New research suggests that weird blobs in the deepest part of Earth’s mantle could be leftovers from an ancient magma ocean.
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They don’t call Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson ‘The Mountain’ for nothing.
In 2015, the strong man and Game of Thrones actor broke a millennium-old record by taking – or more accurately, staggering – five steps with a 650 kilogram (1,430 pound) log on his back.
To most of us, this was simply an extraordinary example of heroic strength. To scientists, this feat marked a crushing limit to the gravitational pull any mortal could ever hope to endure, setting a boundary on the mass of planets we might expect to colonise.
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LEAF’s Rejuvenation Roundup September 2018 is out!
Happy autumn—or spring, if you live in the southern hemisphere! Be as it may, in a post-aging world, the season of your health would always be summer; let’s see how much closer we got to that world during last September.
LEAF News
To get things started, the new episode of the Rejuvenation Roundup podcast is available today.
While the rest of the country has been transfixed by the Brett Kavanagh confirmation drama, the White House was quietly but steadily taking major steps to secure America’s high-tech future.
The first was the release of the National Cybersecurity Strategy last week, which I discussed in a previous column. This week came the National Strategic Overview for Quantum Information Science (QIS), released by a subcommittee of the Committee on Science for the National Science and Technology Council. This document is a big win for Jacob Taylor, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s point man on all things quantum, and a major win for America.
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Be gone flat earthism.
The nature-versus-nurture argument of intelligence just got a lot more complicated with the discovery that the environment can modify the expression of a key gene in the brain, affecting intelligence far more than we previously thought.
Such a finding may not come as a surprise if you remember that numerous genes influence our IQ and stressful experiences can lock and unlock genes in our brains. Yet having hard evidence of the link will no doubt stir debate on just what it means to be “smart”.
Researchers from the Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin analysed the characteristics of a number of genes among a group of healthy adolescents, and compared the results with intelligence scores and various neurological traits.
As the artificial brain races towards the singularity, what we often forget is the boost to human brainpower that will accompany it. As we increase our senses and perceptions, humans have a choice what to do with these new superpowers, that can be used to reinforce one’s tunnel vision of life or to ignore it.
This story is part of What Happens Next, our complete guide to understanding the future. Read more predictions about the Future of Fact.
Not everyone experiences the world in the same way. Whether it’s how you react to the results of an election or what tones you hear in a sound clip, observable reality is often not as objective as you think it is.
Emerging technologies such as augmented reality will further blur this line. With AR on mobile devices and head-mounted displays, we’re well within the start of what it means to live an augmented life. Humans are doing a lot of fun things right now, like integrating playful games into our world and painting ourselves with digitally applied effects and makeup. We’re also starting to find utility for AR in the workplace and with hardware designed specifically for the enterprise market.
How to solve the problem of which map to use, without distortion.
Check out more details at our EuroVis 2018 paper at: https://vis.yalongyang.com/papers/vr-maps-globes.pdf
Four interactive way to present the WORLD: (a) a 3D exocentric globe, where the user’s viewpoint is outside the globe; (b) a flat map (rendered to a plane in VR); © an egocentric 3D globe, with the viewpoint inside the globe; and (d) a curved map, created by projecting the map onto a section of a sphere which curves around the user.