MIND GAMES: Abduction issue
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Negotiating with North Korea is rarely anything but bumpy. But in recent months, Japan once got close to getting Pyongyang&#39;s commitment to rejoin the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)-but Tokyo blew it.
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In the continuing quest to see if humans can outpace their electronic creations, the humans have lost another, perhaps decisive, round.
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Medical practitioners raise concerns about a new breed of videogame that would allow users to control gameplay using thoughts alone.
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Aided, abetted and bedded The felchland Second Life refuses to stay out of our synapses despite some of our best efforts. This month we find the puerile game creeping into our courts and into popular prose.â¦
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A video game purports to probe the minds of the Columbine killers. What enlightenment can a shooter game provide? Commentary by Tony Long.
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This summer's lineup of brain-teasing video games includes some brilliant titles that stretch your mind power to its limits, asking you to think laterally to beat the computer or just out-strategize your friends.
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Tycho: You might have heard that NASA was trying to gin up an MMO. We just received a mail from a human being involved in the project, someone who wants to make sure they collect the best ideas from the best people. Naturally, she thought of the readership here. Her mail follows:I know how incredibly unpleasant this could end up being if we don'thave the right minds behind it, and would just like the chance to get itin front of as many potentially talented people as possible. Would youguys consider posting a sentence on this in the news section soon?"The purpose of this RFI is to solicit information from organizationswith proven immersive synthetic environments expertise who areinterested in potentially forming a MMO platform development partnershipwith NASA. We are currently targeting releasing a Request for Proposalin March 2008."Here's a couple of run-downs in English from people outside NASA:http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/nasa-seeks-inpu.htmlhttp://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/would-you-play.html#previouspostAnd the NASA sites:http://procurement.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/eps/synopsis.cgi?acqid=128415http://ipp.gsfc.nasa.gov/mmo/submit.htmlNASA gets surprisingly tiny amounts of money (about $17B/yr) to go tofreakin' space and do a whole lot of discovering of varioushumanity-impacting things. And a lot of people just don't know theamount of awesomeness we do for that. We're working on many things totry and communicate to people better about what we do (that's part ofour forming mandates, actually), and this is one initiative.And I think it would be cool if it wasn't a big mess, or even just an"eh" thing. I'd like to see it be *good*.For the space program, guys?Oh, but darling: you had us at immersive synthetic environments.(CW)TB
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Also: Paul Allen project maps the brain. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Imaging the brain during social interaction reveals a deficit that may be tied to a sense of self.
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In search of the ultimate lie detector, researchers turn to thermal facial scans, brain wiring and eyeball tracking. But deception still, well, deceives. By Randy Dotinga.
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Tycho:  We still think about Eye of Judgment quite a bit - sometimes I will sit in silence and think about it, or think about it while I lay dormant in my charge casket.  I think about placing cards carefully on its luxurious cloth mat, smirking as distant foes are gnawed by my lizard proxies.  We are overjoyed (joymax!) that they stuck with the new concept, the card thing, as opposed to the brutally sardonic original.    I don't like constantly being pushed to pre-order things, but there is also a point (it would be easy to graph) where I'm not willing to let fate's whimsical machinery determine what I play.  So during a recent mall run I put down some money on whatever I could remember at the time - unscientifically, it was Metroid, Stranglehold, Halo, Stuntman, and Mass Effect.  This doesn't account for everything between now and November, certainly, but it kind of felt like a quiz show and I was intimidated.  Then I remembered Eye of Judgement and its manifold pleasures, endeavoring to append it, listwise.  It was at this point that "John" told us that both the game and the Playstation Eye peripheral had been cancelled.    At this assertion Gabriel stood up straight and still, like a meerkat.    "No, it wasn't," said he, quietly.  A cold quiet, like space.        When I am confronted with mere distortions of facts, I can typically slice through them to the beating truth.  But when a person says something that is flatly false, this is very disorienting for some reason and I am without my mind's full power.  Then the guy compounded things by saying they had very few preorders, and this was accompanied by a sneer, as though the number of preorders was some crucial consideration when assessing quality.  He actually thought it was funny that I wanted to buy it.    I wanted to ask him if he understood that a product not being available for preorder and a product not existing, or never being allowed to exist constituted profoundly different states, but these are the deep thoughts that occur to a person while they are tucking in at the food court and not when they are face to face with strange men at the EB.       When we returned from the store, almost as if on cue the product began to appear at online retailers - for sixty dollars.  Yes, that's correct.  The Playstation Eye peripheral plus the card game, for ten dollars more than a Sixaxis?  I won't say that I expected extortion, but I at least expected profit.  Assuming you have the Triple already in hand, they're making the Eye (and Eye of Judgment) an easy decision.    Let me take a moment to welcome PAX attendees to this year's celebration, even though it isn't especially useful to readers in Glasgow.  I hope the new venue is to your liking.   Be kind to each other, even to your defeated foes!  And be kind to your Enforcers, for they have toiled in your service.
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Psychologists and neuroscientists have spent several decades producing theoretical models of the mental processes and neural networks that might  be involved in the kaleidoscopic state of psychosis. Largely concerned with simulating the nuts-and-bolts of the mind and brain, these  computer models generate results that tend only to be of interest to researchers and their scientific colleagues. More recently, scientists have decided to harness the power of virtual reality, in an attempt to move beyond the confines of theory, to simulate the experience of psychosis itself.
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U.S. News & World Report - It's difficult to indict the cable news channels too much for their obsessive coverage today of a diapered astronaut's           kidnapping attempt of a rival lover of one of her fellow spacemen. This kind of thing is solid gold for TV movie producers and pun-happy headline writers (e.g. "Astro-naughty"). But this incredible, stranger-than-fiction story of a bitter romantic struggle among astronauts does inevitably lead to the question: What is the psychological toll of zero gravity?
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During my visit to the Exploratorium, I learned something I've always suspected: The mind is a cruel, lying, unreliable bastard. Commentary by Lore Sj&#246;berg.
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UK and Swiss scientists find a way to trigger an out-of-body experience in healthy volunteers.
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Investor's Business Daily - Playing online games just five or 10 minutes before work helps reduce stress, a study of McGill Univ. found. In the study, a group of telemarketers was asked to play a game before their shift started. The game, MindHabits, is designed so that players must find the smiling faces quickly among different faces. After a week, the group that played the game were rated as being more confident in their phone calls and made more sales. They also showed higher self-esteem, and less stress.
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Mental illness according to experts is assuming an alarming dimension all over the world. The preponderance of such cases is attracting the attention of individuals, governments and non-governmental organisations