Menu

Blog

Page 6282

May 10, 2019

The Challenge of Building a Self-Driving Car

Posted by in categories: engineering, robotics/AI, transportation

Be one of the first 500 people to sign up with this link and get 20% off your subscription with Brilliant.org! https://brilliant.org/realengineering/

New vlog channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMet4qY3027v8KjpaDtDx-g

Continue reading “The Challenge of Building a Self-Driving Car” »

May 10, 2019

Get your head in the game: World’s 1st VR gym opens in San Francisco (VIDEO)

Posted by in categories: computing, entertainment, virtual reality

The world’s first virtual reality gym just opened in San Francisco, offering a next-generation workout via a computer games-based distraction technique that aims to put the fun back into exercising.

Black Box VR promises a gym experience like no other by giving users a full-body workout while virtually immersed in another world that requires them to fight battles and beat their opponent.

Continue reading “Get your head in the game: World’s 1st VR gym opens in San Francisco (VIDEO)” »

May 10, 2019

How the Videogame Aesthetic Flows Into All of Culture

Posted by in categories: computing, media & arts

Videogames show us how digital media in general lend themselves easily to flow. For flow experiences often depend on repetitive actions, which contribute to the feeling of engagement and absorption that Csikszentmihalyi describes, and videogames—like all interactive computer interfaces, indeed like virtually all computer programs—operate on the principle of repetition. The user becomes part of the event loop that drives the action: her inputs to the controller, mouse, or keyboard are processed each time the computer executes the loop and are displayed as actions on the screen. The user not only experiences flow, she actually becomes part of the program’s flow. This is true, if in different ways, for applications throughout digital culture, such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

The most prominent and popular social media platforms appeal to their hundreds of millions of users in part through the mechanism of flow. The stereotype, which contains some grain of truth, is that flow culture is youth culture. Young people spend their days immersed in flows of text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, and streaming music, while older adults prefer to experience their media one at a time. For example, a Pew Research survey from 2012 showed that almost half of all adults between ages 18 and 34 use Twitter, whereas only 13 percent of adults over age 55 do. The younger you are, the more likely you are to multitask: those born after 1980 do so more than Generation X, which does so much more than the baby boomers.

Each of the genres of social media provides a different flow experience. YouTube, for example, remediates television and video for the World Wide Web. A typical YouTube session begins with one video, which the user may have found through searching or as a link sent to her. The page that displays that video contains links to others, established through various associations: the same subject, the same contributor, a similar theme, and so on. Channel surfing on traditional television can be addictive, but the content of one channel tends to have little to do with that of the next. YouTube’s lists of links and its invitation to search for new videos give the viewer’s experience more continuity, with the opportunity to watch an endless series of close variants.

Continue reading “How the Videogame Aesthetic Flows Into All of Culture” »

May 10, 2019

How scorpion venom is helping surgeons detect brain cancer

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

A new imaging technique designed to help surgeons identify the location of malignant brain tumors during surgery is showing promising early clinical trial results. The technique combines a new high-sensitivity near-infrared camera with a special imaging agent synthesized from an amino acid found in scorpion venom.

Read more

May 10, 2019

SpaceX to launch dozens of ‘test satellites’ for its Starlink program

Posted by in categories: internet, satellites

SpaceX will launch dozens of ‘test satellites’ for its Starlink program next week as it ramps up efforts to create high speed global internet…


According to Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and CEO, the company will launch dozens of satellites next week as a demonstration for project Starlink.

Continue reading “SpaceX to launch dozens of ‘test satellites’ for its Starlink program” »

May 10, 2019

One-off injection may drastically reduce heart attack risk

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

Doctors in the US have announced plans for a radical gene therapy that aims to drastically reduce the risk of heart attack, the world’s leading cause of death, with a one-off injection.

The researchers hope to trial the therapy within the next three years in people with a rare genetic disorder that makes them prone to heart attacks in their 30s and 40s. If the treatment proves safe and effective in the patients, doctors will seek approval to offer the jab to a wider population.

“The therapy will be relevant, we think, to any adult at risk of a heart attack,” said Sekar Kathiresan, a cardiologist and geneticist at Harvard Medical School who will lead the effort. “We want this not only for people who have heart attacks at a young age because of a genetic disorder, but for garden variety heart attacks as well.”

Continue reading “One-off injection may drastically reduce heart attack risk” »

May 10, 2019

Jeff Bezos’s huge ambitions for space include floating colonies with weather like ‘Maui on its best day, all year long’

Posted by in category: space

Bezos has discussed his hope of building O’Neill colonies, spinning cylinders in space that would replicate gravity and sustain human life.

Read more

May 10, 2019

MIT CSAIL’s AI can predict the onset of breast cancer 5 years in advance

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

Scientists at MIT’s CSAIL and Massachusetts General Hospital have developed an AI model that can predict breast cancer up to five years in advance.

Read more

May 10, 2019

Jeff Bezos Details Vision of Colonizing the Solar System

Posted by in category: space travel

Jeff Bezos discussed his vision to go to space to benefit Earth. He announced the Blue Moon lunar lander and provided updates on the New Shepard sub-orbital rocket and other Blue Origin activity. Jeff’s vision is for humanity to colonize space and for civilization to become primarily space-based. Industry will move to space and the resources of the solar system will be used so that growth can continue. There is billions of times the resources of the Earth in the solar system.

Blue Moon lunar lander is a large lunar lander capable of delivering multiple metric tons of payload to the lunar surface based on configuration and mission. The cargo variant revealed today can carry 3.6 metric tons to the surface. There is a larger design of the lander that can stretch to be capable of carrying a 6.5-metric-ton, human-rated ascent stage. Blue also announced it can meet the current Administration’s goal of putting Americans on the Moon by 2024 with the Blue Moon lunar lander.

Continue reading “Jeff Bezos Details Vision of Colonizing the Solar System” »

May 10, 2019

What Insurgency Will Look Like in 2030

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, military, robotics/AI, terrorism

With the rise of enhanced being the world will change at a fast pace similar games such as black ops 3 are a proper representation of possible outcomes in warfare. Like for instance sentient warfighting robot beings or cybernetically enhanced humans. The extremes of these also are seen in wetware which can essentially not have many limits so increased strength intelligence really anything you can imagine. Really sci-fi games such as halo are not far off at the possibilities of warfare. Really we are only limited by our imagination.


The author of “Ghost Fleet” has some guesses — and some questions that U.S. defenders will have to answer.

Robots, artificial intelligence, cyberwar, 3D printing, bio-enhancements, and a new geopolitical competition; the 21st century is being shaped by a range of momentous, and scary, new trends and technologies. We should also expect them to shape the worlds of insurgency and terrorism.

Continue reading “What Insurgency Will Look Like in 2030” »