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Category: education – Page 91

They come in many colors: golden, solid onyx, or striped dandelion and cinnamon. Their eyes can be beady black, slate gray, or even bluish-green. Their bodies may be as small as lentils or big as wine grapes. But the most amazing thing about stingless bees are the honeys they produce, which are increasingly being sought after for food and medicine.

In the Peruvian Amazon, people are just beginning to raise a few of the area’s 175 different species of stingless bees, which promise to help beekeepers and their communities. Historically, such honey has typically been harvested from the wild, which destroys the hives.

But in the last few years, scientists including Cesar Delgado, with the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (IIAP), are teaching people to raise and keep the insects in sustainable ways.

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How can you prove that we may not be from here? The complexity of our DNA doubles every 600M years (Moores Law) so if you take the timeline back to where it intersects when life must have begun, it would be about 9.5B years ago, but the Earth has only been around for about 4.5B years. What gives?

This video is a short 1 min 12 second clip from a great documentary by Caroline Cory, “ET Contact: They Are Here”, available on iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/movie/e-t-contact-they-are-here/id1286966239

Trailer: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/movie/e-t-contact-they-are-here/id1286966239

Continue reading “Our DNA is Older Than Earth Itself — Where Did It Come From? — Oct 2, 2018” | >

Local consciousness, or our phenomenal mind, is emergent, whereas non-local consciousness, or universal mind, is immanent. Material worlds come and go, but fundamental consciousness is ever-present, according to the Cybernetic Theory of Mind. From a new science of consciousness to simulation metaphysics, from evolutionary cybernetics to computational physics, from physics of time and information to quantum cosmology, this novel explanatory theory for a deeper understanding of reality is combined into one elegant theory of everything.

#CyberneticTheoryofMind #Consciousness #Evolution #Mind #Documentary

Based on The Cybernetic Theory of Mind eBook series (2022) by Alex M. Vikoulov as well as his magnum opus The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution (2020), comes a recently-released documentary Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind.

Continue reading “Towards The Cybernetic Theory of Mind” | >

We — educators, scientists, psychologists — started an educational non-profit Earthlings Hub, to help out the kids, affected by the war. We talk to them about STEM, but also about the complexity of the world, philosophy of science, future, and existential risks. We also offer psychological help to their parents. Our advisory board includes NASA astronaut Greg Chamitoff, lead AI researcher Joscha Bach, Professor of Learning and Cognition, author of Netlogo language Uri Wilensky, lead early math educator Maria Droujkova and others. Please share, participate, donate! https://www.earthlingshub.org/

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Other than Earth, no planet in our solar system has been so thoroughly or long examined as Mars. For decades, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has continuously explored the Red Planet with an array of orbiters, landers, and rovers.

What laid the groundwork for this unparallel record of exploration? This 90-minute documentary describes the challenges of JPL’s first attempts to send spacecraft to the Red Planet.

For much of human history, Mars was no more than a tiny reddish dot in the sky. But in 1965, the first spacecraft ever to visit Mars, JPL’s Mariner 4, began to change our understanding of the planet with its grainy black and white images. The data from Mariner 4, and from missions that followed, were full of confusing data for scientists to understand.

The Changing Face of Mars reveals, through archival footage and interviews with key scientists and engineers, JPL’s first roles in exploring the Red Planet, from Mariner 4, through the 1976 arrival of the Viking orbiters and landers.

Continue reading “JPL and the Space Age: The Changing Face of Mars” | >

If you’re anything like us you’ve been keeping a close eye on the development of RISC-V: an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) that’s been threatening to change the computing status quo for what seems like forever. From its humble beginnings as a teaching tool in Berkeley’s Parallel Computing Lab in 2010, it’s popped up in various development boards and gadgets from time to time. It even showed up in the 2019 Hackaday Supercon badge, albeit in FPGA form. But getting your hands on an actual RISC-V computer has been another story entirely. Until now, that is.

Clockwork has recently announced the availability of the DevTerm R-01, a variant of their existing portable computer that’s powered by a RISC-V module rather than the ARM chips featured in the earlier A04 and A06 models. Interestingly the newest member of the family is actually the cheapest at $239 USD, though it’s worth mentioning that not only does this new model only include 1 GB of RAM, but the product page makes it clear that the RISC-V version is intended for experienced penguin wranglers who aren’t afraid of the occasional bug.

Beyond the RISC-V CPU and slimmed down main memory, this is the same DevTerm that our very own [Donald Papp] reviewed earlier this month. Thanks to the modular nature of the portable machine, this sort of component swapping is a breeze, though frankly we’re impressed that the Clockwork team is willing to go out on such a limb this early in the product’s life. In our first look at the device we figured at best they would release an updated CPU board to accommodate the Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module, but supporting a whole new architecture is a considerably bolder move. One wonders that other plans they may have for the retro-futuristic machine. Perhaps a low-power x86 chip isn’t out of the question?

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Advancing Space Tech For Future Missions — Dr. Douglas Willard, Ph.D., Game Changing Development Program, Space Technology Mission Directorate, NASA

Dr. Douglas E. Willard, PhD, (https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/game_changing_de…g-willard/) is Program Element Manager, Game Changing Development Program, Space Technology Mission Directorate, at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The Game Changing Development (GCD) Program advances space technologies that may lead to entirely new approaches for the Agency’s future space missions and provide solutions to significant national needs. GCD collaborates with research and development teams to progress the most promising ideas through analytical modeling, ground-based testing and spaceflight demonstration of payloads and experiments and their efforts are focused on the mid Technology Readiness Level (TRL) range 0, generally taking technologies from initial lab concepts to a complete engineering development prototype. The Program employs a balanced approach of guided technology development efforts and competitively selected efforts from across academia, industry, NASA, and other government agencies.

Continue reading “Dr. Douglas Willard — Game Changing Development Program, Space Technology Mission Directorate, NASA” | >