By the time you hear it, it's often too late. If you know how to deter a hunter-killer drone, the thinking goes, you'll evade incineration. 

With the buzz of unmanned aerial vehicles over the Middle East and Horn of Africa growing louder and louder, it's been suspected that militant networks have been crowdsourcing best practices on how to slip out of the scope of killer flying robots. Now, here's proof of their collusion: The Associated Press just found a comprehensive guidebook in northern Mali believed to have been left behind by Islamist militants. 

The 22-point tip sheet has apparently been circulating among al-Qaida and its affiliates for the last two years, and is as wide-ranging as the organizations and their tactics.  

You've got general no-brainers...

No. 7: Avoid being directly or indirectly spotted, especially at night

...and uncanny deceptions.

No. 18: Form fake gatherings, for example by using dolls and statues placed outside false ditches to mislead the enemy

It goes from the downright crafty...

No. 3: Spread around reflective glass (or, as the West African twist goes, modestly-woven mats of desert grass) to camouflage the tops of vehicles and the roofs of building

...to the technologically saavy.

No. 6: Jamming of and confusing of electronic communication using old equipment and keeping them 24-hour running because of their strong frequencies and it is possible using simple ideas of deception of equipment to attract the electronic waves devices similar to that used by the Yugoslav army when they used the microwave (oven) in attracting and confusing the NATO missiles fitted with electromagnetic searching devices

You can see the entire list here (.pdf). It's worth a look. Noticeably absent? Drone-proof burqas.

Top: Photo of tip sheet

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Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thabanderson

Last August, Google announced a rather large change to its search algorithm: For the first time, it would begin weighing the number of DMCA copyright takedown request a site had received. The move was seen as a nod to pressure from the RIAA, MPAA, and the like, who felt Google was needlessly abetting copyright theft by indexing The Pirate Bay and the like.

Google noted that an inherent issue with letting takedown notices affect search results is the fact that "only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed; Google cannot determine whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law." So while Google said it's willing to change its ranking, it also said it wouldn't remove pages from its search unless they receive a valid copyright removal notice from the copyright holder. It seemed like an okay compromise at the time, but now six months on the RIAA says the change hasn't done a darn thing.

The RIAA released its newest Google scorecard today, and this is what the group says is the key takeaway: "Six months later, we have found no evidence that Google’s policy has had a demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy. These sites consistently appear at the top of Google’s search results for popular songs or artists.” And here's what I'll call the key graph:

That note about YouTube is interesting, if only because it's hilariously anecdotal. Still, according to the RIAA's report (PDF), the RIAA has sent millions of takedown requests to Google, with a few sites receiving over 100,000 requests, often for the same songs, over the last six months, and many of them are still showing up in top spots in search.

The RIAA's survey, which involved running searches for 50 of the most-searched songs, found that sites offering downloads and other copyright-infringing activity were routinely still in the top 10 search results, and often in the top three. On the other hand, legit sites like iTunes and Amazon were regularly farther down the rankings. The RIAA also found that in 88 percent of searches for mp3s and downloads of tracks, Google's autocomplete filled in "incertain terms which are associated with sites for which it has received multiple notices of infringement, thus leading to illegal content."

That led the RIAA to conclude with a wonderfully smarmy quote: "In other words, whatever Google has done to its search algorithms to change the ranking of infringing sites, it doesn’t appear to be working." And really, the RIAA has a point. Finding copyright-infringing material is no problem with Google. But is that really Google's fault?

From the RIAA: "Average % of time a site for which Google had received more than 100,000 copyright removal requests appeared in the top 10 search results for [artist] [track ] download or [artist] [track] mp3 for 50 popular songs."

The RIAA calls for Google to "immediately" fix the problem, but Google is surely loathe to make drastic changes to its gazillion dollar algorithm. And how much of this is Google's fault? Its algorithm isn't actively designed to promote copyright infringers–apparently, it's actually the opposite–but it's still an algorithm, and thus there will always be those who are better at the system than others.

In some cases, like that of Spotify and iTunes, they aren't even trying. Both services run in external programs, which is hardly SEO friendly. That the RIAA is blaming Google for those services not getting more love might make one think that the RIAA isn't sure how Google works, but that's a bit unfair.

The question is whether Google should be adjusting its algorithm to give more weight to legitimate sources than SEO-friendly, highly-popular download sites. It seems like a fair ask, although the RIAA comes off as more than a bit demanding, and Google's also certainly wary of messing with commerce rankings in search after all of its FTC troubles. Google's likely to take some sort of action in response to the RIAA, because that's how things work, but until download sites get eradicated totally, the RIAA's not likely to be content.

@derektmead

When you think of people who urge humanity to go to the stars, you tend to think of cheery liberal icons like Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson. But Newt Gingrich had to get his starry-eyed and much-ridiculed ideas about space exploration from someone, and it certainly wasn't any of those guys.

Enter Robert Zubrin, the right-wing bulldog for space travel. Trained as a nuclear engineer, he's spent more than 20 years pushing for the colonization of Mars through books like 1996's The Case for Mars; advocacy through the Mars Society, which he founded and leads; and relationships with people like Newt Gingrich, whom he advised on space policy in the 1990s. He's not a hardcore Republican ideologue by any means, but he regularly rails against environmentalists for being "anti-growth", writes for the National Review, and proudly wears his American nationalism.

Zubrin, who just published a new e-book called Mars Direct: Space Exploration, the Red Planet, and the Human Future, spoke to me by telephone from his home in Colorado about why to go to Mars, how we might get there, and why it will be important to defend private property and entrepreneurship on the fourth planet from the sun.

Motherboard: When you read the news, do you ever see problems facing humanity and think, "Y'know, if we would just go to Mars, this problem would be solved"?

I would say the biggest threat that our society faces is the bureaucratization of society. Society tying itself up in knots with rules that prevent initiative and, ultimately, liberty. The frontier created this incredibly vigorous society in America. People could come here and do whatever worked. They went to a place where the rules hadn't been written yet. And when you had the challenge of the frontier, it both challenged people to innovate and left them free to innovate.

Now you've got people running around who are launching lawsuits to prevent people from developing crops that have higher yields using genetic engineering. Well, on Mars, you're gonna have very limited greenhouse space, and human labor is gonna be a premium. If you can develop crops that have five times the yield of present crops, you're not gonna tolerate a lawsuit by some twit who is warning of the danger if your tomatoes escape. The frontier is a liberating force.

Illustration by Paul DiMare.

* Related: What a terraformed Mars looks like

So it's not just about Mars, and it's not just about the future. It's about how people see the future now. If you think that the future is closed, that there is only so much to go around, then every new person born is a minus to everyone else: every foreign nation and race is ultimately an enemy to every other race, because we're all competing for a finite pie. It's a "bad thing," for example, that the sons and daughters of Chinese peasants are going to college, because now they'll become engineers and get jobs and cars and start using up oil that "we" want, and therefore, it's a bad thing; and America should be allowed to remain "prosperous" so that we can use up all these resources that "they" should want. This is a formula for despair. It's a formula for conflict. And it's a formula that has a very bad ending.

On the other hand, if you say that resources are things that are created by human initiative, by human creativity, then the more people there are and the higher their standard of living and the more freedom they have, the better it is for you.

So, ultimately, these two concepts, which are very much at war in our society, are implicit in all kinds of political discourse. How people view the future will govern what happens on Earth today.

Illustration by Robert McCall.

We had no idea how we would go to the moon in 1961! We just knew, 'We're Americans, we just beat the Nazis, we can deal with anything.' Now, they're all gonna say, 'Can you guarantee 100% that it's going to be safe?'

So wait, you're saying we need to go to Mars not because we're actually facing a resource crisis and need to expand, but because people think there's a resource crisis on Earth?

Precisely. Ideas have consequences! [Nazi] Germany didn't need living space. Germany today has a bigger population than it did under the Third Reich, substantially smaller territory, and they live much better. They never needed to try to invade Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and kill the Jews and the Slavs and the Greeks and the Serbs. It was all in their heads. All in their heads because they had this idea that Germany needed living space and that other races were competing with them for living space. It was completely mythical. But myths can create wars. Myths can create genocides. So this is about the battle of ideas.

Do you think President Obama has been bad news for space travel?

I don't know how much of this reaches Obama's level. I would say that John Holdren, his science advisor, is really bad news. But in any case, look: we have the great success of Curiosity landing on Mars! The President and top administration figures get up and celebrate, "This is a great achievement for American ingenuity" and so forth. And what do they do? They propose following it up by cutting the Mars exploration budget from $550 million a year to $180 million a year! I mean, they take a bow and then cut the program by a factor of three! And then, this is defended by-- the NASA administrator goes to Congress and says, "Well, the reason why we're cutting the Mars program is that it's been successful."

On a lighter note, did you grow up thinking a lot about Mars and space?

Yes. I was five when Sputnik flew, and while, to the adult world, it may have been a terrifying event, to me, it was utterly exhilarating, because it meant that the science fiction stories I'd been reading -- I was already reading at age five -- were real. We were going into space! All this stuff was gonna happen. And then, as a kid, growing up, Kennedy made his speech committing us to go to the moon, and I was 17 when we landed on the moon. During the '60s, we were going to the moon by 1970, Mars by 1980, Saturn by 1990, Alpha Centauri by the year 2000. We were movin' out, and I wanted to be a part of that!

And then the Nixon administration did the same thing that Obama just did, [but] with Apollo. In other words, they welcomed the Apollo astronauts back from the moon, gave them a ticker-tape parade, and in the meantime, gutted the program. They wrecked it completely.

What sci-fi were you reading? Bradbury?

I certainly read Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, but more typical of the science fiction I was reading at that time were [Robert A.] Heinlein and [Arthur C.] Clarke. The hard science fiction writers.

So, like, Stranger in a Strange Land? That kind of Heinlein stuff about Mars?

Well, Stranger in a Strange Land was a little bit different. But, like, Red Planet, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Citizen of the Galaxy -- those were my favorite Heinlein works.

Red Planet is such an underrated novel.

Well, yeah. Heinlein is very interesting. He's sort of a libertarian, but I think Heinlein's most important works are his juvenile books, like Red Planet and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and Farmer in the Sky and so forth. They all have the following features: they have this kid who knows some science, he's self-reliant, and he is somehow thrown out into space in a predicament, and he uses his self-reliance and his slide-rule and his knowledge of woodcraft -- in the Boy Scouts sense of the word, being able to handle yourself out in the woods -- he uses it to take it on.

It was an expression of a kind of boldness -- the same kind of boldness the nation showed with Apollo. When Kennedy said, "I'm committing the nation to go to the moon," we had no idea how we would go to the moon in 1961! We just knew, "We're Americans, we can take on anything. We just beat the Nazis, we can deal with anything. We can do it."

Now, they're all gonna say, "Well, how can you know it'll be safe when we go to Mars? Can you guarantee 100% that it's going to be safe?" Well, if you wanna be safe, you don't go to Mars, alright? [Laughs] It's this paralysis.

Zubrin holds out a fossil found during a Mars mission simulation conducted on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic in 2001. Image via Mars Society.

If you can develop crops that have five times the yield of present crops, you're not gonna tolerate a lawsuit by some twit who is warning of the danger if your tomatoes escape. The frontier is a liberating force

You've said finding some kind of life on Mars would be like finding the Rosetta Stone. What do you mean by that?

I think it would tell us that the relevant world is much, much bigger than we currently think of it. I mean, look: here we are, it's been almost 500 years since Copernicus; and yet, most people, while they academically agree that Earth is a planet that goes around the sun and there are other planets, probably even other planets going around other stars, and so forth; that's not how they actually think about it, internally.

The way they think about it, most humans still have a geocentric view. They say, "This is the world, and that stuff above us is called the sky, and that's how it is." That's why people can make absurd statements like, "What's so important about space?" That's like somebody in a tiny village somewhere saying, "What's so important about the entire rest of the Earth?"

You've met with Newt Gingrich in the past and talked to him about Mars. What did you think about the debacle that happened when he started talking about space exploration during last year's Republican primaries?

With Gingrich, there was a core in there that was really good, which was this idea of creating a Mars prize and basically letting loose private entrepreneurs and teams to go chase this prize. They could raise money, they could do it, it would really ignite the fires of creativity and the taxpayers wouldn't pay a nickel unless the goal was cheap. I think that was good.

Newt Gingrich, the would-be president of Mars. Image via Getty

There was some other stuff that he mixed up in it -- the moon base and so forth -- that confused the issue and allowed Romney to portray him as somebody who wanted to go spend $400 billion building moon bases. That was in addition to the fact that he was just enormously outgunned by Romney, who ran all kinds of negative ads on all sorts of things and just bombed him in Florida. That allowed Newt to be defeated there. He wasn't gonna win in Florida against those odds.

You seem to have a very skeptical view about stagnation and bureaucracy in the US government's space program. Is it time to get rid of government and depend on private organizations like SpaceX for Mars travel?

I'm not ready to go there yet. I still remember a time when the government, when NASA, did do great things. It still does do great things. I mean, look at Curiosity on Mars.

There's a number of different models to identify. First of all, if we did have a NASA-led program, NASA could simply say, "Here it is, these are the four major pieces of spaceflight hardware that we need in order to do the human Mars mission. Let's put them up for bids and fixed-price contracts." And then you'll have SpaceX making some very aggressive bids that will force Lockheed and Boeing and so forth, more established contractors, to really deal with their overheads. Right now, with cost-plus contracting, the overhead is the way they get paid!

The Curiosity rover. Image via NASA / Flickr.

* Related: Mars on Earth: The People Who Are Already Living On the Red Planet, No Spaceship Required

So, if you created this thing, if you just had NASA say, "Here's the mission plan, we need these four things, let's put them up with fixed-price contracts and start bidding," you would discover that you'd be able to do a human Mars program not for hundreds of billions of dollars, but for tens of billions of dollars. 

Now, if you wanted to even do it more aggressively than that, in terms of private participation, you could put the whole mission up for a bid. You could say, "The mission is a round-trip to Mars. What's your bid for the whole deal?" You might get a bid from SpaceX on the order of $10 billion.

Finally, you could do it with a prize, like Newt wanted to do. You say, "Okay, the government will offer a prize of $10 billion to the first private entity to send people to Mars and back." And $10 billion is nothing to the government, but in the real world, it's a lot of money, and people might go for it. And if they didn't, you wouldn't lose money. Not a penny would be spent.

You've compared the colonization of Mars to the European colonization of the New World. Why is that something to aspire to? Wouldn't we have wars of conquest between nations who are trying to colonize Mars?

If countries are gonna go to war, they're not gonna go to war for Mars. But frankly, if there's gonna be war, I can't think of a better place to do it than outer space.

What do you mean?

A lot less collateral damage. I mean, wars on Earth kill a lot of civilians. [Laughs] That's the thing. In 1967, these people in the Johnson administration -- like Dean, Rusk, McNamara, Rostow, Bundy -- they dreamed up this outer-space treaty to prevent claims of national sovereignty in outer space, supposedly in order to prevent conflict in outer space. So there's this treaty to prevent national sovereignty in outer space.

But there's a real irony here, because what they really did it for, was to prevent the prolongation of the space race beyond Apollo, which was draining funds from what they really wanted to do, which was the Vietnam War! Now, I ask you, which is a more benign activity: competing with the Soviets for firsts in space, or fighting in the jungles of Vietnam?

Curiosity mission control, NASA Ames. Image via NASA / Flickr.

So, you want to get rid of the no-sovereignty-in-space policy?

I think there need to be reasonable laws for claims of sovereignty on Mars. In other words, I don't think you can have one power go there and say, "Well, we landed here first, so we can claim the whole thing." I think there ought to be possibility to claim certain territories based on your activity in those territories. Without that, without there being some national sovereignties, there can't be private property.

Private property can only exist in the presence of government. You own your house because there are police there to make sure that you do. If there were no police, anybody stronger than you could throw you out of your house. In order for us to establish mining claims on Mars, there has to be someone with whom they are registered. So, I do think there needs to be national sovereignty in space, but I think that agreements need to be reached on criteria for establishing national claims on Mars territories.

A Chinese space landing. Image via Xinhua.

Frankly, if there's gonna be war, I can't think of a better place to do it than outer space

Why are you so certain that Americans are the ones who can and need to settle Mars? I mean, China has a pretty robust space program.

Well, if we keep going on the trajectory we're on, the first people on Mars will be Chinese. I don't think that's a good thing. Not because I'm anti-Chinese. I'm not anti-Chinese. I like Chinese people. I've been to China. I think they're very charming, and I'm not just saying that out of political correctness -- I actually think that.

But they have a government which is a tyranny, and they have political and social traditions that lend themselves to tyranny, and I think that, as humanity moves out into space, the traditions of a society which values the individual and values human freedom should be representing humanity as it grows from its planet of origin into the universe beyond.

I don't want this humanistic culture that we have in the West to just be a boutique item that only exists in one corner of the human universe. I want it to put its stamp on the future of mankind.

It sounds like you're saying America should go to Mars so we can take American and Western European culture into space.

Look at it this way: my last name is Zubrin. That's a Russian name. My folks came [to America] from Eastern Europe and I'm really glad they did, since practically all those that stayed behind were either killed by the Nazis or by Stalin or some other godforsaken tyranny. The reason there was a place like this that they could come to is because North America was settled by England, which represented, for all its laws, the most humanistic culture in the world at the time.

If North America had been settled by the Turks, instead, it wouldn't have looked like this. If it had been settled by the Spanish, it wouldn't have looked like this. We're having this conversation in English because the Elizabethans went forth from their little island and the English-speaking version of Western civilization became a world culture, carrying with it all the values of Magna Carta and Shakespeare and the King James Bible and a lot of other very good things. It brought a sense of trial by jury and a lot of other things that didn't exist elsewhere in Europe, to say nothing of Eastern civilizations.

The New World. Image via Library of Congress.

So, it's a very fortunate thing that that happened and that North America became settled by that culture and then became this place that people from every country in the world could come and enjoy the opportunities that that kind of culture can afford. If they hadn't have done that, English, if it had survived, would be this curiosity in this little island on the edge of Europe. England would be kind of like Serbia -- not really relevant to how the world is run and sort of a curiosity. That's why we need to go forth. We need to go forth because what we have is worth spreading.

@abrahamjoseph

Watch "Spaced Out," Motherboard's video series on space obsessives, and follow us @motherboard and on Facebook.

Connections

• This is What a Terraformed Mars Looks Like
• To Star on the Reality TV Show on Mars, You'll Need to Be a Good Person and Have No Business on Earth
• These New Mars Photos Aren't Just Sciencey, They're Gorgeous
• Deathmatch on Mars: An Interview with Warren Ellis on Newt Gingrich, Space Realism and Future America
• Motherboard TV: Mars on Earth: The People Who Are Already Living On the Red Planet, No Spaceship Required
• Spaced Out: Outer Space Interior Design
• The Fantastic and Banal Dreams of 1970s Space Colonies

Top image credit: Physicus / Flickr

Quick refresher: there are four known fundamental forces of nature: the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, and gravity (though electromagnetism is sort of the same thing as the weak force). Most of the stuff we deal in day to day experience has to do with electromagnetism and gravity: light, heat, electricity, not flying off into space, etc. The others have to do with stuff going down at the atomic and subatomic levels, like radioactive decay and holding atomic nuclei together.

We're still learning about all of these things, of course; we've yet to even observe the particle that gives us gravity, the graviton. But in a universe that is still super weird and full of unknown stuff, another force would hardly be unwelcome. Naturally, this is a thing being considered by some particle physicists. One of these fifth forces is called the long-range spin-spin interaction and, as Einstein might put it, it's spooky. That is, it acts at a distance, linking or coupling subatomic particles with other subatomic particles hundreds or thousands of miles away.

In a paper out today in Science, researchers describe how this theorized force could help us figure out more of what's happening in the guts of planet Earth, if nothing much else. The thing is that a lot of what happens in those guts is still a mystery--such as how concentrations of iron and other minerals vary with depth--revealed indirectly and imperfectly through Earthquake monitoring and lab-based modeling. There is no Hubble telescope for the inner-space of Earth, which is kind of a weird thing to consider.

The general idea of the new research, led by Amherst College's Larry Hunter, is that some electrons making up minerals in the Earth's mantle should align themselves according to the planet's magnetic field. These are called geoelectrons, and the team created a computer model describing theorized densities and orientations of these electrons. Hunter et al's next task was putting the model to experiment, with the help of a new device designed to look for interactions between these geoelectrons and particles on Earth's surface.

The long-range spin-spin interaction in which the spin-sensitive detector on Earth’s surface interacts with geoelectrons (red dots) deep in Earth’s mantle. Credit: Marc Airhart and Steve Jacobsen.

Said task was basically to examine how the energy of surface particles changed as their orientation to Earth's interior change. "We know, for example, that a magnet has a lower energy when it is oriented parallel to the geomagnetic field and it lines up with this particular direction — that is how a compass works," says Hunter. "Our experiments removed this magnetic interaction and looked to see if there might be some other interaction with our experimental spins. One interpretation of this 'other' interaction is that it could be a long-range interaction between the spins in our apparatus and the electron spins within the Earth, that have been aligned by the geomagnetic field. This is the long-range spin-spin interaction we were looking for."

Sadly, they didn't find it. But the researchers were able to put a lower boundary on the amount of force the spin-spin interaction should exert: less than one millionth the strength that gravity exerts on the same particles. Considering that gravity is already the weakest force by a huge degree, that makes the spin-spin interaction, like, nothing. But it is a rather spooky nothing, which is always welcome.

Top image: University of Chicago

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

Google startled the tech world slightly on Thursday when it pulled back the curtain on the new high performance, touchscreen Chromebook Pixel laptop. It's not so much that Google released a laptop — Google's been peddling its classic, cloud-based and impossibly cheap Chromebook since 2011. It's that Google slapped an Apple-sized price of $1,299 on the thing and didn't even bother giving it a fresh new design. It looks just like a MacBook Pro!

No big. Companies have been ripping off the MacBook Pro design pretty much as long as the MacBook Pro has been around. And why wouldn't they? The MacBook Pro is really well designed! The just-sharp-enough edges, the black border around the screen, the oversized touch pad, the clean body, the utter simplicity — it's all there. So should Apple be worried that Google is stealing its thunder, its propensity for pretty things? Probably not. But Microsoft should, because the new Chromebook Pixel shows just how useless Windows really is.

The Pixel uses Google's very pared down Chrome OS which is basically just a web browser. This means that you have to use web apps for all your computing needs, a task that would've been impossible ten years ago and might've been somewhat annoying five years ago. But today it's remarkable. Add the high end hardware — a tablet-like touchscreen with resolution that rivals Apple's Retina, a super fast processor, a terabyte worth of storage on Google Drive — and it's hard to say no. 

"But it does this in a package that has the advantage of being totally fused to the cloud: All your files, all your programs, living on Google’s servers, where they never need backing up or updating, and always available on any device you might own, whether it’s a phone, tablet or laptop," explains Christopher Mims at Quartz. "In short, it aims to be the hub of your digital life."

Well, both Microsoft and Apple want to sell you a hub for your digital life, too. Apple seems to be doing just fine doing what it's doing, but Microsoft is clearly struggling to keep up. The Windows 8 operating system didn't get amazing reviews. The Windows Phone hasn't really taken off like it should. The new Windows Surface tablets have gotten good reviews but haven't come close to the adoption rate that Android and Apple tablets have. Microsoft really doesn't need Google swooping in with a premium machine and innovative operating system that will continue to woo people away from Windows. 

And to add insult to injury, as Mims points out, this is a pet project for Google. In other words, it doesn't even matter if people buy the thing. They already make plenty of money. Cut the Windows out of Microsoft, though, and Steve Ballmer will (finally) be looking for a new job.

A few weeks ago, Japanese scientists released video footage of the neurons firing in a baby zebra fish brain while it hunted for food. It was pretty cool. This week, researchers at Stanford University announced they have used a similar technique to capture real-time neuronal images from a mouse brain. It’s pretty cool, too.

As in the fish study, Stanford scientists used gene therapy to elicit a bright, fluorescent green flashes from mouse neurons whenever they fired. From there, they implanted an extremely small microscope in the mouse’s brain, just above the hippocampus. According to a university press release describing the experiment, the camera was able to capture the activity of about 700 hippocampal neurons. A microchip wired to the camera transmitted the images to a monitor for the scientists to view.

Which is what you see in the video above. Released just a few days ago to accompany a new study in the journal, Nature Neuroscience, the video shows in split screen what’s happening in the mouse hippocampus while it negotiates the boundaries of an enclosure.

Part of what you're seeing here is learning. Watch closely and you’ll observe that the neurons that fire when the mouse is in a particular location fire the same way when the mouse returns to that same spot. “The hippocampus is very sensitive to where the animal is in its environment, and different cells respond to different parts of the arena,” explained associate professor of biology and of applied physics, Mark Schnitzer, in the press release. “Imagine walking around your office. Some of the neurons in your hippocampus light up when you're near your desk, and others fire when you're near your chair. This is how your brain makes a representative map of a space.”

In that sense, the footage to the right serves as a direct transposition of real-world space into gray matter topography. As Schnitzer put it, “We can literally figure out where the mouse is in the arena by looking at these lights.” What’s more, the mouse’s neurons fire the same way in relation to its location when the mouse is tested a month later.

The hippocampus plays a complex role in human cognition, which makes this newest batch of video imagery very exciting. As with mice, the human hippocampus is crucial to our spatial intelligence. A famous study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 found that the posterior hippocampi of London cab drivers were actually larger than in control subjects. When a person’s job requires memorizing the byways of a city as large as London (the greater metropolitan area, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, covers 610 square miles), the hippocampus effectively grows to make room.

But the hippocampus is also a crucial instrument in forming and retrieving what are called “declarative” or “explicit” memories. These are memories like facts and places that can be actively recalled and expressed. (“Implicit” or “procedural” memory, by contrast, involves learned but unconscious processes like the complex muscle and sensory coordination it takes to ride a bike.) For declarative memories, it’s believed the hippocampus acts as a sort of processing hub, assigning the different sensory components of an experience to different places in the neocortex, where they eventually reside as “pieces” of a whole memory. Scientists are still figuring out exactly how it works, but declarative memories seem to live at least partially in the hippocampus for a while before eventually moving entirely to the brain's various cortices (visual, auditory, etc.) for long-term storage. 

When we recall memories, the hippocampus acts “something like an orchestra conductor in directing the symphony of our conscious memory,” to borrow a different metaphor from science writer, Nicholas Carr. Based on studies of rats, monkeys and humans from the last few decades, scientists think the hippocampus retrieves and synthesizes whole memories—how a memory looks, feels and smells, for example—from different parts of the brain. Neuroscientists also think, as Carr notes, that the hippocampus helps link new and old memories together.

Which means that part of what we’re seeing in the mouse video could be the beginnings of long-term memory formation. The practical applications of such research are huge. The Stanford scientists believe this and subsequent studies could, for example, contribute greatly to our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s.

Video from the Japanese zebra fish experiment.

In the Japanese fish video (above), the neuronal firings we observe act like something of map, too, albeit a map of a different kind. In that case, scientists were looking at the fish’s optic tectum. The flashing lights mapped what the fish saw, not where it was. Taken together, studies like these are starting to give us a clearer picture of how different areas of the brain work, and work together, in ways we can actually see.

Fracking boomed, and gas got cheap. After hydraulic fracturing hit the scene, it opened up vast stores of previously unobtainable gas. That led to a big ol glut, and it’s already had a huge impact on coal—mostly, by killing it off. Until recently, coal power kept half the nation’s lights on. Last year, for the first time, enough power plants switched to natural that coal was down to providing a third of the nation’s power.

Good riddance. Coal is the filthy, asthma-inducing, globe-warming fuel of the past. It’s the single worst way to generate power, if you give two shits about airy notions like preserving a climate fit for humans to maintain a civilization. But the gas glut is having other unintended consequences. It’s edging nuclear power out, too.

Earlier this month, Scientific American’s David Biello reported that a number of aging nuclear power plants, in Florida, Wisconsin, Maryland, and elsewhere, are shutting down. They’re old, damaged, and in need of expensive repairs. Since those repairs can cost billions of dollars, utilities are deciding it's cheaper just to mothball the nuke and pick up the slack with natural gas—seeing as how the stuff’s currently getting pumped out of the Marcellus Shale faster than oxy from an OD’s gut.

The Washington Post’s Brad Plumer notes that

Since 2010, the amount of electricity generated from America’s nuclear reactors has fallen about 3 percent, or 29 billion kilowatt-hours. That’s a sizable drop … we’d need to quadruple the number of solar installations in the United States just to make up the loss of that carbon-free electricity.

Both Plumer and Biello point out that the shale gas boom isn’t just shuttering existing plants, it’s leading utilities to put the kibosh on plans for future reactors, too. Two reactors planned for Texas have already been scrapped.

Here’s the thing, though: Nuclear power has always been exorbitantly expensive. Every reactor requires staggering loan guarantees from the government and comes with massive upfront costs. That’s partly why that between 1978 and 2012, just one new nuclear power plant was approved for construction in the United States. One. Uno. And it is expected to cost $14 billion.

So there’s a pretty obvious reason that far more wind and solar projects are getting built than nuclear, and why that will continue to be the case—they’re cheaper, safer, and come in more manageable shapes and sizes. Speaking of which, if nuclear power is to survive the gas boom, experts reckon it will do so in downsized form: smaller, modular reactors that are both more efficient and don’t cost ten billion bucks a pop. Bill Gates is a fan. But we’ll see—the tech is still untested, and big questions (re: safety, waste disposal, et al) remain unanswered.

Until the dawn of the mini-nuke plants, I guess we’ll sit back and watch as the fracking fields swallow up and price out every other energy source we’ve got. Fortunately, it seems that we’re dealing with a bit of a bubble here, that the gas deposits are almost overstated, and that prices already seem to be bottoming out. Otherwise, America would run on 100% fracked natural gas by 2020. That's not going to happen—but coal and nuclear are definitely going to take a hit.

It didn't take long for a scruffy guy with glasses to approach me. It was a Saturday night last January, and I was at a cocktail party sitting feet away from porn stars and programmers alike.

“What’s your, uh, involvement with the site?” he shyly asked me. I told him I was a journalist. “Oh,” he said, and laughed in the way that indicated he was secretly hoping he’d gotten off watching me fuck before.

This uncommon intersection of individuals was gathered at the home of Cindy Gallop, one of New York’s boldest technocultural ringleaders, to celebrate the release of the site they hope will turn the porn industry on its head: Make Love Not Porn.

Though the site hasn’t officially launched, it’s come a long way from the bare-bones, restricted-access version that Gallop launched five years ago after she stood on stage at the TED Global conference and became the first person in the history of the glossy confab to describe depictions of semen facials as a World Problem.

From the observations she'd gathered during her many sexual encounters with men 20 to 30 years younger than her, Gallop had grown worried that the generations growing up using hardcore internet porn as sex education were developing an unfortunately skewed relationship with sex.

"My concern is particularly with the young girl whose boyfriend wants to cum on her face," Gallop told the audience. "She does not want him to cum on her face, but hardcore porn has taught her that all men love cumming on women's faces, all women love having their faces cum on, and therefore she must let him cum on her face and she must pretend to like it."

This was the beginning of Gallop's initiative to reprogram the porn industry to reflect real world sex, thereby incorporating women's desires and direction into the narrative—and to profit immensely from doing so. Her primary weapon: Make Love Not Porn, a sex site where users can upload their homemade porn videos for a nominal fee; profits from rentals of the videos are split 50/50 with the creators. The goal is to promote real world sex, not porn per se, and in so doing to inject more humanity and openness into the otherwise troubled world of Internet pornography.

"I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business," the 53-year-old, sporting a powerhouse haircut reminiscent of Anna Wintour, declares as the tagline for her personal brand. As former chairwoman of BBH, one of the top ad agencies in the country, Gallop casually advises some of the most business- and media-savvy women in New York via Rachel Sklar's notorious "xx in tech" mailing list, which is how I became fascinated with her.

I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business

I met Gallop for the first time last November on a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hosted every Friday and Saturday evening by international businessman Nick Gray, the “Hack the Met” tour reveals some of the best easter eggs in the museum as Gray leads groups of debaucherous New Yorkers around the endless maze in hopes of eventually refining his tour to the standards of the Saudi Royal Family.

Beneath the Sphinx statue in the lobby, Gray began his tour by announcing that Gallop was the VIP guest and had the privilege of requesting the night's artifact theme. In his iPad presentation, the words "ANCIENT DILDOS" flashed across the screen in all caps.

"I said I want to see antique pornography," Gallop unabashedly clarified. "Every single triple X rated antiquity and artifact the Met has to offer."

During the tour, Gallop forged ahead of the pack, racing from one remnant of ancient human sexuality to the next. In black leather pants, her commanding strut seemed more suited to someone wearing a ten gallon hat than a pink velvet hoodie.

Post tour, we sipped bourbon at Gray's West Village apartment awaiting a presentation from the best hammered dulcimer player in North America. I told Gallop I'd been following her on TheLi.st, and we got into a conversation about why women really love James Deen. It is ‘porn that women like,’ Gallop concluded, but not because lady porn is simple and sweet like J. Bryan Lowder supposed in an infamous XX_Factor article. We like him, Gallop supposed, because James Deen fucks (and blogs and tweets) like he enjoys getting women off.

Gallop on her bed at the Black Apartment  (via Gala Darling)

Gallop's residence in the Flatiron District--a glamorous and sprawling loft dubbed The Black Apartment--looks more like the set of a high-class erotic thriller than an amateur porn video.  A converted YMCA locker room, it was actually used as the set for The Notorious B.I.G.’s "Nasty Gal" video in 2005. The cavernous loft, filled with taxidermy and lined with bookshelves, windows, and a display case for Gallop’s 300 pairs of high heels, also serves as the base of operations for Make Love Not Porn when her staffers are in New York.

As we sat there, Gallop facing me over a taxidermy statue of a mongoose fighting a cobra, she began to tell me the story of her fascination with porn.

Like so many of us, Gallop, who was born in England, lived in a household where sex was taboo. She was able to piece together what the act more or less involved from indirect references in Shakespearean sonnets at the age of six, and first encountered real porn as a teenager when she and a friend snuck into a XXX cinema in Oxford. As Gallop told VICE's Pornification, she was raised in an age of zero online porn.

Her porn obsession first developed ten years ago while she was leading BHH New York, representing an online dating company. Match.com was the only real competitor at the time, and like any good ad exec, she made sure to thoroughly sample the product.

“I suddenly realized I was every young guy's fantasy. I was an attractive older woman with a high-flying career, never wanted to get married, never wanted children, didn't want a relationship,” Gallop recounted. “I just wanted to have some fun, which was severely missing from my life at the time.”

Indulging in the internet's sexual smorgasbord led Gallop to realize something that's apparent to anyone who’s fucked a twenty-something in the past decade—inexperienced guys try to mimic porn, which inevitably results in sex that isn’t pleasurable for women. “We all get enormously vulnerable when we get naked,” Gallop said. “If the only cues we've been given are from porn, those are the ones we'll take absent anything else.”

For women who know how to get what they want from sex and have no problem guiding, coaching, and recalibrating men away from their porn-derived tendencies, the process is like training a puppy—it’s annoying, but most of them learn quickly and the fun outweighs the hassle. But Gallop is concerned that if a generation grows up only exposed to—and possibly addicted to—mainstream porn, they might think that’s just the way sex is.

It’s not that Gallop's opposed to porn, though--she admits to enjoying it. She just wants to create a counter point so people get the difference between real sex and artificial entertainment.

Team MLNP, L to R: Gallop, Michael Smith (UX Architect), Sarah Beall (MadamCurator), Corey Innis (Co-founder & CTO), Oonie Chase (Co-founder & User Experience Lead)

As a 26-year-old woman, this strikes me as shockingly valid. I remember the first time I looked at online porn: I was eight years old and I made sure I was alone before typing www.sex.com into the URL bar. Days before I’d learned in a chatroom how to live outside of the garden of AOL's splash screen navigation, and I remember thinking, as I watched the blurred pixels cascade down the screen into clarity as the page loaded over dial-up, about how weird it was that they misspelled "come" in such a big font.

Up until a few years ago, I was convinced that either something was wrong with me because sex tended to hurt more than it was enjoyable, or that sex was all just a big conspiracy orchestrated by men to oppress women.

You can’t click a link on YouPorn or RedTube without reading something about pussies being wrecked, destroyed, abused, pounded and torn-up

In a way, I wasn’t totally wrong. As Gallop points out in her TED talk, “the porn industry is driven by men, funded by men, managed by men, directed by men and targeted at men," so it’s really no wonder that women getting fucked by men who learn how to fuck from porn are seeing red flags. Even the standard language of porn is male-centric, as you can’t click a link on YouPorn or RedTube without reading something about pussies being wrecked, destroyed, abused, pounded and torn-up. It's a desensitizing recipe, one that insults women and erodes the kind of chemistry that underwrites physical intimacy.

“Anybody with a vagina cannot but help wince at the term ‘finger blasting,’” Gallop said. “That makes me want to cross my legs immediately.”

Additionally, mainstream porn gives the impression that condoms aren’t necessary or slip on like magic; in reality the STD testing procedures used in the porn industry are laborious, and directors simply edit to cope with condom mishaps. Gallop finds it rather baffling that some people consider porn “dirty” because to her, porn tends to sanitize sex. Think about it. Nobody uses lube. Everyone is waxed bald. And you never see period sex even though many women say that’s when it feels the best.

"No big deal, blood everywhere," Gallop proclaimed, imagining a more realistic depiction. "Take the tampon out with your teeth—whatever turns you on.”

Screengrab of Make Love Not Porn

But it’s one thing to have real sex and another thing to watch people on a screen for entertainment, which is what porn is: entertainment. We don’t go to the movies to see home videos, so why would we watch porn to see Average Joes and Plain Janes having period sex? I asked Joanna Angel, Brooklyn-based founder of the alt punk porn site Burning Angels, how a model like Make Love Not Porn might shake things up.

“I respect it as a business platform," Angel explained. "As a small business owner, I think that's awesome. Do I think it's going to change the world morally or politically? No.”

Angel pointed out that real sex as porn isn’t as new of a concept as Gallop makes it seem with her flawlessly executed business pitch. She recalled one of her films, True Fucking Love, which features all "real" couples: “For our audience, I don't think it was as exciting as our other movies. We shot scenes where the guy couldn't do it. It's just not natural for a guy who's not in porn to show up somewhere and be like, one-two-three fuck.”

Make Love Not Porn doesn’t exclude porn stars from participating, and actually garners quite a bit of support from the porn community—they just have to be real couples. In a preview for one MLNP video featuring pornstar couple Lily Labeau and Danny Wylde, they explain that they fuck each other very differently than they fuck people on screen in porn. Labeau said her nether regions often get "out of commission," so when she goes home to Danny, she asks that he kindly only put it in her ass.

“It got to this point where I was almost like, I don’t know how to show real sex,” Labeau said. “I feel like, as performers in the adult industry especially, every time you bring out a camera it's not real anymore."

“What's real and what's not real? Who cares at the end of the day?” Angel said. “Your goal isn't just to get yourself off, it's to get the world off. When you watch something and you think it's real, then it's succeeded in its goal." 

Porn is entertainment, and despite rare success stories like Angel’s, the business side of it as flawed as the rest of the entertainment industry. With Make Love Not Porn, Gallop aims to capitalize on the failings of an industry that's been disrupted by the Internet, with a business model that splits profits in half with contributors—a template that Joanna Angel admits is appealing in its radical difference.

To submit, amateur porn makers must pay a $5 nonrefundable “curation fee” that acts as quality control to screen out trolls, spammers and other crap. Once a video is approved by Madam Curator, Sarah Beal, each of the videos is put on the MLNP marketplace for $5 to “rent” for three weeks; half of that money goes right into the pockets of the contributors. This plan, she says, will have contributors marketing the site as they use social media channels to promote the sale of their videos.

via Tomas Reyes

Gallop wants people to create a sexual profile, the digital form of flagging, a lesbian tactic I learned about in San Francisco last summer that involves sporting a different color bandana in your pocket to let strangers know what kink you’re into. "We're taking everything that makes Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Zynga so addictive to people, and following it the one place they will not go," Gallop added.

This is where the appeal ends for me as a user. Even if I did have a partner that I had ideal sex with, I probably wouldn’t want to share my naked body with any pervy old internet user for $5 a pop. Maybe this makes me a prude by Gallop's standards. I don't know. But I’d like to keep my most intimate advertising reserved for people I actually want inside me at any given time. I'll watch other people's Love Not Porn all day and night, don't get me wrong. But the only foreseeable case I could imagine in which I would actually contribute to the site would be if someone was threatening to defame me with naked pictures. In such a case, MLNP would be the perfect platform for demolishing a creep's leverage. A nuclear option, to be certain, but I'm glad to know I have a forum like this rather than no option.

But judging from the amount of pornographic content on Twitter and Tumblr, which is rumored to be as much as one third porn, the population of people who want a platform to share their exploits is alive and well. Exhibitionists gotta exhibit, so they may as well get paid for it. And viewers, bombarded by what science has said is an unhealthy surfeit of pornographic images, might have something to gain from a site where the actors are real couples, their bodies aren't shaved or pounded, and the tempo is slow. Appreciation, not fetishization or obsession, is the site's operative logic.

Back at the party at Gallop’s place, I sat on a Chinese Wedding Bed chatting with Sarah Beall, Madam Curator. Nearby, a Gallop staffer deep in a programming trance pounded a keyboard.

“This whole idea of being good in bed is like being an acrobat or having a ten inch dick,” Beall said. “But being good in bed is really about paying attention to your partner and knowing what they like, and being comfortable in your own skin and being comfortable with them and their body.” 

Sounds like hot sex to me, even the kind I'd click on.

Top via Flickr

Connections

• Watching Internet Porn Ruins Your Memory
• Justice Is Fleeting in the Era of Digitized Rape
• An Interview with James Deen, America's Porn Sweetheart

They don't call him the Bill Gates of drug running for nothing. As long-running boss of Mexico's beleaguered Sinaloa cartel, its believed he not only effectively owned the drug pipeline stretching from Central American through Mexico and on toward Chicago--who just declared him Public Enemy No. 1--but that his narco empire spans 140 countries. 

Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known simply as el Chapo, has for all intents and purposes changed why and how drugs are muled across borders. He is legend, the subject of untold hundreds of narcocorridos. And he was maybe just gunned down along the Mexican-Guatelama border. 

It's all still a bit unclear, which is par for course in this game. But guatemalan officials are investigating whether Chapo was killed late Thursday in a gunfight with Guatemalan forces near Peten, an area of jungle on the border with Mexico. As Al Jazeera reports, police have collected fingerprints and photos of the scene, which are now undergoing crosschecks by Mexican authorities. 

"The first information we have is that it could be him," Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez told local radio. Nothing, for now, is "100 percent" certain, Lopez cautioned. 

Guatemala's state-run Agencia Guatemalteca de Noticias first reported the incident, saying that vehicles, weapons and two dead people were found in San Valentin. Ulises Anzueto, Guatemala's defense minister, said earlier that he "had no information confirming a clash between soliders and drug traffickers" and that he has no evidence to back claims that Chapo had been hanging in or around Peten. 

President Enrique Pen Nieto, who campaigned on the promise of doing away with the whac-a-capo style approach to stemming drug violence, said he's "hoping to get some information soon." 

So, who knows. When no one really knows who the hell the real Chapo even is to begin with, this all has to be taken with a giant grain of salt. But if indeed the man has met his end--in true capo fashion, no less--expect a massive power vacuum to potentially open up as the next cartel in line vies for glory and profit in Mexico's ongoing and bloody land grab saga. 

With that, here's a crazy thing from mother site VICE about cartels and the fucking Romney's, who, naturally, are warring. 

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Though the availability and morality of hardcore pornography has been debated since the internet made it more widely available, it’s traditionally been those on the conservative side of the fence arguing against it. But in the past month, Iceland has seriously put forth the prospect of banning violent internet pornography, though they don’t really specify how violent that "violent" is.

Icelandic society is hardly a traditional one; Icelanders have an openly gay prime minister, and their politics are nothing if not progressive. Yet they're growing increasingly wary that violent pornography undermines women’s gender equality and augments young children's libidos irrevocably.

According to Halla Gunnarsdóttir, adviser to the interior minister Ögmundur Jónasson, “We are a progressive, liberal society when it comes to nudity, to sexual relations, so our approach is not anti-sex but anti-violence. This is about children and gender equality, not about limiting free speech."

Occupying a space between fantasy and reality unlike that portrayed in non-pornographic films or videogames, porn requires performers to actually experience the fantasy they’re selling. In hardcore pornography, porn where the selling point can be rough sex or violence, the appeal is not simply the depiction of a sex act, but the power dynamics between the actors on screen. Though they are actresses, doubtlessly exaggerating for the camera, the women really are gagging. Though it's consensual, they really are being slapped in the face.

It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with actors gagging or being slapped in the face or doing the slapping, but I do think it's reasonable to be able to have the conversation about whether, over time, watching all that slapping alters either our opinions or our behaviors. 

Though they are actresses, the women really are gagging. Though it's consensual, they really are being slapped in the face.

When we think about violence in pornography, we need to reassess the questions we ask ourselves. When we misframe the important question as whether it is "okay" for individuals to find violence sexually exciting, we will inevitably reach a dead-end. An individual’s sexualization of any act or preferences is philosophically valueless. Or rather, no one is here to judge that impulse. 

The questions we should be asking are whether viewers of violent pornography escalate to more and more violent pornography (in effect, whether they need more violence to achieve similar arousal) and whether the increasing availability of violent pornography attracts viewers who were not initially attracted to violent pornography. But most importantly, does pornography that sexualizes aggression translate to real-life aggression? Does it translate to viewpoints on gender roles that diminish men or women?

A reasonable person would probably allow for the possibility that repeated exposure to violent imagery of any sort could translate to real world aggression, though confounding factors abound. In mainstream movies, we’re comfortably removed from reality, therefore we can relish all manner of scenarios that would normally horrify. We can be entertained by the idea of someone being shot in the head or slapped in the face while understanding that it’s artifice.

When we watch hardcore pornography we understand it’s artificial in many ways, but the violence (or forcefulness) itself isn’t faked in the same way it is in traditional films. It looks like violence because it is violence. It seems possible that the diminished degree of removal could have some impact, even subconsciously, on the viewer. 

If viewing artificial violence – shooting virtual people in video games – can alter behavior and increase aggression, and if we accept that human beings are capable of becoming at least partially desensitized to any extreme behavior that they repeatedly observe, then what happens when that observed behavior is violent pornography? It's a question that should at least be considered.

Any movie worthy of a kill count supercut is obviously violent. But look at what's portrayed: It's obviously not happening in real life. But porn's violence, however staged, is actually happening between performers.

It can seem decidedly unhip, for many reasons, to question the role of violent media on our behaviors; it can feel too close to aligning with the views of conservative moralists. Especially in the realm of pornography, the focus on avoiding censorship and remaining non-judgmental on sexual proclivities has been taken very seriously. This is understandable, as the fight to destigmatize sex and sexuality is often conflated with the fight to destigmatize pornography. But although they can be related in many ways, they aren’t equal.

In the wake of various mass shootings last year, as the cable news networks shifted into gear for discussion around violence in America, gone was much of the scapegoating of violent video games that occurred so often in the 90s. When NRA president Wayne LaPierre blamed games after Sandy Hook, he was fairly roundly criticized. The same goes for movies. The Aurora shooting sparked a discussion about violence in Hollywood, but fewer people than in years past were willing to try to link action movies to real-life violence.

But as Stephen Marche smartly observed in the New York Times, “A new cliché has taken hold, though, one that insists on an absolute separation between violent art and real violence.” Much like the “video games make children kill” hysteria of the 80s and 90s, this sentiment misses the mark by oversimplifying. No media “makes” human beings do things, but neither are we impervious to the effects of normalized actions. 

In much the same way, Iceland's actions seek a simple solution for a complex issue. It's reductive to say that violent pornography is simply bad for society, and it's not also not true. Legal pornography doesn't translate into more criminal sexual actions, though there's a host of possible confounding reasons for that too. Pornography proponents would say that legal porn provides an outlet for otherwise criminal sexual impulse; porn critics would say that pornography causes women to be more accepting of sexual violence, therefore they report less.

I would wager that it's socially progressive societies that typically legalize pornography, and as societies become more progressive, women typically gain more social capital to oppose sexual violence against them. So "violent" porn doesn't translate into violence, but does it change the way we think or view others?

The fact that violent pornography more frequently features men dominating women mimics the actual gender power imbalance in our culture, and it may be more old-fashioned than many are willing to admit. That finding is highlighted in a study by researchers at the University of Hawaii that examined pornography’s association with gender dynamics in the US, Japan, and Norway.

The higher the ratio of empowering vs. disempowering images in these countries, the more likely women were to have actual social power.

Using the United Nations' Gender Empowerment Measure, a standardized measurement of women’s political and economic power in any country – Norway is 1, the United States is 15, and Japan is 54 – researchers evaluated the number of empowering pornographic images (images where women were confident, unbound, and comfortable) as well as the number of “disempowering” images (images where women were bound, contorted, or clearly uncomfortable) in each country.

Though disempowering images were equally as common across all three countries, the higher the Gender Empowerment Measure of a country, the more common empowering images were. In other words, the higher the ratio of empowering vs. disempowering images in these countries, the more likely women were to have actual social power.

Though you could argue that the pornography is merely a reflection of common gender roles in a country (i.e. that it isn’t causing them), I think making the distinction is irrelevant in this case. If the countries where men have more actual power enjoy pornography that reflects that power imbalance, then it’s pretty clear that the prevalence of disempowering or violent pornography isn’t meaningless.

I think what Iceland is trying to get at is that there is something unsettling about the seemingly infinite images of more violent or aggressive pornography that are available. But what they're proposing is actually part of the problem. What we need is acknowledgment, debate, and discussion, not the threats of banning an entire, vaguely defined genre. Many things are better for us in moderation. Perhaps there are types of pornography that fall into that category as well.

Obviously, banning pornography (or whatever "violent pornography" is) is not the answer, but neither is pretending that media can't influence behavior and beliefs. We need to get at the uncomfortable truths underlying why we love violent pornography -- or just plain violence for that matter -- and what it does or doesn't say about a culture. Additionally, we might keep in mind that pornography has traditionally been made by and for men; it is naturally steeped in a masculine view. As women become more vocal guides of pornography's vision -- producing, directing, and selling porn -- I would argue that porn will become more inclusive of various sexual interests. It's our inability to talk rationally about pornography that harms us the most. 

@kelllybourdet

Picture a gold mine, and your brain probably whips up something delightfully anachronistic—a 49er with a pickaxe maybe, or a wheeled metallic basin emerging from a mine shaft on railroad tracks, overflowing with glittering rocks. Or maybe that’s just me, a result of growing up in Northern California, in ex-gold rush country.

Either way, it’s ridiculous. Obviously. These days, gold mines are often massive industrial operations, and most use complex extraction machinery and thousands of gallons of cyanide to separate the gold from rock.

To illustrate, allow me to detail the next gold mine to be born in the U.S. A detailed proposal has been sent to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management for a new gold mine, the Keiwit Project, in Toole County, Utah. It would be the first ever built in the region. Its operators hope to process millions of tons of ore over six years in order to extract gold, silver, and arsenic from the rock. But to do it, they’re going to need to ship in over ten thousand gallons of cyanide from Nevada.

Deseret News, a local Utah paper, reports that

“cyanide would be trucked to the site from Nevada from a company with employees certified in safety procedures for handling the compound. At the Kiewit site, a lined, 12,000-gallon tank of the material would sit inside a secondary container on top of another liner.”

If that sounds crazy, it isn’t. The report notes that 90% of modern gold mines use cyanide, and the practice has been around since the late 1800s. Rick Havenstrite, the president of Desert Hawk, the Seattle mining company aiming to get the mine approved, explains how it works:

“Basically, the mounds of rock are piled on a lined pad that receive a cyanide solution through a drip application. We mine it, crush it and sprinkle it on. Cyanide bonds to the gold and silver and carries it out. They are all in liquid form."

And the cyanide is coming from Nevada because that’s where the gold mines are—over 30 installations use cyanide to grip gold across the state as we speak.

Clearly, it’s an environmental concern—cyanide is highly toxic, and many of these mines are located near groundwater stores. So far, the proposal, which is currently open to public comment in Utah, hasn’t received any pushback. Maybe with the current focus on coal, oil, and gas extraction, old school mining operations for metals and raw materials are simply sliding under the radar.

Either way, it’s worth the quick look at modern gold mining, if only as a reminder that it’s not just fracking, the currently popularized cardinal sin of resource extraction—everything we pull out from the deep dirt these days comes with a risk and a cost.

Top image: A gold mine in Cowal, Australia that uses cyanide in the extraction process.

Just when you thought you'd forgotten all about that recently revealed "secret" US drone base in Saudi Arabia, there's this: President Obama just revealed yet another far-flung desert drone base, this one in Niger.

Well, it wasn't that straightforward. Obama did not "explicitly reveal the drone base" in a letter to Congress, the Washington Post reports. Instead he said that some 100 military personnel are now posted up in Niger to "provide support for intelligence collection" for a France military operation in neighboring Mali. That that's apparently all code for "our boys will be flying spy planes" comes from a--wait for it--unnamed administration official who tells the Post that nearly all the personnel are with the Air Force.

The drone ops, the official added, are "imminent," and will initially be based in the capital city of Niamey. Eventually the plan is to move everything north to the town of Agadez, closer to the action in Mali. For all the detached, out-of-harm's way characteristics of America's shadow wars abroad, sniffing out suspected bad dudes if still very much about proximity. 

"That’s [Agadez] a better location for the mission," the official told the Post, "but it’s not feasible at this point." Agadez, being far more remote than Niamey, is still fraught “with logistical challenges.”

The big question, of course, is whether these spy missions will eventually be optimized to kill. The anonymous official contends that for now the joint US-France missions will use unarmed Predators, adding that "this is purely an intelligence gathering mission." But then there's those other unnamed administration officials who told the Post that Obama hasn't yet axed the possibility of the drones being rigged up with explosives in the future. 

Either way, don't think al-Qaeda and its militant affiliates won't be ready, what with their mud-smeared cars and radio jammers and other cloaking tactics laid out in that 22-point guidebook to dodging drones. 

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Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

Bottles of cleaning fluid and painter's caulk usually have their own fair share of fatal warning stickers, which is why I've never been to the ER for an eating-related stunt. But that is no feat. It's normal.

Chris Schewe, or Shoenice, has taken a different approach. The man who will eat anything to end world hunger started at the age of three by eating a pack of cigarettes and being rushed to the hospital. Through grade school he would go on to defeat the dares of his classmates and bullies. Gobbling down cups of salt and baking soda, pieces of metal, glue, grass, and piles of sawdust, he found a way to win their love. Chris was a hellraiser with an iron stomach who grew up with his brother under an alcoholic mother whom he would later discover dead (from alcohol-related issues) on the living room floor.

As an adult, his ability to slug bag everything from car wax to motor oil has turned him into a YouTube star. After watching over a hundred of his videos, I was chomping at the bit to get in contact with him. But Shoenice is a master social media spammer, and it's hard to cut through the noise. I gave up after countless attempts. But when Motherboard producer Erin Lee Carr was able to trace Chris down via e-mail, I realized I'd soon be meeting him for the latest episode of My Life Online.

Some are unamused by Shoenice's faults and complete lack of comprehension of online etiquette. I've watched my share of friends and acquaintances gag while watching his stunts. They shudder and ask, "Dude, what's wrong with this guy? Isn't he going to die? He's psycho, something isn't right."

To me, Chris is a hero. While I agree that there might be something suspect about a guy that gladly chugs a bottle of rubbing alcohol, I also see in him an echo of my 14-year-old self. After spending a brisk weekend up in Lake George, NY with Schewe and his friends, feeding him a bottle of glue, and hearing his life story, from a very tough childhood to his time serving food to Gulf War soldiers–and his many musings on death–I didn't understand Chris any better, but I like him a whole lot more.

I still don't fully comprehend the mechanics behind his campaign to end world hunger, and I don't think he really does either. There is also a stunt-loving, self-promotional aspect to his performance art, but perhaps spreading the hunger gospel through YouTube could actually work. Of course, that's assuming that his edible escapades don't get the best of him.

Produced by Erin Lee Carr and edited by Zoe Miller.

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Female D. melanogaster, the fly used in the study, laying an egg. Image: Dow/Davies labs, Glasgow

Fruit flies are a common subject of studies concerning alcohol–they've been shown to drink harder when they're rejected, and to get better at learning while drunk–but why did fruit flies' affinity for drink evolve in the first place? Curiously enough, for fruit flies, alcohol can help combat parasites.

According to a study out of Emory University published in Science, female fruit flies will lay their eggs on alcohol-rich food sources (in the wild, that generally means decomposing fruit) if they see parasitic wasps nearby. Why's that? Endoparasitoid wasps are small, but they're huge killers of flies. They do so by injecting their eggs into fly larvae, along with a chemical that suppresses the fly larva's immune response; if the wasp larvae survives, it eats its way out. Gory, right?

It turns out that fruit flies are far more tolerant of alcohol than are wasps. That means that if an infected fly larva is hatched in an alcoholic environment, it can survive while the wasp larva dies. It's still more beneficial for a fly larva to grow up uninfected and without alcohol, but this study shows that if female flies see a female parasitic wasp–which spells doom for their offspring–they'll choose to medicate their larvae by laying them in an alcoholic environment.

"The adult flies actually anticipate an infection risk to their children, and then they medicate them by depositing them in alcohol," Todd Schlenke, an evolutionary geneticist at Emory whose lab conducted the research, told Science Daily. "We found that this medicating behavior was shared by diverse fly species, adding to the evidence that using toxins in the environment to medicate offspring may be common across the animal kingdom."

The team's experiment was set up thusly: 300 flies were put in cages containing two food sources, one non-alcoholic and one containing a 6% alcohol solution, and allowed to do their mating thing. The control group, which never saw wasps, preferred to lay eggs in the non-alcoholic dish. But in the presence Leptopilina heterotoma females, a common fruit fly parasite, the flies laid a significantly greater portion of eggs on alcoholic dishes. Interestingly, they did not show that bias when in the presence of male wasps, which don't present a danger to fly larvae.

"Our data indicate that the flies can visually distinguish the relatively small morphological differences between male and female wasps, and between different species of wasps," Schlenke said.

The team then tested how strong the females like their kids' alcohol to be. Flies that saw no wasps actually preferred to lay eggs in a 3% solution, which the team notes aligns with previous research suggesting flies get a health benefit from consuming a small amount of ethanol. Females in the presence of wasps preferred to lay their eggs in dishes corresponding to the highest alcohol concentrations found in nature, around 12-15% (wine, basically). 

But is there an actual evolutionary advantage, or are flies just drunks? In the first part of the study, the team measured the eclosion (egg-hatching) success of the flies, and found that when wasps weren't around, non-alcoholic eggs hatched at a higher rate than those that in the 6% solution, which suggests in normal conditions, alcohol is bad for fly fitness. But when wasps were allowed to prey on the eggs, those that were laid in alcoholic dishes survived at a higher rate than those that didn't.

In other words, it's better for flies to not be born in alcoholic conditions, but because wasps are better killers than ethanol is, it's basically better to have drunk babies than parasitized ones. Because of that fitness benefit, the team posits that fruit flies' decision-making over alcohol medication is indeed an evolved trait, which is supported by the fact that such behavior has been observed in a number of different fly species.

@derektmead

Jaime Cochran, AKA @asshurtmacfags, co-chair of Rustle League.

Via Vice UK: According to reports on the BBC and other news sites, hacktivist collective Anonymous had one of their main Twitter feeds hacked yesterday. As you might imagine, this is a big deal in the hacking world because at this stage, Anonymous are to hacking what David Beckham is to football and Will Smith is to rapping: if you asked your nan to name you a hacking collective, she'd go for Anonymous.

So who's responsible for the hack? It's been attributed to a group of hackers going by the name Rustle League.* They've been pestering Anonymous since last summer, and though they've also made it their business to troll lazy journalists and Justin Bieber fans, their main sport is trolling Anonymous. Yesterday’s takeover of @Anon_Central isn’t even the first time Rustle League are reported to have taken over an Anonymous Twitter feed; last time, the group were credited for taking over @YourAnonNews and tweeting images of a man splaying his anus wide open (yeah, it was goatse, I'm not linking to it). They didn't just do this once, they did it 30 times. 

If you think about it, it makes sense: Why shouldn’t Anonymous, who have exploded as an online movement the world over, have their own group of dedicated trolls? Online phenomenon begets online phenomenon.

What makes Rustle League interesting is that they aren't pricks. The word "troll" has become a catch-all misnomer for lazy mainstream media outlets looking to pigeonhole basically anyone who's being a dick on the internet. Originally, though, it used to refer to a less heinous, more playful breed of internet antagonist, and it's to this group that Rustle League seem to belong.

They aren't the aggressively-perspiring, jailbait-loving pervs who destroy teenage girls' lives then mock their deaths on Facebook memorial pages. They retain a sense of mischief rather than menace, and they're not trying to change the world either, like Anonymous appear to be doing right now.

I got in touch with them before their latest hack on Anonymous to discuss modern-day trolling. I guess if you want an accurate definition of the word "troll", it's best to ask a troll themselves. (Unless they give you a wrong answer on purpose because they're trying to troll you.)

“Trolling is a form of social commentary or satirical performance art for people who take themselves too seriously on the internet,” said Jaime Cochran, co-chair of Rustle League. Cochran (she goes by the handle @asshurtmacfags on Twitter) is a 20-something online security professional and "aspiring porn actress" who, when we met for coffee in her home city of Chicago, described her style as "cerebral trolling" or even "an interactive comedy routine", before comparing herself to Andy Kaufman.

Cochran is one of Rustle League's five core members, around which drifts a more nebulous network of 30 or so more. All of them are hackers and online security professionals. None of them are fat, middle-aged men still living with their parents. Although, said Cochran, “The most malicious cyber-bullies are privileged, middle-aged, middle class men. I call it, 'The middle-aged, upper-middle-class white guy on the internet syndrome.'”

A Rustle League fan or member – it's hard to tell.

Rustle League didn't begin as a bunch of malicious jerks bombarding Facebook RIP pages or teenage girls with abuse, but as a joke between a group of friends that morphed into a wider, unified network with their own website (nazifag.com) and Google Voice hotline. Cochran explained that the group formed last summer and began to release "pastebins (online text-storing apps) of nonsense" to "lampoon the way Anonymous" conducts itself.     

“We see ourselves as the old Anonymous, which is more about having fun and fucking with people rather than revolution and saving the world. Although, what we do does serve a purpose in society,” said Cochran.

According to Cochran and IRC chat logs she showed me, Anonymous now think that Rustle League are comprised entirely of FBI agents “because we annoy the shit out of them”. Convoluted conspiracy theories about how Rustle League are “a PsyOps” – a government-run operation meant to affect the already paranoid mental state of Anonymous – abound. Cochran assures me she is not FBI.

The "hacked" Rustle League website.

Besides Anonymous, Rustle League poke fun at the entire hacker ethos. Try “hacking” into the user section of the Rustle League website – designed like a shitty Geocities fan-page whose user ID and password are both “admin” – and you'll find a screen of flying penises, swastikas and the American and Israeli flags. As if it wasn't already obvious enough, they're using symbols like the swastika and words like "nigger" or "fag" because they're charged phrases sure to offend anyone who's not a part of the community. React with outrage and you become the victim. 

“I facetiously call someone a 'fag', but that's internet nomenclature, internet lexicon,” said Cochran, who happens to be transgender and a friend of Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, the “iPad hacker” currently facing a totally unjustified ten years in prison for exposing AT&T's loose security. 

Weev was president of another trolling group known as GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America), a revolving collective that made headlines last autumn for their tweets about African-Americans stealing televisions and pet cats during Hurricane Sandy. None of the thefts they tweeted about actually happened, obviously, but some outlets ran with the story, which is exactly what the GNAA wanted: to point out inefficiencies in today's media by very successfully making them look like idiots.

Andrew "weev" Auernheimer.

Rustle League member Jihad, who was also part of the Occupy Movement and Antisec before one of its most prominent guys, Sabu, was outed as an FBI informant, is convinced “the media purposely confuses trolling for bullying”. In a private web chat about their fake Super Bowl power-outage "hack", Jihad wrote:

“Often we [trolls] rely on the ignorance of the media itself to propagate our messages. When the lights went out at the Super Bowl, the Rustle League tweeted, taking responsibility and linking an obviously fake picture of the "control panel" used to 'LYKE OMG HAX0R THE NFL GIBSON.' It wasn't long before that information was up on various news websites and blogs,” he added, before calling this type of un-fact-checked journalism “lazy” and a form of “selling ignorance.”

Rustle League don't really focus on trolling the media or pointing out issues with the 24-hour news cycle as much as other groups, though. Their “operations” are varied, something that comes with 30 or so unofficial members doing their own thing. One floating member, Dutchminati, for example, created the #cutforbieber hashtag that temporarily had the media believing Justin Bieber fans were cutting themselves in protest at their idol smoking weed. It was supposed to be a form of “social commentary on idol worship and how we treat and look up to celebrities”, explained Cochran. She reiterated, however, that this kind of trolling isn't her style.

Besides mocking hacker culture and Anonymous, Rustle League have made prank calling internet radio station Vince in the Bay another one of their trademarks, but Cochran admits, “We've started to wear out the Vince in the Bay thing.” She then mused aloud about joining the Westboro Baptist Church, “just because they're trolling the shit out of Anonymous".

She explained, “They use free speech so brazenly and it's amazing to see people like Anonymous trying and failing to squash what they do. I don't agree with their message as a trans-woman, but they push the limits of free speech and it's something that needs to be done more often.”

tl;dr: Rustle League = a group of digital Voltaires.

*Update, 6:56PM, 22/02/13: We just got an email telling us that Rustle League didn't hack Anonymous at all, that the two groups are great pals and basically colluded to "rustle the jimmies" of the world's media – "world's media" including us in this instance, I guess. If what the email says is true, then good work, Rustle League. But we haven't yet verified this. See this recent Twitter exchange:

Follow Fruzsina on Twitter: @FruzsE

It's been almost a year since we learned that Hector Xavier Monsegur, the one-time LulzSec leader known as Sabu, had ratted out his hacker friends to the Feds in exchange for a few extra months of freedom. That was last March, and at that point in time Sabu had been working with the FBI for months, helping them thwart hacks from groups like Anonymous and bring in the hackers responsible.

A few weeks after that, we learned that Sabu's sentencing had been delayed so that Sabu could keep helping his new law enforcement friends. On Friday, U.S. prosecutors announced that Sabu's sentencing would be delayed once again. Prosecutors would not say why.

What Sabu is doing now that he's not packing his bags for prison remains a mystery. Assuming history serves as evidence, there's certainly a strong possibility that he's continuing to cooperate with authorities. Whatever he's doing with his free time, Sabu can't be too disappointed. He faces a maximum penalty of 124 years in prison. For hacking.

The timing of all this is pretty curious. Of course, a judge set the date for Sabu's sentencing months ago, but in recent weeks, there's been a serious uptick in reported cyber attacks, both of the jokester Anonymous type and the serious Chinese military type. The New York Times more or less kicked it off when it announced that it had been the victim of sustained hacking attacks over the past four months, and all signs pointed to the People's Liberation Army, though China vehemently denies any involvement.

In the days that followed, several other papers stepped forward and reported similar intrusions. By mid-February, Apple and Facebook also raised their hands to report hacks, also from the Chinese military. And while hacker hunters are getting better at finding out who's behind these kids of attacks, the government is obviously struggling. President Obama admitted as much in his State of the Union Address and the executive order on cybersecurity that followed.

In other words, the FBI needs all the help it can get. Again, it's impossible to say what Sabu is doing. The idea of the Feds maintaining a working relationship a criminal for months, if not years, is hardly far-fetched. Just look as far as Frank Abignale, the shape-shifting con artist made famous by the movie Catch Me If You Can. Whatever he's gaining from staying out of prison, Sabu stands to benefit from playing canary a little longer. That's not a bad move for a guy who's looking at the equivalent of two life sentences.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu is stepping down as Energy Secretary. For four years, he was the guru of keeping America's lights on, keeping the factories chugging, and deciding how we should do both well into the future. And above all else, he wanted more solar power.

With the rest of Washington still obsessed with fossil fuels, Chu was concerned above all else with securing the nation an affordable, sustainable, and abundant supply of clean energy. As a scientist, Chu recognized the threats posed by climate change, and believed the threat should be addressed.

So he launched the SunShot initiative in 2011, which “drives research, manufacturing, and market solutions to make the abundant solar energy resources in the United States more affordable and accessible for Americans.” Modeled after the ethos of JFK’s “Moon Shot,” Chu hoped to inspire a race towards clean, affordable solar technology. And he managed to make some serious headway.

Today, as sort of a farewell to the clean energy wonks that were so thrilled to see him take office in the first place, Chu participated in a Google Hangout to discuss the impact of his SunShot initiative, and, to some extent, his legacy as Energy chief.

“We’re following a learning curve, we see at least a decade of continuous improvement,” he said, noting that we’re seeing the price of solar in Power Purchase Agreements, or the contracts between energy producers and buyers, plummeting. “Now its 14-15 cents per kilowatt hour, going on 11-12. It’s a very exciting downward trend.”

Chu discussed how major technological advances in solar power have increased the efficiency of solar panels, and how much more energy they are now able to convert into electricity.

“In 2004, the cost of utility scale solar power was $8 a watt,” he said. “Now it is below $3, maybe even $2.50. The SunShot goal is $1.00 per watt. That’s everything—the installation, the panels.”

This is the result of the manufacturing and deployment processes for solar scaling up and getting streamlined over the last ten years or so—panels are cheaper, the regulatory frameworks are easier to navigate, and there’s greater investor confidence in solar projects. “Large solar projects have become what we call ‘bankable’,” Chu said.

As a result, Chu portends a very near future where solar is indeed just as cheap as any other power source.

“This is not something that’s going to happen 20-30 years from today,” he said. “This is going to happen 10 years from today. Maybe sooner.”

Chu also advocated finding “new ways of thinking” about the way we get our electricity altogether. He suggested we move towards distributed generation, as opposed to the monolithic central power plant system that runs most of the U.S., and that utilities should consider installing solar panels on consumer’s rooftops and batteries in their homes. Consumers would benefit from being largely off the grid and “blackout immune” he said, and utilities could diversify their power supply.

Chu’s confidence in solar is refreshing—at a moment when the lion’s share of energy investment is pouring into fracking and natural gas, he remains confident that solar technology will pull even. We can do it faster with better policy, he notes. The bottom line is that, according to Chu, solar power is already a completely viable mass energy source: it’s technologically mature and just about cheap enough to give dirty coal and gas a run for its money.

“We’re going further than reaching for the moon,” Chu said, “we’re going for the sun.”

Top image: Geekosystem

Using dead animals as a means of covert warfare has been around since at least about 300 BCE. According to historians, Persian, Greek, and Roman literature around that time cites examples of armies tossing dead animals into their enemies' drinking wells to poison them. Humans have been poisoning each other with dead animals ever since.

Of course, we’ve devised much more effective biological weapons for killing people en masse since the good ol’ days when a dead cat or two could turn the tide of war. But when it comes to waging war on snakes, a dead animal still does the trick.

According to a report by the Associated Press, the island nation of Guam is completely overrun with brown tree snakes—so much so, that the snakes have killed off most of the island’s bird species since they invaded aboard American war ships just after World War II. The snakes are usually just a few feet long, but sometimes grow as long as 10 feet. They live in trees and hunt at night. The local birds never stood a chance.

They’re also biting people and shorting out power lines, the AP reports. And now Hawaii, despite lying 3,000 miles east, is worried the snake could somehow reach its shores and wreak similar havoc. Hawaii likes its wildlife, and so do its tourists. So the United States government has decided to make it rain on Guam’s jungles later this spring with dead mice. The mice will be loaded with acetaminophen.

Apparently the brown tree snake—like many a D-list celebrity—loves any meal it doesn’t have to work for. It also doesn’t do so well with acetaminophen, which cures headaches for humans, but cures life for brown tree snakes.

“We are taking this to a new phase,” said Daniel Vice, assistant state director of U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services in Hawaii, Guam, and the Pacific Islands, in the AP article. “There really is no other place in the world with a snake problem like Guam.”

If it sounds like the feds aren’t messing around, they aren’t. The damage already done to Guam notwithstanding, estimates say the snakes could cause between $593 million and $2.14 billion in economic damage to Hawaii each year if they somehow hitch a ride there by boat or plane.

To develop its mouse-drop logistics, the USDA joined with the Department of Defense, which has been coming up with clever ways to use animals as weapons for a long time. Pigeons were trained during WWII to pilot bombs toward their targets. Bees were trained recently at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to sniff-out explosive substances.

The government’s plans for using dead mice are more complex than just dumping a bunch of dead, drugged mice from a plane.

Per the AP article:

To keep the mice bait from dropping all the way to the ground, where it could be eaten by other animals or attract insects as they rot, researchers have developed a flotation device with streamers designed to catch in the branches of the forest foliage, where the snakes live and feed.

Experts say the impact on other species will be minimal, particularly since the snakes have themselves wiped out the birds that might have been most at risk.

“One concern was that crows may eat mice with the toxicant,” said William Pitt, of the U.S. National Wildlife Research Center's Hawaii Field Station. “However, there are no longer wild crows on Guam. We will continue to refine methods to increase efficiency and limit any potential non-target hazards.”

Now if only the feds could come up wth a similar solution for the Burmese python problem in Florida. Pythons can grow up to 26-feet long and seem awfully fond of dog and cat meat.

Brief disclosure: I haven't read Ray Kurzweil's new book. I haven't even paid too much attention to "the restless genius" (The Wall Street Journal, via Ray Kurzweil's website, thanks) in general. I can say two things: when I mention that I write about science/tech to new age-y peers--cool kids way into triangles, in other words--Ray Kurzweil is frequently brought up above most any other topic. Second, when moderating a panel a couple years back at the Doomsday Film Festival about artificial intelligence in pop culture, I made the apparent misstep of broaching the "singularity" topic, causing panelist and AI pioneer Roger Schank to elicit the most withering scoff in the great history of thinking shit is dumb.

A Science review of the new Kurzweil book, humbly titled How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, delivered a fairly withering scoff of its own a couple of weeks ago. It's well worth reading, particularly if you have any interest in what the scientific community (the neuroscience community, in particular) thinks about the prophecies of Google's director of engineering. (While acknowledging that it's hardly the designated mouthpiece of "the scientific community," Science is about as legit as it gets as far as scientific publications.)

The review, written by neuroscience big name Christian Koch, plays it cool 'till about halfway through, and then we're given this gem: "His understanding of neuroanatomy is about as sophisticated as U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's understanding of international politics when he articulated his belief of a division of Europe into an Old and a New one during the run-up to the second Gulf War in 2003." Ka-boom. But that's sort of the gist: Kurzweil's singularity conclusion is false (or at least dubious non-science) because his premises (the non-computation ones) aren't grounded on any real or demonstrated understanding.

Kurzweil is also, perhaps, not terribly honest about neuroscience, or at least is showing ignorance bordering on willful. "From the tens of thousands of studies published annually, he selectively cites a handful of papers that buttress his points, without giving any context. He mistakes the striatum for cortex and apical dendrites for axons, belies the cognitive contributions of the basal ganglia, and denies higher mental abilities to insects, cephalopods, and birds that don't have a neocortex. Yet he has the unerring belief of the prophet (or the fool): I maintain that the model I have presented is the only possible model that satisfies all of the constraints that the research and our thought experiments have established."

There's more. Beyond the sketchiness above, the current state of artificial intelligence just doesn't match up to Kurzweil's projections. It's not even remotely close: "... even the lowly roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, a creature no bigger than the letter l and with exactly 302 nerve cells, is for now beyond the ability of computational neuroscience to comprehend. Kurzweil's claim that we will soon figure out how the 100 billion neurons of the human brain function on the basis of designed HHMMs is complete bosh."

One imagines Koch's annoyance with Kurzweil to be not terribly common among neuroscientists. The singularity makes biology a sideshow to computation and, as much as I heart math--and think that everything, including consciousness, is subject to computation--that's just not in line with real world science. At least not in Kurzweil's lifetime, or the one or two decades he imagines between us and the singularity.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

I spend a lot of my downtime, and a lot of my regular time chatting on Dump.fm, an image-based chat room started by a few friends of friends. It's a virtual space for net artists and codey-Photoshop-art nerds to 'dump' their favorite things. It's a great place to get inspired if you have anxiety over attending public openings or leaving the laptop unattended.

On Friday, a couple users were passing around this groovy Javascript-enhanced visualizer, namely Chris Shier. Basically, it's an awesome way to repurpose and view animations. The Gifmelter is a combination of a renderer created by a co-founder of Dump, Tim Baker, and Shier's implementation of moving GIFs as brushes. Shier, who works in legal databasing in Vancouver, B.C., explains how it works thusly:

The heavy lifting of Gifmelter is done by Tim's gif.js renderer. Normally, canvas can't access all the frames of a GIF and just shows the first frame as a static image, but Tim finally let me get ahold of his library, which makes in-canvas Anigifs available. This means I can apply my canvas effects to the GIF, and use it like a brush. I'm looking forward to exploring more of what can be done between canvas interaction and animated GIF.

As you can see below, Shier's results are incredibly satisfying.

Though it doesn't work with all GIFs, and some browsers are a little glitchy with the code, you can try using your own GIFs with the Gifmelter. Navigate through one of the Fullscreen links below and add your GIF's URL (hosted elsewhere on the web) after the first question mark in the address bar:

( http://csh.bz/gifmelter/melt.html? + http://i.imgur.com/EEBBY.gif = http://csh.bz/gifmelter/melt.html?http://i.imgur.com/EEBBY.gif )

In the case that you fail or can't find a GIF that will work with this, I placed a handful of Dump favorties in these frames for your Javascript-induced, GIF-gazing pleasure. Enjoy:

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