Usually, our dystopian nightmares of robot domination involve big, substantive machines - man-sized, or better.� But many academics and military futurists believe the real power of 'bots won't be realized there swarms of tiny mechanical critters. (Think the spiders of Minority Report, instead of the Schwarzeneggers of Terminator.)
The massive defense contractor BAE Systems has announced that it will lead a team of academics and military researchers to try to create just those kind of machines. (The picture, below, is from a BAE release - not a Tom Cruise flick.)

We're building things Super villains are expected to make.

Army: Make Us a Mini-Drone Swarm (Updated) | Danger Room from Wired.com

PARIS — Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102.

Albert Hofmann, the Father of LSD, Dies at 102 - New York Times

AMSTETTEN, Austria - The children locked in the basement never saw the light of day for years. A retired electrician has confessed to imprisoning his daughter for 24 years and fathering seven children with her in a windowless cell sealed by an electronic keyless-entry system, police said Monday.

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One of the children died in infancy and was tossed into the furnace of what stunned Austrians have labeled a "house of horrors," officials said. The suspect owned the gray stone apartment building, lived there with his family, and rented the other units to relatives.

Police: Austrian kids locked in basement, never saw sunlight - Yahoo! News

Get back! It's a Sleestak attack!
Fans of the kitschy adventure series Land of the Lost will remember these villainous lizard creatures with the single horn and giant eyes. The latest evolution of the species is preparing to menace Will Ferrell in a big-screen remake.

The Land of the Lost film is now shooting on multiple sound stages at Universal Studios, and the Sleestak surface in a temple where Ferrell's character and his two companions (comedian Danny McBride, Pushing Daisies' Anna Friel) are hoping a giant crystal will return them to their own dimension.

The plot involves three adults (not a dad and two kids as on TV) accidentally thrust into a realm ruled by dinosaurs, monkey-men called Pakuni and the murderous Sleestak.

Director Brad Silberling (Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events) says he fought to keep the human shape of the Sleestak from Sid & Marty Krofft's original production, and not give into the urge to render them as spindly computerized beings.

First look: Kitschy 'Land of the Lost' gets a modern makeover - USATODAY.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgmGYeyPWPk

A little-known, tacked-on provision to the Patriot Act set aside money for what’s known as “infiltration marketing,” an insidious type of reverse-psychology propaganda. Aware that anti-drug campaigns were essentially worthless in the face of Hollywood’s “cool” depictions of drug use, the government decided to fund music and movies that would glorify drug use—the twist being that the youth of America would find the users so repulsively uncool, they wouldn’t want to imitate their behavior.

Lol!

Insidious anti-drug video | The A.V. Club

For every scientific breakthrough, you can expect a new branch pseudo-science that will mirror genuine science in some distorted way. In the nineteeth century, the young branch of engineering that spawned electrical current also spawned quack "electrotherapies" that promised to heal you with the amazing powers of electricity. And phrenology (reading your personality through bumps on your head) became popular just as neuroscience and psychiatry were taking their first baby steps. What new psuedo-sciences can you expect in the twenty-first century? We've got some ideas.
...

Network Divining
Having trouble with your network connections? Does your cell phone signal drop out at random in certain parts of your house? The best way to solve your problem, according to quack science, will be with a special "network divining rod," an LED device that will start blinking if it finds a "break" in your network signals. Unhappy Google-AOL-BT-NewsCorp customers can use it to locate where exactly the problems are in the global phone-computer-media network, and then buy another device, full of network enhancing crystals, to repair the break. Expect the usual promises: "Guaranteed to work! We've got testimonials from many happy customers!"

...

EMF Focusers
Every mobile device emits a small amount of microwave radiation. While we used to believe that was dangerous, it turned out that in fact it was neutral. Based on that idea, future quacks will claim that there is actually a benefit to mobile phone radiation. After all, when people put their cell phones next to the heads, it turns out they have more to say and their vocabularies get bigger. So these quacks will start selling mobile apps that promise to "focus" cell phone radiation to certain regions of your brain that you want to develop more quickly. Want to learn another language really quickly? Get the language stimulation package. Want to inspire yourself to exercise more? Get the goal-attainment package. You don't even have to hold the mobile in a different position! The software does it all for you.

I can't wait till these things hit ebay.

Pseudo Science: The Pseudo-Sciences You're Most Likely to See in the Next 50 Years

There will be upgrades citywide, including a new, next-gen cell network and an overhaul of the subway's security system. Electronic license plate readers, both stationary and mounted on mobile police units, can already scan thousands of cars per day and instantly alert police if a suspect in their database approaches or enters the financial district. Massive vehicle barriers will be able to block off the busiest streets on a signal from HQ, even shutting down the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. An array of 3,000 cameras will turn the area into a 1.7-square-mile, open-air Panopticon. And unlike London's surveillance system, the so-called Ring of Steel, New York's cameras are supposed to do more than identify terrorists after they've struck. Assistant chief John Colgan, who commands the police department's counterterrorism bureau, hopes they'll keep the next disaster from happening. "This is about identifying and eliminating a threat, rather than dealing with the consequences," says Colgan, a compact redhead with a bushy mustache. "I'm not in the consequence-management business."

We've almost reached escape from new york.

NYC Plans a High-Tech Defense. Let's Hope it Works | Danger Room from Wired.com

Our language is littered with dominance metaphors that refer to the vertical dimension: we speak of "upper" classes and of people "high" in authority. Past research has shown that priming participants to think of verticality speeds their response to stimuli that are related to dominance in some way. According to Moeller and her co-workers, the new finding goes a step further by showing that having a dominant personality can actually bias people towards the vertical dimension.

Is this an ad for V8?

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: "It's beneath me": How dominant personalities are biased towards the vertical

Here’s another item to add to the list of science fictional ideas that are edging close to becoming a reality - in-vitro (or “vat-grown”) meat could be sat on supermarket shelves within ten years.

Animal 57?

All hail the New Flesh - in-vitro meat on sale within a decade | Blog | Futurismic

Critics have contended that the machine could produce a black hole that could eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic.

Where can i get one?

Collider May End World! (Or Spit out Man Eating Dragons) | Danger Room from Wired.com