Motherboard spent much of 2011 talking to the smartest, coolest, and craziest people in tech, culture, and the web. It made for a mountain of interviews filled with knowledge direct from the source, the best of which we've collected here in the second of three parts. Our first part focused on the artists we met this year, while the third wraps up with the Web gurus we came across. Peruse the names and quick bios, and click through for the full Q+A with those who pique your interest.At the forefront of the cyborg world, from both a technical and ethical standpoint, is Kevin Warwick. A professor at the University of Reading, Warwick carried out his first cyborg experiment a full 13 years ago. Since then he's done things like send his neural instructions from New York via the Internet to control his robot hand in Reading and connected neurally with his wife to send messages in Morse code from brain to brain. By Derek MeadRead more
Richard Doyle also goes by mobius, an indicator of just how important interconnections are to him – and how transformative, bedeviling and hypnotic his ideas can be. As a professor of English and science, technology, and society at Pennsylvania State University, he has taught courses in the history and rhetoric of the emerging technosciences – sustainability, space colonization, biotechnology, nanotechnology, psychedelic science, information technologies, biometrics – and the cultural and literary contexts from which they sprout. By Jason SilvaRead more
Filmmaker Liz Canner wasn't always interested in the business of women's orgasms. It was only after years of documentary filmmaking—on subjects like Nicaragua and the World Bank—that she began to focus her lens closer to home. After accepting a job editing together erotic footage for clinical trials of an arousal enhancing drug made by the pharmaceutical company Vivus, Canner got permission to document the drug's slow passage through FDA approval. By Kelly BourdetRead more
Infamous for his essay, 10 Things You Always Wanted to Know About Robot Sex, Cobalt scribed his first short story at six years old and is currently a notable author who maintains a not-insignificant obsession with robots. In addition to contributing to a local food blog, Cobalt writes fiction and nonfiction of several varieties, and has been published in Circlet Press, Carnal Nation and Sexis Magazine. He's even got a robot-erotica novel in the works. By Kimberly HaddadRead more
Sandor Ellix Katz is a self-described fermentation revivalist, author and food activist. He's passionate about the health benefits of the live bacteria cultures these fermented foods contain. A resident of the Radical Faeries community in Tennessee and a 20-year AIDS/HIV survivor, Sandorkraut, as he's affectionately known by his fans, is devoted to promoting easy and delicious ways to improve health through cultures. By Kelly BourdetRead moreFilmmaker Ben Mendelsohn explored the physical infrastructures that contain our cyber networks in his thesis documentary, "Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors." It led him to Telx, the large server building that resides on 60 Hudson Street in New York City. 60 Hudson is the building that houses one of the largest hubs of Internet connectivity structures on the East Coast, and sits nondescriptly in the middle of Lower Manhattan where people walk by it everyday. By Lara HeintzRead more
In 1980, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. started producing beer out of a brewhouse built with dairy equipment salvaged by founder Ken Grossman. Since then the Northern California brewery has become the sixth-largest in the nation. The brewery itself, while remaining true to its greener roots is exploring decidedly new routes in technology. Nowadays the company sports an on-site water treatment facility, natural and bio-gas capable fuel cells with heat recovery systems to reduce the energy needs of their massive boilers, one of the largest private solar arrays in the nation, and carbon dioxide recovery systems integrated into the fermentation process. By Derek MeadRead moreMalte Gather and Seok Hyun Yun are a pair of absurdly smart scientists from the Wellman Center for Photomedicine in Boston. They published research showing how they created the world's first biological lasers made from single cells. Their work was picked up all over the Internet, and now they've effectively become rock stars of the light sciences world. We talked to Gather about the future of biological lasers, the silly controversy over his research, and whether he unlocked the key to creating a zombie army with laser eyes. By Derek MeadRead moreIt turns out that NASA can't spend a penny of taxpayer dollars on advertising. In fact the military is the only government agency that is allowed to have ad campaigns. Fortunately one Canadian kid, Reid Gower, became so fed up with the under appreciation of NASA that he independently produced his own NASA ad campaign on YouTube. By Kirk PoropatitchRead moreFollow Motherboard on Twitter and Facebook.By Derek Mead
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Kevin Warwick, Cyborg researcher
Richard Doyle, Transhumanist Professor

Liz Canner, Director of Orgasm, Inc.

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Kal Cobalt, Robot fetishist

Sandor Katz, fermentation guru

Ben Mendelsohn, Filmmaker
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Bill Manley, Beer Nerd at Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.
