What I've been reading: 2008-05-24

• 'Blade Runner' ruling subverts nature of sport (Art Caplan)
  Artificial legs would make for artificial competition at Beijing Olympics.
• Searching for Alien Neutrino Messages (Wired)
  If you were a hyper advanced alien civilization, rather then mucking about with noisy electromagnetic waves, perhaps you would try to make contact with other intelligent life forms by sending your messages via neutrinos.
• Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes? (Scientific American)
  One of the most basic facts of life is that the future looks different from the past. But on a grand cosmological scale, they may look the same.
• Sports-related knee injuries more severe in girls than boys (CBC)
  When it comes to playing sports, the knee injuries that boys and girls sustain are very different, suggests new research.
• Distant Mirrors (Lee Billings - SEED)
  To find life on other worlds requires thinking about how other life would find us.
• Brain's 'trust machinery' identified
  The brain centers triggered by a betrayal of trust have been identified by researchers, who found they could suppress such triggering and maintain trust by administering the brain chemical oxytocin.
• Six 'uniquely' human traits now found in animals (New Scientist)
  To accompany the article So you think humans are unique? we have selected six articles from the New Scientist archive that tell a similar story.
• Perfect Ponderables
  Secular and scientific themed decorative candles.
• Researchers develop robotic brain-computer interface (Engadget)
  Brain-computer interfaces have been kicking around for a few years now, but they're relatively slow and unwieldy, which kind of puts a damper on world-domination plans -- the guy with the keyboard would probably be well into the missile-launch sequence by
• That Alien Message (Eliezer Yudkowsky - Overcoming Bias)
  Imagine a world much like this one, in which, thanks to gene-selection technologies, the average IQ is 140.