November 21, 2008 – 4:16 am
Good news if you're the kind of fun loving gad-about-town who enjoys shared intravenous drug use and unprotected sex (Because it totally ruins the experience for me..can't we do it without...just this once...) as a new drug that radically improves your chances of not getting the AIDS goes to major trial. Apparently pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP works using existing HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy) drugs and with a vaccine looking increasingly unlikely in the short term, it's ability to lower the risk by up to two thirds is a pretty attractive prospect. Bob Grant, who researches HIV prevention at the University of California, speculates that some users may even have less unsafe sex.
"PrEP might put people in a different frame of mind," he says. "When people take a pill a day, that reminds them that they are at risk of catching HIV."
Alternatively, you could just wear a rubber, and avoid the kind of syphillic fever dreams that constantly plague the staff here at Spectre towers.
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November 21, 2008 – 3:38 am
In a vaguely worrying move, NASA has successfully tested a deep-space capable communication system that runs on the same lines as Arpanet, the Interwub’s immediate predecessor. Basically, the plan is to fire of a few deep space probes and satellites off, and have them act as intermediates allowing fast, clear data transference across interstellar distances (and given the speed computer tech moves at, is it too much to hope for subspace soon after?) According to the guy with the coolest sounding job title since ‘Viking’ (manager of space-networking architecture ) Adrian Hooke:
“This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet,”
Given the way the net has evolved here on Earth, it sounds like we may no longer have to pay premium Japanese sites for our alien tentacle porn. LolKlingons anyone?
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November 21, 2008 – 3:12 am
In line with our love of cloning and dangerous experiments in general, the Spectre are genuinely pleased to learn that insane soviet genetics from the 1920s are all set to be this seasons hot new scientific hangout. Apparently the Mammoth project is a trifle costly, but Science confidently predicts a decent map of the Neanderthal genome by Christmas, and exciting possibilities for a Human or Chimp/Neanderthal mashup. According to ironically named top DNA-Tinkerer George Church:
“The big issue would be whether enough people felt that a chimp-Neanderthal hybrid would be acceptable, and that would be broadly discussed before anyone started to work on it,”
Personally I say enough talk, I want my monkey man! And people say science is boring..Mutant Ape Army Now!
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November 20, 2008 – 9:19 pm
Steampunk is a slippery concept . At once literary tradition, design style and fashion statement. And now, increasingly – music genre. But how does a band capture and create the sound of a time that never existed? How can you classify something as steampunk when your source material is disparate fiction? Well, you just do it and see what happens…
And until now I never really agreed with any band calling themselves steampunk – Abney Park, although awesome are a little too electronic, Unextraodinary Gentlemen, too experimental and Thomas Truax, well he’s kind of odd.
But now there is Ghostfire who sound like what would happen if you stuck The Cure, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a steam organ and Tom Waits into a blender, and dressed the result in brass goggles, top hats and told them to entertain a drunken punk crowd.
That laboured metaphor can boil down to three words ‘they sound fantastic.’
It’s the kind of thing the common people would listen too in a stempunk setting. After a hard day building airships the workforce would retire to gin soaked taverns and be entertained by something sounding a lot like this.
Demo opener Vaudevillian is a ska tinged, beer soaked sing-along about vampires (I think) that shows off singer Steven’s powerful and unique vocals, Masters of the Sea is a haunted shipwreck of a song. Ghostways Of Paris is a gothic absinthe-nightmare in lace and leather and demo closer Barrio – possibly the weakest song in comparison – is still a jarring – jangly slab of romantic darkness.
Praises don’t get sung much higher than this. Steampunk just got it’s official sound.
LINK (Ghostfire MySpace)
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November 19, 2008 – 11:13 pm
Remember a few years ago when you got sent a link to a video that made you, our obviously nerdy and awesome audience scream with joy? You know the one…Batman, Joker, Alien, Predator. Yeah, how ace was that! Well, joy of joys – someone has thrown enough money at its brilliant creator Sandy Collora for him to make a full movie.
Entitled Hunter Prey – it’s a war film set on an alien world, filmed for very little, but from the above picture – looking awesome. IO9 spoke to the man himself…
The film centers around a crew of special forces commandos who must recapture an alien prisoner that has escaped after the military transport ship carrying it crashes on a desolate and hostile planet. There are subtle political and environmental overtones that I certainly don’t hit anyone over the head with at all, but that will hopefully make you think about things like war, politics and current events, by presenting them in situations cinematically from a uniquely different perspective.
Thank god for a sci fi film that isn’t a comic book rip off, sequel or remake. can’t wait to see this.
LINK (IO9)
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