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What if technology could eliminate the need for anyone to go through pregnancy and childbirth to have a baby? This article is an installment of Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Thursday morning by subscribing here. It takes nine months for a fertilized egg to develop into a roughly 7-pound baby, and during that time, the person carrying the baby gets to feel the miracle of life growing inside them. They can also expect to experience a slew of unpleasant side effects, from nausea and vomiting...

One hundred and fifty years ago today, the future mayor of Chicago Anton Cermak was born in an area of Austria-Hungary that is now part of the Czech Republic. The above photo of him with Franklin Delano Roosevelt was taken in 1932, a year before Cermak’s death as a result of his relationship with Roosevelt. FDR won the nomination to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate against Herbert Hoover at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that year. Cermak was mayor of Chicago at the time, having ended the notorious William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson’s second term as mayor by...

Los Angeles, 2019. Bursts of flame erupt over a city bathed in perpetual twilight. From the pyramid-like offices of the Tyrell Corporation, we see an eye in close-up, the lights of the city reflected in it. Whether this eye is human is yet to be determined. But, ultimately, in Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi masterwork, the eye of the beholder is irrelevant. In the world of Blade Runner the future is a hardscrabble hellscape with no escape. Is it any wonder, then, that Rutger Hauer’s band of rogue replicants – humanoid worker robots designed to blend in with the flesh and...

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams is a British made science fiction anthology TV series based on the works of Philip K. Dick. It is currently being shown in the UK on Channel 4. Amazon Video will begin showing in the US sometime in 2018. Here is the trailer: Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams – Official Trailer [HD] | Amazon Video References: WikipediaIMDb Articles: ‘Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams’ 1st Trailer Asks What It Is To Be Human? – NY Comic-Con Explore Philip K. Dick's crazy futures in 'Electric Dreams' trailer Holy Crap, the Philip K. Dick Electric Dreams TV Series...

Americans increasingly support free speech as a concept but make lots of exceptions. A new Pew Research poll found that 40 percent of Millennials (ages 18 to 34) believe the government should be able to prevent people from making offensive statements about minority groups. New York governor Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, certainly agree. Often rivals, they teamed up to remove a set of controversial subway ads advertising a new Amazon series that depicts an alternate history in which the Nazis and the Japanese won World War II and divided control of America between...

I just finished watching the Amazin series The Man in the High Castle. I have not read the book, but if anyone has seen the show I have a question. Is the end of the tenth show the end of the book/story? I've not seen there being a second season do did the book end w the Trade Minister waking up you-know-where? (I'm trying to avoid spoiling it for anyone who hasn't seen it). How important a are the films? Was J.Blake a spy or a member of the resistance?

This new amazon show called 'The Man in the High Castle' explores what would have happened if the Allies had lost World War II. It's based on a Philip K. Dick novel from 1962. The hour-long drama stars Alexa Davalos (Mob City), Luke Kleintank (Pretty Little Liars), Rupert Evans (The Village), Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Mortal Kombat Legacy), and Rufus Sewell (Eleventh Hour). Ridley Scott is Executive Producer. It streams on Amazon prime this fall.

What if the Allies had lost World War II, the Nazis had been first to develop the atomic bomb, and the Germans and Japanese had carved up control of United States? That's the premise of the new streaming series from Amazon, The Man in the High Castle — an adaptation of the 1962 book by the same name. And the show is fantastic.N

What if the Allies had lost World War II, the Nazis had been first to develop the atomic bomb, and the Germans and Japanese had carved up control of United States? That's the premise of the new streaming series from Amazon, The Man in the High Castle — an adaptation of the 1962 book by the same name. And the show is fantastic. Nazi brownshirts control New York City streets, San Francisco is lorded over by Japanese police, and postwar TV game shows prominently feature Nazis in full regalia. The people of the United States seem to more or less...

The late Philip K. Dick, born 86 years ago today in Chicago, is something of a cautionary figure in American literature: brilliant, prolific, often sloppy, and woefully underappreciated during his lifetime. It was only with the 1982 release of the film "Blade Runner" (loosely based on his 1968 novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") that Dick's work truly began to saturate the mainstream; by that point, he had been dead for four months. In the ensuing three decades, Dick's novels and stories have served as fodder for dozens of Hollywood movies; they have been reissued again and again. In...

What if everything you know is fake? That is a premise that was repeatedly explored by author Philip K. Dick in his science fiction novels. Some of his stories have been made into popular films such as “Total Recall,” where a blue collar worker in the far future doesn’t know whether he is really a secret agent or just pretending to be one as part of an implanted memory. In Dick’s novel “Time Out of Joint,” protagonist Ragle Gumm gets confirmation that something is terribly wrong with the world around him when he attempts to buy a beer at an...

I've been thinking about Philip K. Dick quite a lot in recent months. Philip K. Dick, for those who pay no attention to such things, is the writer who, without ever expressly intending it, transformed the often shabby and degraded genre of science fiction into something resembling art.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles police are aiming to beat suspects to the scene of a crime by using computers to predict where trouble might occur. The Los Angeles Police Department is the largest agency to embrace an experiment known as "predictive policing," which crunches data to determine where to send officers to thwart would-be thieves and burglars. Time Magazine called it one of the best inventions of 2011. Early successes could serve as a model for other cash-strapped law enforcement agencies, but some legal observers are concerned it could lead to unlawful stops and searches that violate Fourth...

Sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick's heirs battle Hollywood over the rights to the 2011 Matt Damon film "The Adjustment Bureau."Plot outline for a Philip K. Dick story: Hollywood buys film rights to obscure short story by famous author. Makes movie. Movie makes money. Producers then claim they never needed to buy rights in the first place. Demand their money back. Emblematic Philip K. Dick story elements: Attempt to turn back time and murkiness of reality. Extra mind-bending plot twist: Author of original story is named Philip K. Dick. As Laura Dick Coelho, one of the late author's daughters, told me:...

And it’s a “liable to be a sequel” according to Scott himself, who was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog. When I first heard about this project, back in the summer, it was unclear whether the movie would be a prequel or a sequel. But saying I was intrigued would be falling short. Blade Runner wasn’t much of a hit when it was released in theaters back in 1982, but I could never get my eyes off it — without fail — every single time I rented it (Yes. On VHS). And I rented it several times...

The year was 1990. The first President George Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev were ending the Cold War, while South Africa was ending apartheid. It was the year of Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" and MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This," and in the theaters, Home Alone was the top-grossing film of the year.

When we first caught sight of Sega Toys' meowing, purring robo-feline, we fervently hoped Lucky the robo-dog or some other bigger, stronger robot would come along and scare the creepy cat out of the neighborhood. Alas, that's not to be. "Yume-Neko Venus," or "Dream Cat Venus," is slated for a July 30 release, according to Sega (PDF in Japanese). The fake feline will cost 10,000 yen (about $108)--not bad considering you'll be saving a bundle on kitty litter and toy mice. The battery-operated robo-cat is equipped with five touch sensors that let it engage in real-life behavior like rolling on...

Twenty-five years ago, the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner became an instant science fiction classic. Set in a sodden, squalid Los Angeles of 2019, the neo-noir masterpiece influenced a generation of filmmakers and video-game designers. Long before I teamed up with Jamie Hyneman to form the MythBusters, I was a special-effects modelmaker, and Scott's cyberpunk gem almost instantly became the most important film in the canon of movies I love. I'm still such a big Blade Runner fan that I watch it at least once every 18 months. I also own pretty convincing replicas of the "blade runner blaster" wielded...

The following is an old story (1974) but probably not very well-known. I came upon it recently, by chance, because of the upcoming release of the new movie 'Next' which is based on a Philip K. Dick short story called 'The Golden Man'. Although I'm a big fan of PKD, I had not read The Golden Man and wanted to check it out before the movie opened. The few collections of PKD short stories I have did not contain The Golden Man, so I found a collection entitled The Golden Man that was published in 1980. This collection, of course,...

Philip K Dick is missing. Not the American science fiction writer whose novels spawned hit films such as Blade Runner and Total Recall - he died more than 20 years ago - but a state-of-the-art robot named after the author. The quirky android, which made a major splash at Wired Magazine's NextFest in Chicago in June, was lost in early January while en route to California by commercial airliner. "We can't find Phil," said Steve Prilliman of Dallas-based Hanson Robotics, which created the futuristic robot with the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis, the Automation and Robotics...