Science Fiction
Dictionary
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
 |
Must Breaking Up Be Hard To Do?
Breaking up is hard to do - but does it have to be that way? Can modern technology provide help to the lovelorn?
But oxytocin is important for all relationships, not just romantic love. You might cure your broken heart, but is it worth impairing all your other relationships?
Young's team has also shown that blocking corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), a hormone involved in the stress response, stops the depressive behaviour that prairie voles exhibit when their partner dies. Young doesn't recommend blocking CRF for unrequited love, but he says it could be helpful to relieve the depression that comes with persistent grief.
Should we expect to see quick-fix solutions offered off label or in some anti-love black market? "I think there would be a real market, but I certainly don't recommend it," says Young.
Other groups are trying to help people with post-traumatic stress disorder replace a memory with another that is less emotionally fraught. "Hypothetically, you could imagine a similar therapy being used to dampen the memory of love," says Fisher. One day it might even be possible to use brain stimulation to decrease activity in the ventral pallidum, to speed up the healing effects of time, she says.
I must confess to readers that, when I started this site, I sometimes doubted whether or not I should bother typing an author's most unusual and frivolous "inventions" into the site's database. I soon learned, however, that even the most unlikely idea might actually become reality.
In his 1965 collection The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age, Stanislaw Lem writes about a monarch with a problem - an unrequited love. Does this age-old problem have a technological solution? Of course it does!
Read more about this idea at If I Could Just Stop Loving You: Anti-Love Biotechnology and the Ethics of a Chemical Breakup; via New Scientist.
The prairie vole is famously monogamous – it forms one life-long bond. However, when Larry Young at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, injected female voles with a drug that blocked either dopamine or oxytocin, they became polygamous. "This suggests you might be able to block oxytocin and sever a long-term attachment," says Young.
He set up his equipment in the magnificent royal gardens and in three weeks had converted the Temple of Contemplation there into a strange edifice full of metal, cables and glowing screens. This was, he told the King, a femfatalatron, an erotifying device stochastic, elastic and orgiastic, and with plenty of feedback; whoever was placed inside the apparatus instantaneously experienced all the charms, lures, wiles, winks and witchery of all the fairer sex in the Universe at once. The femfatalatron operated on a power of forty megamors, with a maximum attainable efficiency - given a constant concupiscence coefficient - of ninety-six percent, while the system's libidinous lubricity, measured of course in kilocupids, produced up to six units for every remote-control caress...
(Learn more about Lem's femfatalatron)
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 2/18/2014)
Follow this kind of news @Technovelgy.| Email | RSS | Blog It | Stumble | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit |
Would
you like to contribute a story tip?
It's easy:
Get the URL of the story, and the related sf author, and add
it here.
Comment/Join discussion ( 0 )
Related News Stories - (" Culture ")
Switzerland May Cap Population At Ten Million
'The population of Castle Hagedorn was fixed...' - Jack Vance, 1967.
California Governor Candidate Calls For Voting By Phone
'... every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions.' John Brunner, 1975.
Chinese Hospital Tries Vonnegut's 'Harrison Bergeron' Cosplay
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half
blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.' - Kurt Vonnegut, 1961.
A Remarkable Coincidence
'There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here...' - Arthur C. Clarke, 1953.
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's 1950's
1960's 1970's
1980's 1990's
2000's 2010's
Current News
Outdoor Video Screens Can Be Arbitrarily Large
The Shape of Things To Come
Infrared Contact Lenses To See In The Dark
'I can see in the dark, Case.'
What'll You Have? Extinct Animals Returned, Or Synthetic Eggshells?
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
Sunbird Pulsar Fusion Like Leinster's Space Tug
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
RentAHuman App Lets AI Agents Hire Humans
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
Unitree CEO Wang Xingxing Runs With His G1 Robot Army
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
AIs Turn Marxist Under Bad Management
'It was a general strike of the robots...'
Moscow Attacked By Hundreds Of Drones
'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...'
Nifty Folding Electric Bicycles!
'Separate paths were provided for them...'
FTC: Says Ring Employees Illegally Surveilled Customers
'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.'
Switzerland May Cap Population At Ten Million
'The population of Castle Hagedorn was fixed...'
Project Silica Offers 'Long-Term' Digital Storage
'... folios and tapes and playable discs of platinum alloy.'
Can 'Tactical Umbrellas' Shield One From Drones
'... another corner of his mind began to think about the shields.'
Crystalline Structures In Space, You Say?
A massive space borne lifeform from ST:TNG.
Garçon! A Menu For Artemis II, S'il Vous Plaît
'Michel Ardan, as a Frenchman, was declared chief cook, an important function, which raised no rival.'
Amazing Photonic Crystal Light Sail
'That sail will be twenty thousand miles at the wide part.'
