First a Robot Flies Like a Bird. Then Humans Fly with the Birds. Now Man Flies Like a Bird with Custom-Made Wings. It’s the third part of our unplanned trilogy.

Yesterday we featured a video of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” being played on a pair of Tesla coils. Today we keep the music going with something perhaps even more amazing: a swarm of autonomous flying robots playing the theme from the James Bond movies.

Ray Kurzweil — he’s the futurist of our time, a prophet of technology who foresees a day when we will achieve Singularity, a moment when humans will enjoy superintelligence and longer life expectancies (perhaps even immortality) thanks to rapid technological advances.

In a series of short films, director Kirby Ferguson has been gradually making the case that “Everything is a Remix” — that great art doesn’t come out of nowhere. Artists inevitably borrow from one another, drawing on past ideas and conventions, then turning these materials into something beautiful and new.

An oft-repeated piece of sound engineering apocrypha holds that the creators of the MP3 format geared it specifically to reproduce, as faithfully as possible, Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.

Can one person experience love more deeply than another? That’s what The Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging and filmmaker Brent Hoff set out to understand when they hosted the 1st Annual Love Competition. Seven contestants, ranging from 10 to 75 years of age, took part.

Last year, Jeremiah Warren celebrated the 154th birthday of Nikola Tesla by creating (in less than 36 hours) a short, animated introduction to Tesla’s work, which contributed to the birth of commercial electricity.

The gender stereotypes might be backward-looking (we’ll make up for it later in the day), but the technological vision is on the mark, right down to email, e-commerce and online banking. Of course, these weren’t the only people imagining an electronic, connected world during the 1960s.
In 1964, the futurist Arthur C.

Neil Young made headlines last week when he appeared at the Wall Street Journal’s “D: Dive Into Media” conference and voiced his disapproval of the way music is being heard these days. “We live in a digital age,” Young said, “and unfortunately it’s degrading our music, not improving it.

Last week, Google hosted a gathering called “Solve for X,” which brought together entrepreneurs, innovators and scientists interested in finding technological solutions to the world’s greatest problems. These solutions weren’t small in scope.