Jan 29, 2016
Elon Musk Says SpaceX Will Send People to Mars
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: Elon Musk, space travel
Elon Musk wants to go to space within the next five years and thinks human beings can reach Mars by 2025.
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Jan 29, 2016
This comic is funny, because old gadgets are LOLz and all, but it actually bears a lot of truth
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in category: materials
Humans have contributed, in the form of plastic, glass, and purified metals, the largest influx of new minerals into Earth’s geologic history (probably) since oxygen levels first ticked up in the atmosphere around 2.3 billion years ago.
Here’s two new, 100% real science words for you to learn today: Technofossil and plastiglomerate.
I’ll have a video out about this on Feb. 8… stay tuned!
Jan 29, 2016
Greenlight VR Report: Consumers Are Surprisingly Unaware of Virtual Reality
Posted by Karen Hurst in categories: computing, virtual reality
When the consumers (who happen to be your primary customer) of your product doesn’t seem to be fully aware of your product; then you have indeed a broken product marketing and launch awareness program. And, if industry is also part of that picture; you may have an even bigger challenge.
After our latest US consumer research in October 2015, we wanted to find out if the trends we were seeing in the survey data held for a larger, more international pool. In December, we surveyed over 1,000 respondents throughout the United Kingdom about their awareness of virtual reality, interest in purchasing headsets and trying applications, and their concerns.
With everyone from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to analysts at Goldman Sachs boldly claiming VR as the next computing platform, we believe it is critical strategic decision makers — product managers, marketers, and investors alike — better understand the industry’s potential early adopters and what they really want from our industry.
Jan 29, 2016
The understanding of artificial intelligence should be better
Posted by Karen Hurst in categories: business, finance, robotics/AI, space
Overall, this is a good article. However, for AI to truly take off across industry; you must understand the industries that you’re trying to enable. I keep finding this gap in all of the AI discussions.
Yes, we have opportunities in the consumer space; however, if you truly want to be embraced by industry to enable it’s front and back office operations you must ensure that the AI that you’re developing can easily support and enable businesses. Granted not all AI belongs in business and are sometimes better suit for the consumer space or government and vice versa. However, when designing and developing AI; you truly have to know up front who is your primary targeted audience and remain focused towards that audience.
Dr. Kailash Nadh, who holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from London’s Middlesex University and is the CTO of financial technology firm Zerodha, talks about why AI hasn’t picked up yet and what lies in the future.
Jan 29, 2016
Nanotechnology in Manufacturing: The Future is Now (Part 1)
Posted by Klaus Baldauf in categories: biotech/medical, engineering, nanotechnology, particle physics, robotics/AI
The burgeoning field of nanotechnology promises an indefinite range of capabilities in medicine, optics, communications, and other facets of applied science and engineering. On that front, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Atoms 2 Products program (A2P) is funding 10 companies, universities, and institutions to develop mass-manufacturing techniques and technologies for functional products made up of nanoscale constituents. The project demonstrates a mere slice of the contributions in the mass movement to make nanotechnology a part of our everyday lives.
The following gallery highlights the work of five DARPA-funded projects in the program. The slides describe an atomic calligraphy technique for 2D atomic printing, a manufacturing method for producing high-frequency “Nanolitz” wires, the construction of pop-up sensors for laparoscopy, and a conjunct effort to use micro-robotics to build the assemblers of nanodevices.
Jan 29, 2016
Many healthcare organizations not preparing for precision medicine
Posted by Karen Hurst in categories: biotech/medical, health
59% of the providers surveyed recently state that they have no intentions of offering precision treatment such as CRISPR for the next 5 yrs. which means patients with MS, Dystonia, Cancer, etc. will not necessarily get proper choice of treatments that they deserve.
As the Obama administration looks to Congress to fund its $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative, a new poll of healthcare executives indicates that most hospitals and health systems are not planning on leveraging such advances in genomics and data analytics to personalize patient care.
In the poll, conducted by analytics vendor Health Catalyst, 59 percent of respondents indicated that precision medicine will not play a significant role in their organizations over the next five years.
Continue reading “Many healthcare organizations not preparing for precision medicine” »
Jan 29, 2016
The 21st Century Philosophers — By Melanie Ruiz | OZY
Posted by Odette Bohr Dienel in categories: futurism, philosophy, robotics/AI
““If you think it’s too early to think about something, it’s probably slightly too late.””
Jan 29, 2016
The Technological Singularity: A Definition
Posted by Amnon H. Eden in categories: neuroscience, singularity
(draft)
We’ve just posted a proposed definition of the notion of a technological singularity in our blog. Please comment freely.
Synopsis: Careful expositions of a technological singularity anticipated by the mid-21st century can be uniquely described using three common characteristics: superintelligence, acceleration, and discontinuity.
Jan 29, 2016
Imagining Football’s Future Through the Super Bowl of 2066
Posted by Klaus Baldauf in categories: food, privacy, robotics/AI, transportation, wearables
Scalpers offered contact lenses guaranteed to fool any ocular-based biometric ticketing technology.
He was right, of course, which explains all those people arriving at the stadium in all the usual ways. Some came by autonomous cars that dropped them off a mile or more from the stadium, their fitness wearables synced to their car software, both programmed to make their owner walk whenever the day’s calories consumed exceeded the day’s calories burned. Others turned up on the transcontinental Hyperloop, gliding at 760 miles per hour on a cushion of air through a low-pressure pipeline, as if each passenger was an enormous bank slip tucked into a pneumatic tube at a drive-through teller window in 1967. That was the year the first Super Bowl was played, midway through the first season of Star Trek, set in a space-age future that now looks insufficiently imagined.
And so hours before Super Bowl 100 kicked off—we persist in using that phrase, long after the NFL abandoned the actual practice—the pregame scene offered all the Rockwellian tableaux of the timeless tailgate: children running pass patterns on their hoverboards—they still don’t quite hover, dammit—dads printing out the family’s pregame snacks, grandfathers relaxing in lawn chairs with their marijuana pipes.
Jan 29, 2016
Biotechnology, synthetic biology keys to humans colonizing other planets
Posted by Klaus Baldauf in categories: alien life, biotech/medical, food, genetics, particle physics, space travel, sustainability
Over the last 12,000 years or so, human civilization has noticeably reshaped the Earth’s surface. But changes on our own planet will likely pale in comparison when humans settle on other celestial bodies. While many of the changes on Earth over the centuries have been related to food production, by way of agriculture, changes on other worlds will result, not only from the need for on-site production of food, but also for all other consumables, including air.
As vital as synthetic biology will be to the early piloted missions to Mars and voyages of exploration, it will become indispensable to establish a long-term human presence off-Earth, namely colonization. That’s because we’ve evolved over billions of years to thrive specifically in the environments provides by our home planet.
Our physiology is well-suited to Earth’s gravity and its oxygen-rich atmosphere. We also depend on Earth’s magnetic field to shield us from intense space radiation in the form of charged particles. In comparison, Mars currently has no magnetic field to trap particle radiation and an atmosphere that is so thin that any shielding against other types of space radiation is negligible compared with the protection that Earth’s atmosphere affords. At the Martian surface, atmospheric pressure never gets above 7 millibars. That’s like Earth at an altitude of about 27,000 m (89,000 ft), which is almost the edge of space. And it’s not like the moon is a better option for us since it has no atmosphere at all.
