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does he also have to pay property tax?

so how does that state get his money from this type of economy? where is the VAT in there?

Last time I checked the "state" was still loosing money. But their main income is the sale of resources. Mostly new land, but I believe at some point they wanted to sell their initial planet too.

Jesus, this is the end point... A group of real neurons connected with a PC are controlling the behaviour of a virtual mouse, in a virtual maze, looking for virtual cheese!

Instead of taking the real world into virtual reality you can make virtual reality out of the real world...

this might come very handy in case we explore further the idea of a virtual ACT - one of the key points: you still have to meet from time to time physically ...

"Neuroscience UCLA neurophysicists have found that space-mapping neurons in the brain react differently to virtual reality than they do to real-world environments. Their findings could be significant for people who use virtual reality for gaming, military, commercial, scientific or other purposes." I wonder if we are doing it wrong with the airplane pilot simulators...

Finally we will have the VIRTUAL ACT!!!!!

Intrinsic 3-d effect are enabling for effective virtual reality systems......

An acoustic analogue of the dynamical Casimir effect (DCE) has been demonstrated for the first time.

Another Star Trek technology :) Might have an positive psychological effect if astronauts on long term missions could virtually escape their confinement - walking through a labyrinth with the blue sky above them. Ok, ISS does not provide enough space, but on Moon or Mars...

Is there not a risk that while walking in circles this way the cable I keep dragging behind will eventually strangle me?

I hate scorpions, but this could be a nice subject for a future Ariadna study! This north African desert scorpion, doesn't dig burrows to protect itself from the sand-laden wind (as the other scorpions do). When the sand whips by at speeds that would strip paint away from steel, the scorpion is able to scurry off without apparent damage.

Nice research, though they have done almost all the work that we could do in an Ariadna, didnt they? "To check, they took further photographs. In particular, they used a laser scanning system to make a three-dimensional map of the armour and then plugged the result into a computer program that blasted the virtual armour with virtual sand grains at various angles of attack. This process revealed that the granules were disturbing the air flow near the skeleton's surface in ways that appeared to be reducing the erosion rate. Their model suggested that if scorpion exoskeletons were smooth, they would experience almost twice the erosion rate that they actually do. Having tried things out in a computer, the team then tried them for real. They placed samples of steel in a wind tunnel and fired grains of sand at them using compressed air. One piece of steel was smooth, but the others had grooves of different heights, widths and separations, inspired by scorpion exoskeleton, etched onto their surfaces. Each sample was exposed to the lab-generated sandstorm for five minutes and then weighed to find out how badly it had been eroded. The upshot was that the pattern most resembling scorpion armour-with grooves that were 2mm apart, 5mm wide and 4mm high-proved best able to withstand the assault. Though not as good as the computer model suggested real scorpion geometry is, such grooving nevertheless cut erosion by a fifth, compared with a smooth steel surface. The lesson for aircraft makers, Dr Han suggests, is that a little surface irregularity might help to prolong the active lives of planes and helicopters, as well as those of scorpions."

What bugs me (pardon the pun) is that the dimensions of the pattern they used were scaled up by many orders of magnitude, while "grains of sand" with which the surface was bombarded apparently were not... Not being a specialist in the field, I would nevertheless expect that the size of the surface pattern *in relation to* to size of particles used for bombarding would be crucial.

"For the first time, researchers have determined virtually the entire genome of a fetus using only a blood sample from the pregnant woman and a saliva specimen from the father."

Research on new working methods? - another interesting application of the Oculus!

"They found that while the robot can leap to a height of 1.5 metres, such leaps put stresses on the robot's legs that make it more likely to fall over. Leaping to 0.8 metres improved stability but reduced the robot's maximum running speed. Future simulations will determine the precise trade-off between speed and stability."

"Computer simulations of tiny robots with rudimentary nervous systems show that, over hundreds of generations, these virtual machines evolve altruistic behaviors"

I have lost track of all the artificial life/evolutionary computing studies showing the evolution of cooperation/altruism. I don't understand why all the big fuss about this latest one.

Sounds good!

well of course money is trust, and even more loans and credit and even more stock and bond markets. It all represents trust and expectations. However since the first banks 500 years ago and the first loans etc. etc., and as well the fact that bonds and currencies bring down whole countries (Greece lately), and are mainly controlled by large financial centres and (central) banks, banks have always been on the winning side no matter what and that isn't going to change easily. So if you are talking about these new currencies it would be a new era, not just a new currency. So should Greece convert its debt to bitcoins ;P ?

well, from 1936 to 1993 the central bank of france was owned by the state and was supposed to serve the general interest...

DRACO selectively induces apoptosis, or cell suicide, in cells containing any viral dsRNA, rapidly killing infected cells without harming uninfected cells. As a result, DRACO should be effective against virtually all viruses,

Holy grail of medicine... if this indeed works and is safe (which I actually doubt), someone's going to make a nice fortune. BTW the toupee of the guy on the photo says it all :)

anybody interested in joining?

Crazy.....

Bored by the stupid virtual ghosts of PacMan?