Meat production gobbles up more than half of all land in use by agriculture. Shrinking this will allow us to restore nature and open up land for recreation and living. Also, the pressure on the tropical rainforests will diminish.
Silicon Valley plant-based beef from Impossible Foods is now in Bareburger at 535 LaGuardia Place in New York, its first chain restaurant.
Humanoid robots may enhance growth of musculoskeletal tissue grafts for tissue transplant applications.
Over the past decade, exciting progress has been made in the development of humanoid robots. The significant potential future value of humanoids includes applications ranging from personal assistance to medicine and space exploration. In particular, musculoskeletal humanoids (such as Kenshiro and Eccerobot) were developed to interact with humans in a safer and more natural way (1, 2). They aim to closely replicate the detailed anatomy of the human musculoskeletal system including muscles, tendons, and bones.
With their structures activated by artificial muscles, musculoskeletal humanoids have the ability to mimic more accurately the multiple degrees of freedom and the normal range of forces observed in human joints. As a result, it is not surprising that they offer new opportunities in science and medicine. Here, we suggest that musculoskeletal robots may assist in the growth of musculoskeletal tissue grafts for tissue transplant applications.
One of the most fundamental tenets of modern physics is that in a perfect vacuum — a place entirely devoid of matter — no friction can possibly exist, because empty space cannot exert a force on objects travelling through it.
But despite the conventional wisdom, physicists in the UK discovered that a decaying atom travelling through a complete vacuum would experience a friction-like force, and now they’ve figured out how this reinforces — rather than breaks — Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
“We spent ages searching for the mistake in the calculation and spent even more time exploring other strange effects until we found this (rather simple) solution,” one of the team, Matthias Sonnleitner from the University of Glasgow told Lisa Zyga at Phys.org.
(sth/T.L.) – Luxembourg’s government and Tokyo-based space lunar robotic exploration company ispace Inc. on Thursday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in the context of the SpaceResources.lu initiative with focus on developing miniaturized technology to discover, map, and utilize resources on the Moon.
Japanese start-up ispace was created by Hakuto, a finalist team of Google’s prestigious innovation competition Google Lunar XPRIZE. The company already works together with the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) and will continue to do so.
Within the framework of this MoU, ispace intends to focus, through its new European office based in Luxembourg, on business development, R&D and on several key technical services, including payload development, engineering and integration.
At Quora, I occasionally play, “Ask the expert”. Several hundred of my Quora answers are linked here. Today, I was asked “How much of Bitcoin’s value is driven by speculation”. This is my answer…
This is a great question! While the value of any commodity is determined by supply and demand, speculation is one component of demand. Another is the unique utility value inherent in a product or process. This is sometimes called ‘intrinsic value’.
It’s ironic that when a high fraction of value is driven by speculation, short-term value becomes volatile and long-term value becomes less certain—and less likely to produce returns for those same speculators.
Editor’s Note: In the past few weeks, a significant spike in Bitcoin’s value and trading volume relates to a pending regulatory decision expected at the end of next week. This activity is certainly driven by speculation. But for this article, I am considering periods in which the demands of individual events are less clear.
The value of Bitcoin is influenced by:
of revenue in Bitcoin (rather than exchanging to Fiat). To avoid a round trip exchange, they seek to purchase materials or pay staff with the Bitcoin they earned.Here’s the rub: Bitcoin will not become a store of value unto itself (i.e. a currency), and it will not gain a significant fraction of the payment instrument market until the transaction volume of the first to user categories in the above list are overtaken by the the ones further down. Likewise, Bitcoin will not enter its biggest growth spurt until the last two items swamps the others as the largest motive for acceptance and use.
Put another way: Long term value must ultimately be driven by organic adoption from actual users (people who are buying and spending Bitcoin on other things.
In another article, I expand on the sequence of events that must take place before Bitcoin grows into its potential. But make no mistake. These things will happen. In tribute to the brilliance of Satoshi, the dominoes are already falling.
In response to the question, I estimate that at the beginning of 2017, 85% of Bitcoin value is still driven by speculators. I have not analyzed wallet holding periods compared against the addresses of known vendors. Furthermore, it would be difficult to understand the relationship between the number of speculative transactions and the overall effect on value. Therefore, my figure is more of a WAG than an calculated estimate. But it’s an educated WAG.
The fraction of speculative transactions will drop significantly in the coming months—even as late speculators jump on board. That’s because uptake from consumers and businesses is already taking off. The series of reactions that lead toward ubiquitous, utilitarian applications has begun. Bitcoin’s value will ultimately be driven by use as a payment instrument and in commerce.
Because it is a pure supply-demand instrument, Bitcoin will eventually be recognized as currency itself. That is, it needn’t be backed by precious metal, pegged convertibility or a redemption promise. When that happens, you will no longer ask about 
Bitcoin’s value. That would be a circular question, since its value will be intrinsic. Instead, you will wonder about the value of the US dollar, the Euro and the Yen.
As a growing fraction of groceries, gasoline and computers that you buy are quoted in BTC, you will begin to think of it as a rock, rather than a moving target. One day in the future, there will be a sudden spike or drop in the exchange rate with your national currency. At that time, you won’t ask “What happened to Bitcoin today? Why did it rise in value by 5% this morning?” Instead, you will wonder “What happened to the US dollar today? Why did it drop in value by 5%?”
Philip Raymond co-chairs Crypsa & Bitcoin Event, columnist & board member at Lifeboat, editor
at WildDuck and will deliver the keynote address at Digital Currency Summit in Johannesburg.
MIT physicists have created a new form of matter, a supersolid, which combines the properties of solids with those of superfluids.
By using lasers to manipulate a superfluid gas known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, the team was able to coax the condensate into a quantum phase of matter that has a rigid structure—like a solid—and can flow without viscosity—a key characteristic of a superfluid. Studies into this apparently contradictory phase of matter could yield deeper insights into superfluids and superconductors, which are important for improvements in technologies such as superconducting magnets and sensors, as well as efficient energy transport. The researchers report their results this week in the journal Nature.
“It is counterintuitive to have a material which combines superfluidity and solidity,” says team leader Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT. “If your coffee was superfluid and you stirred it, it would continue to spin around forever.”
One thing is clear: the way in which we organize the economy and society will change fundamentally. We are experiencing the largest transformation since the end of the Second World War; after the automation of production and the creation of self-driving cars the automation of society is next. With this, society is at a crossroads, which promises great opportunities, but also considerable risks. If we take the wrong decisions it could threaten our greatest historical achievements.
We are in the middle of a technological upheaval that will transform the way society is organized. We must make the right decisions now.
Computer researchers are betting they can take on the house after designing a new artificial intelligence program that has beat professional poker players.
Researchers from University of Alberta, Czech Technical University and Charles University in Prague developed the “DeepStack” program as a way to build artificial intelligence capable of playing a complex kind of poker. Creating an AI program that can win against a human player in a no-limit poker game has long been a goal of researchers due to the complexity of the game.
Michael Bowling, a professor in the Department of Computing Science in the University of Alberta, explained that computers have been able to win at “perfect” games such as chess or Go, in which all the information is available to both players, but that “imperfect” games like poker have been much harder to program for.
Posted in government, security, space
American space power stagnated under U.S. Air Force stewardship a long time ago. [1] Congress observed this situation nearly 25 years ago, as the epigraphs above indicate. However, nothing substantive was done to fix the problem.
This article recommends the creation of a U.S. Space Corps in the Department of the Air Force as an initial step to set American space power on a path to reach its full potential.
Ultimately, America’s national security interests in space will best be served when Congress creates an independent Space Corps, just as it created independent services for land, sea and air, uniting them under the Department of Defense.
