Think a DNA scanner embedded in the lip of your bottle reading all 3 gigabytes of your base pair genetic data in a fraction of a second, fine-tuning your individual hormonal cocktail in real time using our patented Auto-Drink™ technology, and slamming a truckload of electrolytic neurotransmitter smart-drug stimulants past the blood-brain barrier to achieve maximum optimization of your soon-to-be-grateful cerebral cortex. Plus, it's low in carbs! And with flavors ranging from Beta Carroty to Glutamate Grape, you'll never run out of ways to quench your thirst for knowledge.

A group calling itself Whirl-Mart infests the halls of commerce with site-appropriate dance: The ritual consists of interested humans arriving at a predetermined Wal-Mart at 12 noon on the first Sunday of every month and proceeding to push empty shopping carts slowly and silently through the aisles. Eventually, all of the participants locate one another and form a single-file chain of anti-shoppers which weaves, wanders, and whirls throughout the different departments of the store for about an hour. Overall, it is a soothing and fun experience for the actors, and perhaps a memorable spectacle for shoppers. It is a collective reclamation of space that is otherwise only used for buying and selling. It is a symbolic display of the will to resist the capitalist ideology. And, it is a living, breathing, moving, evolving sculpture.

A parody group calling itself the Organization of Corporations Against Coöperation staged a protest against small business and in favor of giant corporations. They picketed a small bookshop with signs saying things like "Size Does Matter" and urged passers-by to patronize instead huge chain bookstores. The same group later managed to get a branch of one such giant bookstore chain to close for one day - they masqueraded as a pro-corporate taskforce who was monitoring local anti-corporate activity and said that a planned protest might get out-of-hand, recommending that the bookstore close up shop for the day of the protest.

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"We’ve set up a system of regulation so that these forms of expression are illegal. So we can’t teach them to our kids--that would be schools promoting piracy. We can’t promote them with our businesses. All we can do is focus on how to punish those who write with the ordinary tools of the 21st century.

Existing law conflicts with the technology of the 21st century and that gives us a choice: Reform the law or reform the technology. Since 1998 there has been a clear choice—it was made for us by our own village doctors. They assembled in Congress and what they have collectively given us as an answer to this choice--reforming the law or reforming the technology--is to utter the words of HG Wells: To cure them, all we need to do is a simple and easy surgical operation, namely to remove the irritant body, the machines, your technology. They want to blind us. To conform us to 18th century law."

Over the past decade, experiments devised by Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich in Switzerland, among others, have shown that many people will cooperate with others even when it is absolutely clear they have nothing to gain. A capacity for true altruism seems to be a part of human nature. It is a heartening discovery, yet one that has also touched off a firestorm of debate.

The experiments at the centre of the controversy are as simple as they are illuminating. They ignore theory-based preconceptions about how individuals ought to behave and focus instead on finding out what they actually do when playing games in which there is real money at stake.

One of the most basic of these games is the "ultimatum game". An experimenter gives one of two players some cash, say $20, and asks that person, called the "proposer", to offer a fraction of it to the second player, called the "receiver", whose identity is hidden from the other player. The proposer can offer any amount they choose, from nothing up to the entire $20. The receiver then has the choice of accepting or rejecting the offer. If he or she accepts, the cash is shared according to the original offer. A rejection means that no one gets anything. The game is played just once.

For the receiver, self-interest would seem to dictate accepting the offer no matter how small it is, since getting something is better than getting nothing. Knowing this, a similarly self-interested proposer should offer as little as possible. But over the past decade or so, research on student volunteers has shown that proposers in such experiments typically offer anything from 25 to 50 per cent, while receivers tend to reject offers of less than 25 per cent.

"People reject low offers," says anthropologist Joseph Henrich of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, "because they view them as unfair." And through their rejection, they show a willingness to punish the unfair offers even at a cost to themselves.

A vast number of other experiments illustrate the same point. Last year, for example, Fehr and his colleagues had students play a version of the famous prisoner's dilemma game, in which two people can prosper through cooperation but are also given strong incentives to cheat on one another. In this game, if the participants cooperate, each receives a worthwhile monetary pay-off. But either player can get an even higher pay-off by cheating while their opponent cooperates (see Diagram).

In this particular version of the game, the researchers got people to play sequentially: one would go and then the other, fully aware of what the first had done. In theory, anyone thinking only of their own personal gain would always cheat, as this pays more than cooperating. But in the experiments, although many of players who went first did cheat, others cooperated, despite knowing that the second player could sucker them by cheating. What's more, roughly half those who went second rewarded cooperation by treating their opponent fairly, even though that meant forgoing an easy pay-off for themselves (Human Nature, vol 13, p 1). "The facts are clear," Fehr says. "Many people are willing to cooperate and to punish those who don't, even when no gain is possible."
"Many people will cooperate, and punish those who don't, even when no gain is possible"

This tendency - which researchers call "strong reciprocity" - throws into question the assumption that apparently selfless behaviour must have some selfish explanation. Across disciplines, researchers now agree that people often act against their own self-interest. "This is the most important empirical work on the human sense of justice in many years," says evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers of Rutgers University in New Jersey.

A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings. If you doubt this, consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions: 1. You have only two weeks to live. 2. You’ve just won a lottery prize of one hundred million dollars. 3. Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts.[...]

Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.[...]

While Eastern mysticism has its fair share of unjustified belief, it undoubtedly represents humankind's best attempt at fashioning a spiritual science. The methods of introspection one finds in Buddhism, for instance, have no genuine equivalents in the West. And the suggestion that they do is born of a desperate attempt on the part of Westerners to make all religious traditions seem equally wise. They simply aren't. When a Tibetan lama talks about "nondual awareness" (Tib. rigpa) and the Pope talks about God or the Holy Spirit (or anything else), they are not talking about the same thing; nor are they operating on the same intellectual footing. The lama is using some very precise terminology (albeit terminology that has no good English equivalent) to describe what countless meditators have experienced after very refined training in methods of introspection; while the Pope is merely reiterating unjustified and unjustifiable metaphysical claims that have been passed down to Christians in the context of a culture that has failed--utterly--to find compelling alternatives to mere belief. Such alternatives have existed for millennia, east of the Bosporus. This is not to ignore the Meister Eckharts of the world, but such mystics have always been the exception in the West. And it is important to remember that, being exceptions, they have been regularly persecuted for heresy.

Mysticism, shorn of religious dogmatism, is an empirical and highly rational enterprise. Just as people do not burn their neighbors at the stake as a result of new insights in physics or biology, no one is likely to do so on the basis of genuine mysticism. Religion--especially in the West--is another matter entirely. Religious faith is a conversation stopper.

The only thing that guarantees a truly open-ended collaboration among human beings is their willingness to have their views (and resulting behavior) modified by conversation--by new evidence and new arguments. Otherwise, when the stakes are high, there is nothing to appeal to but force. If I believe that I can get to Paradise by flying a plane into a building, and I am content to believe this without evidence, then there will be nothing another person can say to dissuade me, because my leap of faith has made me immune to the powers of conversation.[...]

"Faith" is false conviction in unjustified propositions (a certain book was written by God; we will be reunited with our loved ones after death; the Creator of the universe can hear our thoughts, etc.). "Spirituality" or "mysticism" (both words are pretty terrible, but there are no good alternatives in English) refers to any process of introspection by which a person can come to realize that the feeling he calls "I" is a cognitive illusion. The core truth of mysticism is this: It is possible to experience the world without feeling like a separate "self" in the usual sense. Such a change in the character of one's experience need not become the basis for making unsupportable claims about the nature of the universe, however.

A self-replicating 3D printer that spawns new, improved versions of itself is in development at the University of Bath in the UK.

The "self replicating rapid prototyper" or RepRap could vastly reduce the cost of 3D printers, paving the way for a future where broken objects and spare parts are simply "re-printed" at home. New and unique objects could also be created.

3D printing - also known as "rapid prototyping" - transforms a blueprint on a computer into a real object by building up a succession of layers. The material is bonded by either fusing it with a laser or by using alternating layers of glue. When it first emerged in the mid-1990s, futurists predicted that there would be a 3D printer in every home.

But they currently cost $25,000 (£13,000) and so have not caught on as a household item, says Terry Wohlers, an analyst at Wohlers Associates, a rapid prototyping consulting firm in Fort Collins, Colorado, US. Instead, they are used by industry to develop parts for devices such as aircraft engines, spaceships and hearing aids.

Now Adrian Bowyer hopes to change that by making the first 3D printer capable of fabricating copies of itself, as well as a wealth of everyday objects. He reasons that prices would plummet to around $500 if every machine was capable of building hundreds more at no cost beyond that of the raw materials.