Lifeboat Foundation

Heidi Hoopes — Gizmag

It may be a little late for April Fool’s, but some skepticism is nonetheless warranted when reading that researchers have shown nanoparticles to disobey a fundamental law of physics which dictates the flow of entropy and heat in, it was believed, any situation. Specifically, researchers from three universities theoretically proposed then demonstrated that a nanoparticle in a state of thermal non-equilibrium does not always behave as larger particles might under the same conditions, with implications for various fields of research.

The second law of thermodynamics is the one that makes perpetual motion machines impossible. It states that the entropy – the measure for the disorder of a system – of any isolated system cannot decrease spontaneously, with the system evolving towards the state of maximum entropy (favoring disorder). The team has shown that a nanoparticle trapped with laser light temporarily violates this law. This seeming violation of universal law is transient, something that the researchers first derived as a mathematical model of fluctuations expected at the nanoscale.

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The future propulsion community are those who believe in or are actively researching rocketry, gravity modification & interstellar propulsion engineering & physics.

In this video I discuss the 3 groups within the future propulsion community. These groups are the Nay Sayers — they don’t believe that it is in the near future, Advanced Rocket — that only rockets can do this, & New Physics — that a new physics will solve this soon.

I also discuss briefly the European/French and Chinese interest in my work.

Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub

While traditional sports only grudgingly accept technological augmentation, the 2016 Cybathlon, a kind of hybrid between the XPRIZE and Olympics, embraces it with both robotic arms. Disabled competitors (or pilots) will compete using assistance devices like powered exoskeletons, robotic prostheses, and brain-control interfaces.

We’ve chronicled the continuous evolution of such technologies over the years, but they’re still largely out of reach for most folks.

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Neal Ungerleider — Fast Company

Brazil is one of the biggest foreign markets around for Facebook and Google–and it’s one of the places where the NSA loves to snoop on the President’s email accounts. It’s also a place where the Internet landscape is diverging from the United States in a way that benefits ordinary digital citizens: On April 21, Brazil’s congress passed a legally binding “Internet Bill of Rights.”

The Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights, called the Marco Civil and signed by president Dilma Rousseff in Sao Paulo, guarantees net neutrality, regulates government surveillance on the Internet, and places limits on data companies can collect from Brazilian customers. In addition, Internet service providers won’t be held liable for content published by their customers and will be legally required to remove offensive material via court order. The legislation’s signing took place at a global Internet governance conference, NETMundial, in front of executives from Google and several other firms.

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Jordan Pearson — Motherboard

Impending technological change tends to elicit a Janus-faced reaction in people: part awe, part creeping sense of anxiety and terror. During the Industrial Revolution, Henry Ford called it the “the terror of the machine.” Today, it’s the looming advancements in artificial intelligence that promise to create programs with superhuman intelligence—the infamous singularity—that are starting to weigh on the public consciousness, as blockbuster ‘netsploitation flick Transcendence illustrates.

There’s a danger that sci-fi pulp like Transcendence is watering down the real risks of artificial intelligence in public discourse. But these threats are being taken very seriously by researchers who are studying the existential threat of AI on the human race.

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Matt Rocheleau — Boston.com

Each of the 4,500-plus undergraduates at MIT will soon get $100 in bitcoin as part of a project launched by a pair of students who announced today that they’ve raised a half million dollars to fund the effort.

Organizers said they hope to establish “an ecosystem for digital currencies” at the Cambridge campus that will allow professors and researchers to study how students use bitcoin as well as to promote other academic and entrepreneurial activity around bitcoin.

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Sam Machkovech — ars technica

Up until this point, the musical genre known as “drone rock” had been a weird, indie niche that consisted of slow, loud guitar noise. If machinists and programmers have their way, that description will need some major rewriting—but it’ll probably seem just as weird.

This week, a team at Philadelphia-based KMel Robotics, known for building airborne video recording solutions, turned their robot-making talents to creating a band. The company pre-programmed a six-aircraft ensemble to hover over instruments and strum or strike without any human interaction, other than the team’s initial strike of a “play” button.

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Louise Donovan — GQ
In 1969, the United States put two men on the moon. The mission required more than 3,500 IBM employees and the most sophisticated programs ever written. Today, though, a single Apple iPhone holds more computing power than any of the technology used on Apollo 11. That rapid advance can be explained by a pattern called Moore’s Law: every 18 months, the amount of transistors that it’s possible to fit on to a one–
inch-wide microchip doubles. In other words, the pace of change is geometric, not linear. That’s why a laptop bought today is not nine times better than one you could buy nine years ago, it’s 64 times better. The problem for innovators is that Moore’s Law will, in around 15 years’ time, hit a wall. There is a physical limit to how many transistors can be squeezed on to a chip.

In the short term, the chips themselves will evolve. The so-called “wonder material”, graphene could replace their silicon insides. Graphene conducts electricity at high speed and it reduces interference between tightly arranged transistors.

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I am so glad to have the new video for my Kick Starter project, Ground Zero of Interstellar Propulsion and covers briefly Gravity Modification aka Anti-Gravity, Interstellar Propulsion, UFOs, Laithwaite, Crisis In Physics