Just a few links.

* I'm only going to say this once, media bloodsuckers: Leave Bruce alone.

* Pink Tentacle has your vintage alien landscapes from Kazuaki Saito.

* The Dollhouse situation and what Joss Whedon should do next.

I would like to see what kind of wonderfully dense, risk-taking project Whedon would come up with when he is not hampered by the current conservative climate at the networks, which these days want most story lines to wrap up by the end of the hour. Can you imagine what a Whedon show on HBO, Showtime, FX or AMC would look like?

...

My point is this: Whedon needs to make his next show on cable. End of story.

Ironically, this is also what Joss should have done this time, and the time before this one.

* Florida Power & Light and a real estate developer have announced that they will build the first solar-powered city in the U.S., a community of 19,500 homes, offices, retail shops, and light industry whose electricity will come from the world’s largest solar photovoltaic plant. The new city will be called Utopia Prime Future One Alpha City Babcock Ranch.

Today's chilling vision of postmodernity (via Gravity Lens): Polka Floyd. It's been forever since a band affected me like this.

Warning: After this nothing will ever be the same.

Brain Damage/Eclipse
We Don't Need No Education
Dark Side of the Moon medley

Another day, another crazy medical discovery: researchers from the University of Minnesota have figured out how to grow artificial hearts in the laboratory.

The researchers took dead animal hearts and stripped them of everything except the blood vessels, valves and connective tissue. These scaffolds were then seeded with cells from newborn and foetal rat hearts and, after four days of growth, the organs started to contract. Within eight days, the hearts were beating.

This is amazing: researchers have discovered a treatment that dramatically reverses the degenerative effects of Alzheimer's within minutes of injection.

1) Aubrey de Grey was right; we really are all going to live forever.

2) I smell a great potential origin for a superintelligent superhero. Or supervillain. Or zombie epidemic.

Via Boing Boing.

grinding.be is a new blog (spearheaded by Warren Ellis, though he's not a main participant) devoted to highlighting weird scientific discovery and the nowness of the future. It looks like it may be pretty cool. Thanks to Jacob for the link.

Slouching towards posthumanity: They've invented a drug to replace sleep.

Rolling Stone interviews William Gibson.

What are the major challenges we face?

Let's go for global warming, peak oil and ubiquitous computing.

Ubiquitous computing?

Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi.

In a world of superubiquitous computing, you're not gonna know when you're on or when you're off. You're always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it's a drag.

Flying cars within one year? I take it all back, America, the future is golden.

"It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile": The pain-ray Silent Guardian is here, and the future is bright.