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In the video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution, neuroscience meets synthetic augmentation in a fascinating and terrifying manner. The game focuIn the video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution, neuroscience meets synthetic augmentation in a fascinating and terrifying manner. The game focuses on the war between people who are neurologically augmented, and those who are too principled (or too poor) to seek artificial augmentation.ses on the war between people who are neurologically augmented, and those who are too principled (or too poor) to seek artificial augmentation.

"Big Data is watching you. And it's big business. Credit card companies, for instance, are selling the data about what you're consuming. So why is it that you, as the person manufacturing the data, has no say over who's using it or what they're doing with it? "That's got to change," argues Rick Smolan who co-authored the book The Human Face of Big Data (available for download as a tab let app here) an ambitious project that aims to capture the "men, women, and children whose lives are being transformed by this data revolution.""

As a child I used to read my grandfather's Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines. The constant promise and inevitable disappointment of amazing technologies that mostly never materialized (a problem likely exacerbated by my focus on the amazing and outlandish ones) made me skeptical of futurist predictions. It is somewhat strange then, that I now commonly find myself a proponent of futurist visions equally as grand as those that once made me a cynic. But I'm not alone in seeing the near future as a quickly changing technological landscape. In their recent book Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee* offer a similarly sweeping view of how technology is, and will be, shaping our future

It is rather odd how often I hear the expression paradigm shift during contemporary scientific presentations and seminars. The expression was popularized by Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In that book, Kuhn referred to ground-breaking and revolutionary changes in scientific thought as paradigm shifts, but the expression is so over-used today that even minor discoveries are sometimes marketed as paradigm shifts.

In 1991, when I was a staff writer for Scientific American, I wrote a letter to Thomas Kuhn, then at MIT. I said I wanted to profile him for Scientific American and "tell readers how you developed your views of the process of science." When he didn't respond, I called. Kuhn was reluctant to do the interview. He distrusted journalists, and he was still peeved by an old Scientific American review of his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. When I persisted, Kuhn asked to see other profiles I had done, and I mailed him pieces on his MIT colleagues Claude Shannon and Noam Chomsky.

So who are you? You might be a current scientist, a recovering scientist, a revolutionary, or just really into checking out neat innovations. Well, Marblar's a right-brained buffet - and we're about to open the kitchen.  Who says finding homes for inventions can´t be fun? Who says the process has to be closed to just a select few? Marblar.com is a democratic playground for creativity. You´ve got great ideas and we´ve got great inventions. As a Marblar you´ll be part of an artistic community and earn marbles for flexing your imagination in the service of science.  So there you have it. You´re a creative beast. The left brains sure aren´t starting the Fourth Industrial Revolution.  You are.  Join today.

Water towers have been a common sight in cities, towns and villages all across the world since at least the Industrial Revolution. As certain towers fall out of use for one reason or another, they are often left standing thanks to their historical significance. But why leave these fascinating structures empty and languishing? These majestic homes were all once functional water towers but have since been converted into the type of home most of us can only dream about.

Our personal data is among today's most valuable information currency. It's often hard to determine what part companies own, what part the government owns, and what part, if any, is entirely our own - provided a third party hasn't already sold it to someone else.

Salman Khan's simply narrated, faceless home videos on everything from algebra to French history have been viewed half a billion times. Last year, a number of schools began "flipping" their classrooms, having students study Khan videos by night and do homework with teachers by day. His staff has been ramped up to 32, including the recent high-profile addition of Google's first hired employee, programming ace Craig Silverstein. The staff's immediate mission is to further broaden the site's content and improve assessment and feedback features so the Khan Academy experience becomes more interactive.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency told software vendors on Tuesday that it plans to revolutionize the way it does business with them as part of a race to keep up with the blazing pace of technology advances.