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Tracking the Future just got better
The solar thermal technology behind Ivanpah—which is being jointly developed by BrightSource Energy, NRG Energy and Google—uses thousands of mirrors to reflect sunlight. That light is collected in one of Ivanpah’s three solar towers, where the intense heat transforms water into steam. That steam is piped to a turbine that generates electricity. It’s the same basic technology behind a coal or natural gas plant—only the sun provides the heat. Ivanpah also has the advantage of producing electricity on a much smoother curve than solar PV, which means it can keep generating power later into the day. But Ivanpah, which should go fully online before the end of the year, has something else: sheer beauty.
Max Tegmark, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi), presents a cosmic perspective on the future of life, covering our increasing scientific knowledge, the cosmic background radiation, the ultimate fate of the universe, and what we need to do to ensure the human race's survival and flourishing in the short and long term.
Small electrodes placed on or inside the brain allow patients to interact with computers or control robotic limbs simply by thinking about how to execute those actions. This technology could improve communication and daily life for a person who is paralyzed or has lost the ability to speak from a stroke or neurodegenerative disease.
Now, University of Washington researchers have demonstrated that when humans use this technology – called a brain-computer interface – the brain behaves much like it does when completing simple motor skills such as kicking a ball, typing or waving a hand. Learning to control a robotic arm or a prosthetic limb could become second nature for people who are paralyzed.
A group of French researchers believe that the sensors and transmitters we wear will route and relay data, not just collect it. We won’t just be connected to the network. We’ll be the network.
In a jaw-dropping feat of engineering, electronics turn a person's thoughts into commands for a robot. Using a brain-computer interface technology pioneered by University of Minnesota biomedical engineering professor Bin He, several young people have learned to use their thoughts to steer a flying robot around a gym, making it turn, rise, dip, and even sail through a ring.
The technology may someday allow people robbed of speech and mobility by neurodegenerative diseases to regain function by controlling artificial limbs, wheelchairs, or other devices. And it's completely noninvasive: Brain waves (EEG) are picked up by the electrodes of an EEG cap on the scalp, not a chip implanted in the brain.
May 22 (Bloomberg) -- Bloomberg Television looks at the advances to IBM's supercomputer "Watson," including cognitive computing developments allowing doctors to improve their practices, and hospitals to manage their data.
Draper Laboratory, an 80-year-old R&D lab, has been working with MIT and NASA's Johnson Space Center to develop a suit that will function, essentially, like a body-molded version of a traditional spaceship. Instead of floating in free space, at the mercy of forces acting on it, the suit would be able to move on its own
The United Nations on Thursday was dealing with a surprisingly pressing issue: killer robots.
In Geneva, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Christof Heyns, called for a moratorium on the development of drones that are programmed to target and fire without human intervention. “War without reflection is mechanical slaughter,” he said. “In the same way that the taking of any human life deserves at the minimum some deliberation, a decision to allow machines to be deployed deserves a collective pause, in other words, a moratorium.”
Bioelectronics is the field of developing medicines that use electrical impulses to modulate the body's neural circuits as an alternative to drug-based interventions. How far away are we from having these very targeted "electroceuticals"?
Can the standard chemical fixation and plastic embedding technique used for electron microscopic investigation of brain circuitry be adapted to preserve the synaptic connectivity of an entire human brain?
interview by: Adam Ford
Synthetic biology moves us from reading to writing DNA, allowing us to design biological systems from scratch for any number of applications. Its capabilities are becoming clearer, its first products and processes emerging. Synthetic biology’s reach already extends from reducing our dependence on oil to transforming how we develop medicines and food crops. It is being heralded as the next big thing; whether it fulfils that expectation remains to be seen. It will require collaboration and multi-disciplinary approaches to development, application and regulation. Interesting times ahead!
Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has proposed that our ability to awe was biologically selected for by evolution because it imbues our lives with sense of cosmic significance that has resulted in a species that works harder not just to survive but to flourish and thrive.
Join Jason Silva every week as he freestyles his way into the complex systems of society, technology and human existence and discusses the truth and beauty of science in a form of existential jazz. New episodes every Tuesday.
Watch More Shots of Awe on TestTubehttp://testtube.com/shotsofawe
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One of the biggest impediments to developing practical quantum computing is preserving information. That’s because unlike a regular bit on the computer you’re reading, which can either exist as either a 1 or a 0, a quantum bit (“qubit”) can exist in a quantum superposition – meaning it exists simultaneously in all of its possible states until it’s observed. As a result, information stored as qubits has a tendency to develop errors and degrade in fractions of a second.
Scientists in the field of quantum computing have been working for years to find a method to correct the errors in quantum data storage, allowing that information to exist for longer periods of time. And now a team of researchers from Dartmouth and the University of Sydney have developed a method that may allow for quantum information to be stored for long periods of time while keeping the error rate low.
Biologists at University College London say they now know why cancerous cells group together and spread to different parts of the body. And shockingly, it appears that the malignant cells are migrating by literally chasing healthy cells that are trying to get away.
The discovery could pave the way for alternative cancer treatments — future therapies that can work to disrupt the process of interaction between malignant and healthy cells.
The future of robotics in surgery will involve an increasingly powerful virtual environment, where surgeons are able to see through the body and potentially work side by side with autonomous robotic assistants.
Using exotic components such as color codes, new phases of quantum matter, and extra dimensions, a team of physicists has shown that it's theoretically possible to construct a quantum computer that has the ability to correct itself whenever an error occurs.
Economist Andrew McAfee suggests that, yes, probably, droids will take our jobs -- or at least the kinds of jobs we know now. In this far-seeing talk, he thinks through what future jobs might look like, and how to educate coming generations to hold them. Andrew McAfee studies how information technology affects businesses and society.
Scientists say quantum computers could be built to operate up to a million times faster than conventional computers. But how do they work? And how close are we to putting them in homes and offices around the world?
There's no easy answer for HIV; the sly virus uses our own immune cells to its advantage and mutates readily to shrug off round after round of anti-retrovirals. But thanks to the efforts researchers from the University of Illinois and some heavy-duty number crunching from one of the world's fastest petaflop supercomputers, we may be able to stop HIV right in its tracks.
The latest line of attack against HIV targets its viral casing (or capsid). Capsids lie between the virus's spherical outer coat, a .1 micron diameter, lipid based layer known as the viral envelope, and a bullet-shaped inner coat known as the viral core that contains the strands of HIV RNA. Capsids comprise 2,000 copies of the viral protein, p24, arranged in a lattice structure (a rough insight gleaned only from years of cryo-electron microscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, cryo-EM tomography, and X-ray crystallography work). The capsid is responsible for protecting the RNA load, disabling the host's immune system, and delivering the RNA into new cells. In other words: It's the evil mastermind.
As biology emerges as another generalised computing medium, future biological creations will, just like electronic computing, extend their reach into every aspect of our lives and into every industry, transforming them both to their very core.
If our experience with cyberspace is any indication, these developments will unfold unpredictably, yet there are important lessons to be learned. The internet was built for redundancy, not security. As a result, we have the omnipresent spectre of cybercrime looming over us. Before we enter the age of programmable biology, we must contemplate what we might do differently to avoid the mistakes we made in our development of silicon-based computing. DNA is the common thread that runs through all living things. Without it, there is no life. As such, we have no alternative to seriously considering how we will protect the world's original operating system.
Planetary Resources’ team of engineers who have designed, built and operated spacecraft throughout the Solar System, including all of the recent U.S. Mars landers and rovers, are now developing the most advanced space technology ever and will make it publicly accessible. A diverse group of supporters, including Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson, actor Seth Green, Star Trek’s Brent Spiner (Data) and Rob Picardo (The Doctor), Bill Nye the Science Guy, futurist Jason Silva, and MIT astrophysicist Dr. Sara Seager, have joined forces with Planetary Resources to make access to space widely available for exploration and research.
Until recently, the wet lab has been a crucial component of every biologist. Today's advances in the production of massive amounts of data and the creation of machine-learning algorithms for processing that data are changing the face of biological science—making it possible to do real science without a wet lab. David Heckerman shares several examples of how this transformation in the area of genomics is changing the pace of scientific breakthroughs.
In a move that would make the Alchemists of King Arthur's time green with envy, scientists have unraveled the formula for turning liquid cement into liquid metal. This makes cement a semi-conductor and opens up its use in the profitable consumer electronics marketplace for thin films, protective coatings, and computer chips.
"This new material has lots of applications including as thin-film resistors used in liquid-crystal displays, basically the flat panel computer monitor that you are probably reading this from at the moment," said Chris Benmore, a physicist from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory who worked with a team of scientists from Japan, Finland, and Germany to take the "magic" out of the cement-to-metal transformation. Benmore and Shinji Kohara from Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute/SPring-8 led the research effort.
This video maps out Kurzweil's SIX EPOCHS OF EVOLUTION showing the exponential progression in the way the universe stores and processes information... what we see is a bootstrapping recursive complexification leading us towards some kind of intelligence singularity.
"Part Timothy Leary, part Ray Kurzweil, and part Neo from 'The Matrix.'..."
JASON SILVA is an extraordinary new breed of philosopher who meshes philosophical wisdom of the ages with an infectious optimism for the future. Combining intriguing insights and a mastery of digital filmmaking, Jason delivers philosophical shots of espresso, which unravel the incredible possibilities the future has to offer the human race.
Homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that don't heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not any more.
A team of researchers at Stanford has designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining. Such a structure could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space.
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