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Sep 5, 2015

Lessons From Dying Extrasolar Earths

Posted by in category: cosmology

For those who missed this.


By all counts, Earth is on a one way trip to oblivion. Our aging Sun will see to that. Within 500 to 900 million years from now, photosynthesis and plant life on Earth will reach a death-spiral tipping point as the Sun continues its normal expansion and increases in luminosity over time.

Trouble is, researchers are still unsure about all the grisly endgame details, and their models of such slow motion horrors are hard to test. But a team of researchers now say that finding and observing nearby aging Earth-analogues, undergoing the ravages of their own expanding sun-like stars, will help Earth scientists understand how the stellar evolution of our own sun will affect life here on Earth.

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Sep 5, 2015

Controversial Philosopher Says Man And Machine Will Fuse Into One Being

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, cyborgs, engineering, genetics, singularity

The human being — especially in so-called “advanced civilizations” — is the animal that molds itself into its own pet.


Peter Sloterdijk is Germany’s most controversial thinker and media theorist. He has dared to challenge long-established divisions in traditional philosophy of body and soul, subject and object, culture and nature. His 1999 lecture on “Regulations for the Human Park,” in which he argued that genetic engineering was a continuation of human striving for self-creation, stirred up a tempest in a country known for Nazi eugenics. At the same time, he himself has concluded that “the taming of man has failed” as civilization’s potential for barbarism has grown ever greater. His seminal books include “Critique of Cynical Reason” and his trilogy, “Spheres.”

At a recent Berggruen Center on Philosophy and Culture symposium on humans and technology at Cambridge University’s St. John’s School of Divinity, The WorldPost discussed with Sloterdijk the end of borders between humans and technology, the cloud, singularity and identity in the age of globalization.

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Sep 4, 2015

Why’s IBM Investing $3 Billion In Quantum Computing & Synth Brains? Trillion Dollar Humanoid Market

Posted by in categories: computing, neuroscience, quantum physics, transportation

1. Silicon technology has taken humanity a long way forward from 1947 when the first transistor was invented by the Nobel prize winners Shockley, Bardeen & Brattain.

2. From smart mobile telephones we rely on to the sophisticated satellite navigation systems guiding our cars, a lot of techno-magic we see around us is a result of our ability to scale silicon-tech that turns hitherto science fiction into everyday reality at affordable prices.

3. All the Nobel laureates, scientists and engineers we liaise with at Quantum Innovation Labs http://QiLabs.net collectively realise the end of the silicon-scaling era is coming to end as the Moore’s Law era for Silicon-based computers finally concludes.

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Sep 4, 2015

The 10 Algorithms That Dominate Our World

Posted by in categories: computing, encryption, information science

1. Google Search.

2. Facebook’s News Feed.

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Sep 4, 2015

Toyota Pledges $50M To Research AI For Autonomous Vehicles, Hires DARPA’s Dr. Gill Pratt

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

Today, Toyota announced that it has hired Gill Pratt to drive its autonomous car research. Pratt is best known in this field for his work at DARPA and MIT, including starting the Robotics Challenge. The company is also investing $50 million in the research over the next five years as well as partnering with MIT and Stanford.

AAEAAQAAAAAAAAKxAAAAJDI5YjM4ZWM1LTFmOTgtNGEwNS04YmM3LTNiMWI4NmJiMjY2MQPratt has spent the past five years with DARPA, and laid out what’s important for Toyota at an event in Palo Alto today: “Our long-term goal is to make a car that is never responsible for a crash.”

Pratt will serve as Toyota’s “Executive Technical Advisor” on the research.

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Sep 4, 2015

Interesting Photo

Posted by in category: computing

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Sep 4, 2015

Changing the World Panel—Singularity Summit 2009—Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Aubrey de Grey — MIRI | Vimeo.com

Posted by in categories: hacking, innovation, life extension, robotics/AI, Singularity University

Sep 4, 2015

The Longevity Reporter: The Weekly Newsletter on Aging (05th September, 2015)

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health, life extension

Checkout the latest Longevity Reporter Newsletter (05th September, 2015), covering this week’s top news in health, aging, longevity.

This week: Dramatic Advances In Super-Resolution Imaging; This Stunning 3-D Model Provides A Fresh Perspective On Cancer; Want A Long Lifespan? You Need Stable Gene Networks; The Future Of Health: Precision Medicine; And more.

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Sep 4, 2015

Squishy transistors—a device concept for fast, low-power electronics

Posted by in categories: computing, electronics

An international team of researchers from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), IBM, the University of Edinburgh and Auburn University have shown that a new device concept — a ‘squishy’ transistor — can overcome the predicted power bottleneck caused by CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) technology reaching its fundamental limits.

Moore’s law predicted that the number of transistors able to fit on a given die area would double every two years. As transistor density doubled, chip size shrank and processing speeds increased. This march of progress led to rapid advances in and a surge in the number of interconnected devices. The challenge with making anything smaller is that there are fundamental physical limits that can’t be ignored and we are now entering the final years of CMOS transistor shrinkage.

Furthermore, this proliferation is driving an increase in data volume, accompanied by rising demands on energy to process, store and communicate it all; as a result, IT infrastructure now draws an estimated 10 % of the world’s electrical power. Previous efforts have focused on remediation by reducing the amount of energy per bit. However, soon we will hit a power barrier that will prevent continued voltage scaling. The development of novel, low-power devices based on different physical principles is therefore crucial to the continued evolution of IT.

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Sep 4, 2015

The World in 2025: 8 Predictions for the Next 10 Years

Posted by in category: futurism

In 2025, in accordance with Moore’s Law, we’ll see an acceleration in the rate of change as we move closer to a world of true abundance. Here are eight areas where we’ll see extraordinary transformation in the next decade:

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