stimulation systems to jolt their paralyzed legs into action; electrodes and muscles will work in tandem to propel their trikes forward.

Yes, the Paralympics already offers athletes with disabilities a forum to showcase their talents. But the Cybathlon’s rules and aims are different, explains … Read More → "Get ready for the world’s first Cyborg Olympics"

In a study involving 16 dogs published this week in Scientific Reports, researchers described their experimental setup: a treat dispenser that only worked when a dog pulled on a tray with its teeth. But there was a catch—the dog didn’t get to eat the food itself. Instead, the food was delivered to another dog on the other side of a partition. So the donor dog, as the scientists called … Read More → "Scientists say dogs like giving treats to their friends"

Last Friday at the Neural Information and Processing Systems conference in Montreal, Canada, a team of artificial intelligence luminaries announced OpenAI, a non-profit company set to change the world of machine learning.

Backed by Tesla and Space X’s Elon Musk and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, OpenAI has a hefty budget and even heftier goals. With a billion dollars in initial funding, OpenAI eschews the need for financial gains, allowing it … Read More → "Inside OpenAI: Will transparency protect us from artificial intelligence run amok?"

A group of skaters and street artists in Llanera, Asturias, Spain transformed an abandoned church built in 1912 into a beautiful indoor skate park featuring murals by artist Okuda San Miguel. 

via Boing Boing

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For most of us, our memories are filled with the minutiae of our personal lives. We tend to remember that relatively unimportant time we went to McDonald’s with our grandma for years, while information learned in high school about the U.S. Constitution slips away just months (if we’re being optimistic) after learning it. For people with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), it’s … Read More → "9 facts about people who remember everything about their lives"

The next time someone refers to a horror movie as “bloodcurdling,” they might actually be kinda right. A new study shows that the fear experienced when watching scary movies is in fact associated with an increase in clotting agents in the blood.

A team of researchers from the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands has published its findings in the Christmas issue of the British Medical … Read More → "Fear can actually curdle your blood"

Falling asleep during a Netflix binge can be annoying.

Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you are, when you wake up, you might have no idea where you fell asleep in the episode. You might not even remember which episode you were in altogether.

Fortunately Netflix has a cheeky solution to your problems: “Netflix socks.” Netflix has built socks that read your body to understand … Read More → "Netflix has created ‘smart’ socks that sense when you fall asleep and pause the show you’re watching"

Society isn’t ready to take a medium seriously until it can provide certain things. The first, and most obvious, achievement is it must work with porn. Virtual reality passed that benchmark a long time ago, and it seems to have no problem revisiting it over and over again. So what’s the next trial that virtual reality must face on its quest to becoming a … Read More → "This virtual reality bike could kill the boredom of exercise"