http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21334-kopimism-the-worlds-newest-religion-explained.html Isak Gerson is spiritual leader of the world's newest religion, Kopimism, devoted to file-sharing. On 5 January the Church of Kopimism was formally recognised as a religion by the Swedish government. Tell me about this new file-sharing religion, Kopimism. We were founded about 15 months ago and we believe that information is holy and that the act of copying is holy. Why make a religion out of file-sharing? Why not just be an ordinary club without defining yourselves as being a religious community? Because we see ourselves as a religious group, a church seems like a good way of organising… ]]> Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:32:57 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21334-kopimism-the-worlds-newest-religion-explained.html http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/01/malaria-caught-breaking-and-entering-red-blood-cell.html The video above captures the moment when a malaria parasite invades a human red blood cell - the first time the event has been caught in high resolution.

The Plasmodium parasite responsible for malaria is transmitted by the bite of infected mosquitoes, and is thought to kill almost 1 million people worldwide each year.

Jake Baum at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues used transmission electron microscopy, immuno-fluorescence and 3D super-resolution microscopy to record thousands of high-definition images of separate invasion events, a process that takes… ]]> Mon, 24 Jan 2011 03:54:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/01/malaria-caught-breaking-and-entering-red-blood-cell.html http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/article/mg20727741.200-biosemiotics-searching-for-meanings-in-a-meadow.html Are signs and meanings just as vital to living things as enzymes and tissues? Liz Else investigates a science in the making EVERY so often, something shows up on the New Scientist radar that we just can't identify easily. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a brand new type of flying machine that we are going to have to study closely? That was our reaction when we first heard about a small conference held in June at the philosophy department of the Portuguese Catholic University in Braga. There, a group of biologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, information technologists… ]]> Fri, 27 Aug 2010 01:08:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/article/mg20727741.200-biosemiotics-searching-for-meanings-in-a-meadow.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727721.200-rethinking-einstein-the-end-of-spacetime.html Physicists struggling to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics have hailed a theory – inspired by pencil lead – that could make it all very simple

IT WAS a speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade into the mere… ]]> Wed, 11 Aug 2010 03:25:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727721.200-rethinking-einstein-the-end-of-spacetime.html http://www.newscientist.com/special/beyond-space-and-time We don't have any trouble coping with three dimensions – or four at a pinch. The 3D world of solid objects and limitless space is something we accept with scarcely a second thought. Time, the fourth dimension, gets a little trickier. But it's when we start to explore worlds that embody more – or indeed fewer – dimensions that things get really tough. These exotic worlds might be daunting, but they matter. String theory, our best guess yet at a theory of everything, doesn't seem to work with fewer than 10 dimensions. Some strange and useful properties of solids, such… ]]> Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:01:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/special/beyond-space-and-time http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17518 An invasion led by artificially intelligent machines. Conscious computers. A smartphone virus so smart that it can start mimicking you. You might think that such scenarios are laughably futuristic, but some of the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers are concerned enough about the potential impact of advances in AI that they have been discussing the risks over the past year. Now they have revealed their conclusions. Until now, research in artificial intelligence has been mainly occupied by myriad basic challenges that have turned out to be very complex, such as teaching machines to distinguish between everyday objects. Human-level artificial… ]]> Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:45:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17518