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Mar 26, 2015

Here’s How You Can Help Build a Quantum Computer

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

Maddie Stone — GizmodoHere's How You Can Help Build a Quantum Computer

Quantum computers—theoretical machines which can process certain large and difficult problems exponentially faster than classical computers—have been a mainstay of science fiction for decades. But actually building one has proven incredibly challenging.

A group of researchers at Aarhus University believes the secret to creating a quantum computer lies in understanding human cognition. So, they’ve built computer games to study us, first.

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Mar 26, 2015

Smart Cities Built on Emerging Tech is India’s Latest Initiative

Posted by in category: futurism

By — SingularityHubhttp://cdn.singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/6186422906_3a34d4752b_o-1000x400.jpg

The world is urbanizing—and fast. Why are cities so popular?

They’re where the opportunities are. In 2014, the world’s 300 largest cities accounted for 20 percent of the world’s population and nearly half of global output. It is estimated that growing cities could bring nearly $30 trillion a year into the global economy by 2025.

As we rapidly urbanize—and 70 percent of urban growth takes place in emerging economies—understanding cities becomes critical. How can we, for example, improve livability and resource management? Manage disease and sanitation?

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Mar 25, 2015

Teaching programming to preschoolers

Posted by in category: computing

Larry Hardesty | MIT News OfficeThe Personal Robots Group at the Media Lab have developed an interactive robot called Dragonbot to teach young children how to program. Dragonbot has audio and video sensors, a speech synthesizer, a range of expressive gestures, and a video screen for a face that assumes various expressions. Children created programs that dictated how Dragonbot would react to stimuli.Researchers at the MIT Media Laboratory are developing a system that enables young children to program interactive robots by affixing stickers to laminated sheets of paper.

Not only could the system introduce children to programming principles, but it could also serve as a research tool, to help determine which computational concepts children can grasp at what ages, and how interactive robots can best be integrated into educational curricula.Read more

Mar 25, 2015

The Next Generation Of Home Robots Will Be So Much More Than Vacuums

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

— TechCrunchIf Hollywood’s depiction of artificial intelligence were accurate, we would be falling in love with operating systems, sharing our homes with Stepford wives, and fending off cyborg attacks by now. While movies like Ex Machina and Her stoke the fears and desires of our imaginations, new innovations in robotics and artificial intelligence are bringing our visions of tomorrow closer to today.

You can now take a ride in a Google autonomous car, order dinner from a robot butler at a hotel in Cupertino, and buy a personal quadcopter drone for under a thousand bucks. These robots aren’t quite the cylons from Battlestar Galactica or the space bots from Interstellar, but there’s no question that we’re getting close.

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Mar 24, 2015

How to design the future

Posted by in category: futurism

Jon Turney — Aeonhttp://cdn-imgs-mag.aeon.co/images/2015/03/Digitarians-Dunne-and-Raby-1024x641.jpg
Picture yourself in a supermarket aisle in 2050. These new ‘magic meatballs’, brightly coloured for the kids, seem worth a try. Better have some of the meat powder too, one of the more established products from the mass-manufacturers of cultured meat – you can make that creamy meat-based fondue that always satisfies. You don’t fancy the meat ice-cream today, but there’s still time left for a trip to the deli counter, for some expensive, but delicious ‘rustic’ meat, matured in special vats, or perhaps some knitted steaks. And you can pile your cart secure in the knowledge that no animals were harmed in the making of any of these offerings.

At the moment, in vitro meat is a laboratory venture, yielding expensive and unappetising-looking muscle fibres that might be fit for filler in pies or burgers. But suppose the researchers’ ambitions are realised? Where will the technology go? How will it be marketed and consumed? Who might want it, and what for? These questions animate The In Vitro Meat Cook Book (2014) by Koert van Mensvoort and Hendrik-Jan Grievink, whose recipes for hypothetical products are sampled above. The authors’ open-ended, imaginative approach makes the book a good example of a new way of questioning technology: design fiction. As questions about technological choices trouble us more and more, it could be that design fiction, not science, has the better answers.

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Mar 24, 2015

Super Physics for Super Technologies

Posted by in categories: astronomy, cosmology, defense, disruptive technology, education, engineering, general relativity, particle physics, physics, quantum physics, science, space travel

CoverThumbnailTitle: Super Physics for Super Technologies
Sub Title: Replacing Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger & Einstein
Author: Benjamin T Solomon
Paperback: 154 pages
Publisher: Propulsion Physics, Inc. (March 19, 2015)
ISBN-10: 1508948011
ISBN-13: 978–1508948018
Language: English

Publisher’s Link: Super Physics for Super Technologies
Amazon’s Link: Super Physics for Super Technologies

Reviewer’s comments: “Benjamin is the second researcher I have met who has tried to consider a nonsingular cosmology. The first was Christi Stoica, which I met in 2010″.
Andrew Beckwith PhD

The Objective: This book, Super Physics for Super Technologies, proposes that a new physics exists. The findings are based on 16 years of extensive numerical modeling with empirical data, and therefore, both testable and irrefutable.

Continue reading “Super Physics for Super Technologies” »

Mar 24, 2015

The ‘Oculus Rift’ and the Courtroom

Posted by in category: virtual reality

Laura Bliss — City Lab
Image Flickr/wikileakstruck, Wikimedia Commons/Paethon, Laura Bliss
Immersive virtual reality and its ground-shaking potential was the belle of the ball at South by Southwest’s “Interactive” portion, which wrapped up Tuesday. Virtual reality (VR) headsets like the Oculus Rift fascinated and delighted festival-goers, with promises of changing the very landscapes of film, travel, journalism, and of course gaming—where VR’s journey into mainstream discourse began with the Oculus’ 2012 Kickstarter.

But there’s another area that the Oculus Rift—or whatever immersive VR headset gets commercialized first—is likely to enter: The courtroom. (And no, we don’t mean the current patent lawsuit against the Oculus Rift’s makers.) It might not sound sexy, but the implications could be pretty big.

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Mar 23, 2015

Virtual Reality Advertisements Get in Your Face

Posted by in category: virtual reality

By Rachel Metz — MIT Technology Review
illustration of ad addled man wearing VR headgearI’m sitting in a desk chair in an office in Mountain View, California. But with a virtual-reality headset strapped to my head and headphones over my ears, it looks and sounds like I’m standing in the belly of a blimp, flying high above silent city blocks dotted with billboards for a Despicable Me theme-park ride.

The blimp ride is part of a demo built by MediaSpike, a startup that’s making ads for virtual reality. Even the blimp itself is an ad: before boarding it, I can see its exterior is covered with a larger-than-life version of one of the film’s short, yellow characters.

For now, augmented reality and virtual reality are not widely used. But as new headsets hit the market, advertisers will surely try to stake out virtual ground.

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Mar 23, 2015

IQ-Test for the Planet

Posted by in categories: existential risks, particle physics

There are scientific publications starting in 2008 all remaining unchallenged in the literature which prove that the attempt to produce black holes down on earth is maximally dangerous for the planet.

Nevertheless all visible media and all politicians of the world refuse to say a word in response to the tomorrow to be doubled attempt at CERN.

Lifeboat is too small and unassuming to have a wide distribution, but it is an honor to say that in the Middle West of the United States the kindest and most caring and rational people on the planet live because they support Lifeboat.

Lifeboat is a planet’s lifeboat.

Mar 23, 2015

DARPA thinks it has a solution to Ebola (and all other infectious diseases)

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

by Alexis C. Madrigal — Fusion

http://i0.wp.com/fusiondotnet.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/fusion_ebolaantibodies.gif?resize=1400%2C788&quality=80&strip=all

Saving the world from Ebola suddenly sounds so simple, as the solution spills from Colonel Dan Wattendorf’s mouth, up on the stage in the windowless banquet hall of this Marriott hotel south of San Francisco.

“We’re going to take the genetic code and put it into a format where you go to your drug store or doctor and get a shot in the arm,” Wattendorf told a room full of medical researchers and technologists. “There’s a low-cost of goods, no cold chain, and we would produce the correct antibody in [any] individual directly.”Read more