Scientists has opened a door to faster, cheaper computer chips with the help of ‘DNA origami.’ “We would like to use DNA’s very small size, base-pairing capabilities and ability to self-assemble, and direct it to make nanoscale structures that could be used for electronics,” Adam T. Woolley said.
While many tech moguls dream of changing the way we live with new smart devices or social media apps, one Russian internet millionaire is trying to change nothing less than our destiny, by making it possible to upload a human brain to a computer, reports Tristan Quinn.
“Within the next 30 years,” promises Dmitry Itskov, “I am going to make sure that we can all live forever.”
It sounds preposterous, but there is no doubting the seriousness of this softly spoken 35-year-old, who says he left the business world to devote himself to something more useful to humanity. “I’m 100% confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn’t have started it,” he says.
A master player of the game Go has won his first match against a Google computer program, after losing three in a row in a best-of-five competition.
Lee Se-dol, one of the world’s top players, said his win against AlphaGo was “invaluable”.
The Chinese board game is considered to be a much more complex challenge for a computer than chess, and AlphaGo’s wins were seen as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence.
Posted in computing, entertainment, virtual reality
Special thanks to archive.org for hosting these episodes. Downloads of all these episodes and more can be found at: http://archive.org/details/computerchronicles
It can be easy to take things like modern email for granted, and nothing highlights that more than this clip from the “Database,” an old tech show that aired in the 80s.
In the segment above, you can see what sending and receiving an email was like in 1984, back when you were greeted with prompts like “phone computer” and literally had to dial in using a rotary phone. These were the days when webpages were numbered and email was such a luxury that people would excitedly sign off on messages with phrases like “electronically yours.”
The network shown here is Micronet, an internet portal that Gizmodo points out was a lot like an early version of AOL. Micronet featured online games, a magazine, rudimentary message boards, news, downloadable software, and yes, even email.
On January 20th, 2016, researchers Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown of Caltech announced that they had found evidence that hinted at the existence of a massive planet at the edge of the Solar System. Based on mathematical modeling and computer simulations, they predicted that this planet would be a super-Earth, two to four times Earth’s size and 10 times as massive. They also estimated that, given its distance and highly elliptical orbit, it would take 10,000 – 20,000 years to orbit the Sun.
Since that time, many researchers have responded with their own studies about the possible existence of this mysterious “Planet 9”. One of the latest comes from the University of Arizona, where a research team from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory have indicated that the extreme eccentricity of distant Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) might indicate that they crossed paths with a massive planet in the past.
