The Wind's Song

The mechanical doppelgangers are available for a limited time as part of a special New Year’s promotional sale at Sogo, Seibu, and Robinson’s department stores. They will be built by Japanese robotics firm Kokoro, which is perhaps best known for its line of Actroid receptionist humanoids.
In addition to providing the robot with the owner’s face, [...]

Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs increased 50 percent with children in the US, and 73 percent among adults, from 1996 to 2006, according to a study in the May/June 2009 issue of the journal Health Affairs. Another study in the same issue of Health Affairs found spending for mental health care grew more than 30 percent [...]

Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil’s border with Bolivia.
The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the [...]

Through email, the internet, television and other media, people are deluged with around 100,500 words a day – equivalent to 23 words per second, researchers claim.
Scientists from the University of San Diego, California, who conducted the research, believe that the information overload may be having a [...]

Anthropologists have traditionally had a pretty wonkish reputation, earnestly taking field notes while interviewing a tribal chief or lecturing in some college classroom about the intricacies of indigenous clan-systems. If the Pentagon has its way, though, more anthropologists will exchange their tweed for military fatigues and leave the halls of academe for the front lines. [...]

On Breitbart.tv:

Al Gore finally comes clean.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — On a mountaintop clearing in the Sierra Nevada stands a tall metal platform holding a crude furnace and a box of silver iodide solution that some scientists believe could help offer relief from searing droughts.
This is a cloud-seeding machine designed to increase rainfall by spraying a chemical vapor into the clouds. [...]

New climate-friendly cremation method uses water and lye to transform human remains into 200 gallons of liquid fertilizer.
There are an awful lot of people on the planet, and modern methods for disposing of human remains aren’t exactly earth-friendly. A new alternative to cremation and burial could change that — and even increase food production for [...]

This week, Italian scientists announced that in a month-long experiment conducted last year, an amputee’s nervous system was attached to a mechanical hand disconnected from his body. The man, Pierpaolo Petruzziello, was not only able to move the robotic appendage, but was apparently able to receive feedback and feel sensations from the hand. From the [...]

From H+, a number of ways in which the arrival of animal-free, laboratory-created meat will be a revolution:
Red meat & poultry will vanish from the marketplace, similar to whale oil’s flame out when kerosene outshone it in the 1870’s. Predictors believe that IVM will sell for half the cost of its murdered rivals. This [...]