“I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” — Winston Churchill
Death still enjoys a steady paycheck, but being the Grim Reaper isn’t the cushy job that it used to be.
It’s getting harder and harder to get away from the cameras these days, and now a new type of facial recognition system goes further than most: it uses infrared scanning technology to match the thermal heat signature of a person’s with a standard photograph of it. In other words, you can now be seen in the dark.
More luminous and energy efficient than LEDs, white lasers look to be the future in lighting and light-based wireless communication.
Is this what we will be fated to in the future?….Karaoke Robots.
“What Do Machines Sing Of?” is a robot by artist Martin Backes that endlessly performs number one hit ballads from the 1990s while attempting to add the proper emotion to its performances. When one song ends the machine randomly selects another and keeps on singing.
100 Year Starship (100YSS) today announced the establishment of the Canopus Award, an annual writing prize recognizing the finest fiction and non-fiction works that contribute to the excitement, knowledge, and understanding of interstellar space exploration and travel.
100YSS, led by former astronaut, engineer, physician and entrepreneur Dr. Mae Jemison, is an independent, long-term global initiative working to ensure that the capabilities for human interstellar travel, beyond our solar system to another star, exist within the next 100 years.
Continue reading “100 Year Starship Announces the Canopus Award for Interstellar Writing” »
A standard assumption of technological progress is that new innovations are born in our mind, and we humans choose which of those visions to bring into existence. We imagine stuff, we want stuff, we build stuff, and repeat.
We assume that our brains are the center of the innovation universe.
But just as Copernicus’s sun-centered model of our solar system taught us how physically marginal our place in the cosmos really is, a new class of techno-philosophy is similarly displacing our understanding of technological innovation. Read more
Most comets that brush past the sun end with a whimper, but if a big one plunges into the sun it could go out with a bang.
A new story on how coming technology may change our attitudes on the death penalty. This story was a feature on Vice yesterday, as well as Motherboard:.
