Lifeboat Foundation

Over the last couple of seasons of television, critics and audiences have begun to pay a considerable amount of attention to the role of women and racial diversity on their favorite shows. Despite being set in the future, science fiction television has often been stubbornly stuck in the past. With its latest lineup, however, the Syfy channel has demonstrated that a proactive approach can create lasting change.

While visiting the sets of Dark Matter and Killjoys, I spent some time chatting with a fellow journalist, where we began to talk about how the channel’s new slate of shows had demonstrated some considerable changes in the science fiction world: across The Expanse, Dark Matter, Killjoys and 12 Monkeys, women and people of color were cast in lead or in prominent roles, with particular attention being paid to underprivileged groups in many instances. Recently, spoke with the showrunners of each production about their approach to envisioning their respective futures.

Scientists have mixed a molecule with light between gold particles, creating a new way to manipulate the physical and chemical properties of matter.

Light and matter are usually separate and have distinct properties. However, molecules of matter can emit particles of light called photons. Normally, emitted photons leave the molecule and the two do not mix again.

Now, scientists have trapped a single molecule in such a tiny space that when it emits a photon, the photon cannot escape. This produces an oscillation of energy between the molecule and the photon, creating a mixing of the properties of matter and light.

Spectroscopy studies of charge transfer from cadmium selenide quantum dots to molecular nickel catalysts reveal unexpectedly fast electron transfer, enabling exceptional photocatalytic hydrogen production.

A key challenge facing the US is the harvesting, production, storage, and distribution of energy to support economic prosperity with responsible environmental management. Currently, fossil fuels provide more than 80% of the energy consumed in the US (even when significant increases in the use of alternative sources of energy in recent years are accounted for).¹ For the US Department of Defense in particular, volatility in the price and availability of fossil fuels leads to significant short- and long-term financial, operational, and strategic risks.² There is, therefore, clearly a need for new alternative sources of energy.

Continue reading “Ultrafast dynamics of semiconductor nanocrystals” »

I find this article extremely laughable. Of course, humans do not know everything around science why we do research, incubate, and evolve future technologies as well as continue to do innovation and discovery.

What We Cannot Know. By Marcus du Sautoy. 4th Estate; 440 pages; £20. To be published in America by Viking Penguin in April 2017.

“EVERYONE by nature desires to know,” wrote Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago. But are there limits to what human beings can know? This is the question that Marcus du Sautoy, the British mathematician who succeeeded Richard Dawkins as the Simonyi professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, explores in “What We Cannot Know”, his fascinating book on the limits of scientific knowledge.

Over 20 years ago, I was interviewed by a group that asked me about the future of technology. I told them due to advancements such as nanotechnology that technology will definitely go beyond laptops, networks, servers, etc.; that we would see even the threads/ fibers in our clothing be digitized. I was then given a look by the interviewers that I must have walked of the planet Mars. However, I was proven correct. And, in the recent 10 years, again I informed others how and where Quantum would change our lives forever. Again, same looks and comments.

And, lately folks have been coming out with articles that they have spoken with or interviewed QC experts. And, they in many cases added their own commentary and cherry picked people comments to discredit the efforts of Google, D-Wave, UNSW, MIT, etc. which is very misleading and negatively impacts QC efforts. When I come across such articles, I often share where and why the authors have misinformed their readers as well as negatively impacted efforts and set folks up for failure who should be trying to plan for QC in their longer term future state strategy so that they can plan for budgets, people can be brought up to date in their understanding of QC because once QC goes live on a larger scale, companies and governments will not have time to catch up because once hackers (foreign government hackers, etc.) have this technology and you’re not QC enabled then you are exposed, and your customers are exposed. The QC revolution will be costly and digital transformation in general across a large company takes years to complete so best to plan and prepare early this time for QC because it is not the same as implementing a new cloud, or ERP, or a new data center, or rationalizing a silo enterprise environment.

The recent misguided view is that we’re 30 or 50 years away from a scalable quantum chip; and that is definitely incorrect. UNSW has proven scalable QC is achievable and Google has been working on making a scalable QC chip. And, lately RMIT researchers have shared with us how they have proven method to be able to trace particles in the deepest layers of entanglement which means that we now can build QC without the need of analog technology and take full advantage of quantum properties in QC which has not been the case.

Continue reading “Google’s quantum computer inches nearer after landmark performance breakthrough” »

China has signed an agreement with the United Nations to open its future space station to spacecraft, science experiments and even astronauts from countries around the world.

The agreement was laid out by Ms Wu Ping, Deputy of China’s Manned Space Agency (CMSA), in a presentation at the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) annual session in Vienna on Tuesday.

The move is aimed at boosting international cooperation in space and spreading the benefits of on-orbit research and opportunities provided by the Chinese Space Station, the core module of which will launch in 2018.

Continue reading “China opens space station to rest of the world with United Nations agreement” »

Why would you stick to an elbow, a wrist and five fingers if you could make anything? This guy got a game-inspired bionic arm.

We have been hearing predictions for decades of a takeover of the world by artificial intelligence. In 1957, Herbert A. Simon predicted that within 10 years a digital computer would be the world’s chess champion. That didn’t happen until 1996. And despite Marvin Minsky’s 1970 prediction that “in from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being,” we still consider that a feat of science fiction.

The pioneers of artificial intelligence were surely off on the timing, but they weren’t wrong; AI is coming. It is going to be in our TV sets and driving our cars; it will be our friend and personal assistant; it will take the role of our doctor. There have been more advances in AI over the past three years than there were in the previous three decades.

Even technology leaders such as Apple have been caught off guard by the rapid evolution of machine learning, the technology that powers AI. At its recent Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple opened up its AI systems so that independent developers could help it create technologies that rival what Google and Amazon have already built. Apple is way behind.

Continue reading “Long Promised Artificial Intelligence Is Looming—and It’s Going to Be Amazing” »

Congrats to David Dean fellow Oak Ridge researcher and leader in ORNL’s efforts on this impressive research.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., June XX, 2016—Soon to be deployed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is an experiment to explore new physics associated with neutrinos. The Precision Oscillation and Spectrum Experiment, or PROSPECT, is led by Yale University and includes partners from 14 academic and governmental institutions. The DOE High Energy Physics program will support the experiment at the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at ORNL. The neutrino, the subject of a 2015 Nobel Prize, remains a poorly understood fundamental particle of the Standard Model of particle physics.

These electrically neutral subatomic particles are made in stars and nuclear reactors as a byproduct of radioactive decay processes. They interact with other matter via the weak force, making their detection difficult. As a result of this elusiveness, neutrinos are the subject of many interesting and challenging detection experiments, including PROSPECT.

Continue reading “Scientists seek new physics using ORNL’s intense neutrino source” »