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Environmentalists, What Are You Asking From Dedmoroz Lenin For Earth Day This Year?

Tomorrow is Earth Day. It is also Lenin's birthday. That's not coincidence. The leader of...

How Ancel Keys Went From MAHA Hero To MAHA Villain

If a lot of the food and health claims you read and hear today seem like things left over from...

Are Baseball Pitchers Faster Today?

On September 7, 1974, pitching for the California Angels, Nolan Ryan, known for his velocity, became...

Ground-Nesting Bee Populations Don't Get Publicity But They're Everywhere

Honeybees get attention in environmental fundraising campaigns because people don't understand...

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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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A man with an inherited form of blindness, retinitis pigmentosa, has been able to identify a coffee mug and various shades of gray using a retina implant, according to work published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The Retina Implant AG is a sub-retinal chip placed in the central macular area behind the retina.   Their chip works by converting light that enters the eye into electrical impulses which get fed into the optic nerve behind the eye.   It requires an external battery which was connected to a cable that protruded from the skin behind the ear.

Retina Implant AG

1,400,000 70-dimension histogram vectors about gamer behavior.  What can you do with that?

Me?  Nothing, the math is too much but, if you can make sense of it, a lot of data is there in the ongoing online gaming phenomenon known as World of Warcraft(WoW).   Keeping track of all that data would seem to be solely the purview of computer programmers but sociologists are starting to take notice.   Some people are just goofing off and writing a book about their experiences but others see gold in 'game mining' - the insights of anthropology we can get by seeing what 10 million people do in a virtual, controlled setting over a period of years.
Remember the "Star Wars" scene where robotic scamp R2-D2 projects a three-dimensional image of Princess Leia trying to ask for help from Obi-Wan Kenobi?   

New 3D holographic imaging technology developed at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences is bringing it a little closer.   
There are times when being a communist dictatorship has its advantages.  Without having to worry about jobs or elections, you can enact a plan and stick to it until it works and, if a million or so peasants get displaced to build a dam, they don't vote anyway.
I get that not everyone will devote two hours each night, or 10 hours over a weekend, to pumpkin carving a Death Star...

death star pumpkin

 ...or watching 5 terrific Halloween movies, but even if your attention span runs more toward Twitter than IMDB, here are at least a few videos you can try:
After "Five Million Miles to Earth" and "Dead of Night" we get to something a little more modern in our 5 Days of Halloween Movies.