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Dec 20, 2015

This virtual reality bike could kill the boredom of exercise

Posted by in categories: health, virtual reality

Society isn’t ready to take a medium seriously until it can provide certain things. The first, and most obvious, achievement is it must work with porn. Virtual reality passed that benchmark a long time ago, and it seems to have no problem revisiting it over and over again. So what’s the next trial that virtual reality must face on its quest to becoming a true consumer medium?

Someone has to try and make me exercise with it.

That someone are the makers of the Virzoom, an exercise bike and app suite for the Oculus Rift headset. The VirZOOM is available for preorder today, with the first 300 units are $200 (it’s regular price $250).

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Dec 20, 2015

NASA’s Starshade

Posted by in category: alien life

Finding aliens with sunglasses!

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Dec 20, 2015

Solar Frontiers

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

From Haiti to Alabama – discover the Solar Frontiers where clean energy is sparking a revolution in how our planet is powered – and by whom.

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Dec 20, 2015

Ben Goertzel: Transitioning to a Post-Employment, Post-Scarcity, Post-Money Economy

Posted by in categories: economics, robotics/AI

Full Title:
Transitioning to a Post-Employment, Post-Scarcity, Post-Money Economy in Which Collective Human and Machine Meaning Making Reigns.

Speaker:
Ben Goertzel, AGI Society, OpenCog Foundation.

Continue reading “Ben Goertzel: Transitioning to a Post-Employment, Post-Scarcity, Post-Money Economy” »

Dec 20, 2015

NASA shows off their humanoid robot that they want to send to Mars

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, space travel

Click on photo to start video.

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Dec 20, 2015

Warp drive and wormholes could be used for time travel, says physicist

Posted by in categories: cosmology, space travel, time travel

Older, but interesting idea—


Warp drive and stargate wormholes could be used for time travel to the past. That’s the surprising conclusion that controversial theoretical physicist and author Dr. Jack Sarfatti has reached from his research into dark energy and dark matter.

Hubble image of dark matter ring in galaxy cluster

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Dec 20, 2015

Oxford team demonstrates ‘hybrid’ logic gate as work towards quantum computer continues

Posted by in categories: computing, particle physics, quantum physics

‘In a nice piece of “spin-off science” from this technological achievement, we were able to perform a “Bell test”, by first using the high-precision logic gate to generate an entangled state of the two different-species ions, then manipulating and measuring them independently. This is a test which probes the non-local nature of quantum mechanics; that is, the fact that an entangled state of two separated particles has properties that cannot be mimicked by a classical system. This was the first time such a test had been performed on two different species of atom separated by many times the atomic size.’

While Professor Lucas cautions that the so-called ‘locality loophole’ is still present in this experiment, there is no doubt the work is an important contribution to the growing body of research exploring the physics of entanglement. He says: ‘The significance of the work for trapped-ion quantum computing is that we show that quantum logic gates between different isotopic species are possible, can be driven by a relatively simple laser system, and can work with precision beyond the so-called “fault-tolerant threshold” precision of approximately 99% — the precision necessary to implement the techniques of quantum error correction, without which a quantum computer of useful size cannot be built.’

In the long term, it is likely that different atomic elements will be required, rather than different isotopes. In closely related work published in the same issue of Nature, by Ting Rei Tan et al, the NIST Ion Storage group has demonstrated a different type of quantum logic gate using ions of two different elements (beryllium and magnesium).

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Dec 19, 2015

This Simple Video Explain Where All The Aliens Are And Why We Haven’t Found Them Yet

Posted by in categories: existential risks, physics

The “Fermi Paradox” and “The Great Filter.”


Our universe is huge and some parts are very old and if we somehow happen to live on a planet that’s fairly young, aliens must also exist somewhere. But where the hell are they? Kurz Gesagt tries to find an answer in this beautiful animation explainer that traces on The Fermi Paradox and different kinds of potential civilizations.

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Dec 19, 2015

Mystery material stuns scientists

Posted by in categories: entertainment, materials

How does water on the surface of this bizarre material control UV light emission and also its conductivity? (credit: Mohammad A. Islam et al./Nano Letters)

In a remarkable chance landmark discovery, a team of researchers at four universities has discovered a mysterious material that emits ultraviolet light and has insulating, electrical conducting, semiconducting, superconducting, and ferromagnetic properties — all controlled by surface water.

It happened while the researchers were studying a sample of lanthanum aluminate film on a strontinum titanate crystal. The sample mysteriously began to glow, emitting intense levels of ultraviolet light from its interior. After carefully reproducing the experimental conditions, they tracked down the unlikely switch that turns UV light on or off: surface water moisture.

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Dec 19, 2015

Google’s artificial intelligence bot thinks the purpose of life is ‘to live forever’

Posted by in categories: life extension, robotics/AI

This week, Google released a research paper chronicling one of its latest forays into artificial intelligence.

Researchers at the company programmed an advanced type of “chatbot” that learns how to respond in conversations based on examples from a training set of dialogue.

And the bot doesn’t just answer by spitting out canned answers in response to certain words; it can form new answers from new questions.

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