In Raleigh, North Carolina, something wet and writhing, fresh from a B or C or even D Sci-Fi midnight movie madness is lurking in the sewers. We have the video. You’re thinking as you watch this,“Dude, this cannot be real”, as you make funny faces and fight the volcanic re-emergence of your lunch.

In the past, if you wanted to go to Space, the word was study, study, study. In addition, you had to be virtually physically perfect or had to be teacher of the year or something like that. In the past, the inky blackness of the final frontier was beyond the hopes and dreams of a mere mortal like myself. All that has changed kid. All you need now is cash sweet cash.

In the category of “Oh My God What Are They Thinking”, science comes this dreadful and frightening advance into figuring out just what is floating around in the human mind. An unveiling of tech at the World (Mad) Science Festival in New York reveals just how close we are to digging into thoughts that are none of your damn business. Here’s how the mind meld thing works. It’s called functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and measures neural activity by measuring the change in the blood oxygen level in the brain. High levels in different parts of the brain are then mapped and the white coated Igor type with the eye tick at the controls can then link this map to words and images you might be thinking of, such as plotting against Dear Leader or boffing the receptionist.

Intellectual curiosity is a wonderful thing. It has brought us happily out of the caves. The problem with scientists and their curiousity is that there is no off switch. No one has the power to impose wisdom. If an experiment is illegal or unpopular in one place, scientists just do it someplace else. As we get more advanced, the Sci-Fi concept of “The Big Mistake” gets more and more likely. The issue is this. Scientists make predictions about the outcomes of experiments that they haven’t attempted yet and use their predictions as their understanding of the experimental dangers. Of course, the reason we do scientific experiments is the discovery of the unknown. I would imagine that the large majority of experiments result in unanticipated results.

Researchers funded by mega science fund DARPA or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are slowly and incredably making progress on a Robert Patrick style metal morphing Terminator. From Signal magazine via Wired.

Some incriminating quotes.

The absolutely pimptastic propellerheads at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems in Germany have created an embedded OLED eyeglass display that beams images right onto your freaking retina and will actually read your eyeball movements and allow you to manipulate menus and select stuff. Deep breath. The images are bright enough to read in daylight and appear to be coming from about a meter away. The picture from the fraunhofer site (seen below) shows this display on ordinary eyeglasses. I’m doubtful that their prototype actually looks like that but since the beamer is really tiny (19.3 by 17 millimeters) and housed in the hinge area I think using this thing for real and maintaining my resolute coolness is doable.

Somewhere out in the real world, in some nondescript mini mall or faceless industrial park, a corporation just like the fictitious Cyberdyne is accidentally engineering our doom by big metal things with teeth. All of this will be oblivious to the bosses of this fictitious Cyberdyne. Each little piece of our robotic destruction will be put together by many separate teams in other countries and by pale nerds in forgotten labs in dank basements. All the pieces will be assembled together all at once after a missed deadline by accountants and executives that can barely text on their Blackberrys. None of them will know which part does what or how they are supposed to be put together. This my Sci-Fi citizens, is how we got Vista.

Marc Millis, former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, explains in this video how it might be possible to achieve superluminal travel using our current understanding of the universe. All I know is, sign me up for that please! This guy seems to know what he’s talking about so take a look for yourselves.

Astronomer Thierry Legault shot these pictures with his Takahashi TOA-130 refractor telescope and a Canon 5D Mk II along with a few other astronomy and camera doodads. These images were captured soon after launch and show the shuttle Atlantis alone and the Atlantis and Hubble as they cross the face of the sun. Pictures like these put the real in my Sci-Fi. Thank Gizmodo.

Tired of your enslavement to our cruel, sprocket filled, titanium encased robotic overlords? Well now, from the land of the rising sun, home of strange devices and beautiful beguiling women, comes your chance to end that silly resistance to smooth white plastic encasement and cool blue limb accentuation.