Wheelchairs to be contolled by your mind

Voice-control is sooo twentieth century and besides, not everyone can use their voice. Thankfully then, technology has advanced enough to allow things like wheelchairs to be mind-contolled.

The japanese research institution RIKEN has built a wheelchair that reads the wheelchaired person's brainwaves using new brain-wave analysing technology. This new technology allows the wheelchair to be controlled with just a 125 millisecond delay, as opposed to conventional mind-readers that takes several seconds to react.

There are plans in the works for use of this technology in other fields too, like medicine and nursing care management. There's a host of future science fiction-y mind-control gadgetry that could use this technology. Personally, I imagine a future where you don't have to pain-stakingly, physically do things like driving a car. Instead you tell the car-or-whatever - with your mind - to take you where you wan't to go and then it does.

Ancient Europeans ate the children of their enemies

Archaeologists excavating the caves of Atapuerca in nothern Spain has found that the ancient europeans living there wre practising cannibals, AFP reports. The remains found ate the site are examples of Homo antecessor who lived there as long as 800, 000 years ago and so were probably among the first humans, before the Neanderthals and before the Sapiens, to arrive in Europe.

The Antecessors chose a good spot to settle too, with a comfortable climate, nearby rivers for water and a forest full of deer, horses and wild boars for food. The archaeologists also found two layers of cannibalised remains, suggesting that the cannibalism wasn't a one-time-only, desperate act of survival. Furthermore the AFP says:

A study of the remains revaled that they turned to cannibalism to feed themselves and not as part of a ritual, that they ate their rivals after killing them, mostly children and adolecents. 

"Sweet taste of victory", indeed. 

Galleries galore and zooooooooooooooooooooming

Another flurry of links heading your way: first, The Big Picture's set of photos taken on the ISS. Second, a New Scientist gallery of images (photos and illustrations) of next-generation rockets. Third, ever wanted to see an extreme close-up of an ant? So have I! Here you go. Zoom, zoom, zoom. 

Real and virtual dissection of giants

See New Scientist's gallery of IRL and VR animal autopsies from the Inside Nature's Giants documentary series.

Soft-core pornography (with worms)

Elegant like dancer a male nematode worm circles his hermaphrodite lover. The male has taken charge and the hermaphrodite remains passive. With the front of his tail, the male pushes up against his mate, backing along and questing for the love canal with his scent. In loving embrace, his tail curled around his hermaphrodite partner, he finds it and enter with stiff spicules. A short but frantic while later, the male spills his seed.

See the action here.

Give your house rat some love

The Cracked comedy website lists "The 5 Most Hated Creatures on the Planet" that don't deserve it: rats, cockroaches, wasps and so on. Rats, which are abundant in any city, are mostly considered "sewer-dwelling, corpse-nibbling cornucopias of contagion", to quote Cracked, but, really, when was the last time you caught the plague?    

Robot displays emotion, robot-mime uprising is nigh?

Scientists at Waseda Univerity unveiled a robot that can display a wide array of human emotions, CBS13 reports. Fitted with 48 actuators, the robot - called KOBIAN - can use it's whole face and body to express emotions such as anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. The scientists hope that in the future robots will be able assist people in their daily lives. The ability to display human emotions would then aid in human-cyborg relations. 

You might not worry too much about these miming robots, but then you have to consider thehunter-robots. Am I the only one envisioning a future of roving bands of robot-mimes stalking prey among the rubble of human civilization? Probably. But it would be awesome.