Lifeboat Foundation

Watch enough movies in which aliens contact humans, and you’ll notice a trend: the people deciding how Earth should respond to the extraterrestrial communications are usually politicians or scientists.

But the UK Seti Research Network (UKSRN) thinks the average person should have a say in how Earth responds if aliens ever decide to say “hello” to humanity.

Hollywood once said that a film based on the graphic novel Watchmen could never be made—in large part because the technology to create Dr. Manhattan, the blue, glowing, matter-manipulating superhero, simply didn’t exist. The hotly anticipated film, directed by Zach Snyder, hit theaters yesterday, glowing blue man and all. Here’s how filmmakers used Frankenstein and DIY sensibilities to create a photo-real, all CG superhero.

Recently, we have started to hear the concept of artificial intelligence as often as we have never met. This technology, which is no longer a fantastic science fiction element but is included in our lives, is ranked first among the technology trends that will shape the years to come.

Artificial intelligence, which can be explained by the fact that computers can make use of human thinking, reasoning, perception, comprehension, judgment and inference abilities, is the understanding of information about the environment of a machine in practice.

In this way, an artificial intelligence system optimizes the acquired data and becomes usable in daily life. We can say that many studies have been done about artificial intelligence from past to present, some of them being shelved and some of them pioneering today’s technology.

DeepNude already put on its clothes.

WASHINGTON, United States—The creators of an application allowing users to virtually “undress” women using artificial intelligence have shut it down after a social media uproar over its potential for abuse.

The creators of “DeepNude” said the software was launched several months ago for “entertainment” and that they “greatly underestimated” demand for the app.

Continue reading “‘DeepNude’ app that ‘undresses’ women shut down after furor” »

It might be a fun game for film fans, but how will “deep fake” technology actually change the future of filmmaking?

In a viral sensation that has been bouncing around the internet, some very popular and very interesting videos have used this budding “Deep Fake” technology to superimpose different people and actors into some of our favorite film scenes.

Found by the Ultimate Action Movie Club, here’s an example of the tech at work replacing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous intro scene in Terminator 2 with Sylvester Stallone.

Magnetic actuation of keyboards can have almost an infinite number of keystrokes.

The ultimate entry-level gaming keyboard featuring individually programmable backlit keys Powered by Razer Chroma for full personalization and performance.

Photography measures how much light of different color hits the photographic film. However, light is also a wave, and is therefore characterized by the phase. Phase specifies the position of a point within the wave cycle and correlates to depth of information, meaning that recording the phase of light scattered by an object can retrieve its full 3D shape, which cannot be obtained with a simple photograph. This is the basis of optical holography, popularized by fancy holograms in sci-fi movies like Star Wars.

But the problem is that the spatial resolution of the photo/hologram is limited by the wavelength of light, around or just-below 1 μm (0.001 mm). That’s fine for macroscopic objects, but it starts to fail when entering the realm of nanotechnology.

Continue reading “New holographic technique opens the way for quantum computation” »

For a medievalist like myself, it doesn’t get much better than Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches. Both the internationally bestselling trilogy and the newly adapted TV show have many of the conventions of a kickass fantasy story. There’s a 1,500-year-old vampire, a powerful witch who can literally make it rain, and their prophesied love story. There’s the imminent threat of the end of all creatures—demons, vampires, and witches—and the ensuing battle between good and evil. And, at the heart of A Discovery of Witches is an enchanted alchemical manuscript hidden deep within Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, Ashmole 782, and the witch who was able to call it up for the first time in 500 years. That witch is a medievalist, badass feminist, and history of science professor, Dr. Diana Bishop.

The British television network SkyOne’s adaptation of the books will begin streaming in the U.S. today on Sundance Now and AMC’s Shudder. To give layfolk a sense of how dope an obscure, 15th-century alchemical manuscript can be, we’ve prepared a medievalist guide to some of its features—from the philosopher’s stone to the alchemical child and more.

Where many fantasy novels are complete works of fiction, perhaps inspired by the medieval period, but not in any way historically accurate, A Discovery of Witches combines the fantastical with the academic. Deborah Harkness, the author of the series, is a history of science professor at the University of Southern California. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the history of science and magic in Europe from 1500 to 1700—the same subject her protagonist, Dr. Diana Bishop (played by Teresa Palmer in the adaptation), is researching in Oxford’s Bodleian at the outset of A Discovery of Witches.

By Timothy Revell

They say 10,000 hours makes an expert, but for video-game playing AIs much more is needed. After playing thousands of years’ worth of the video game Dota 2, artificial intelligence is now able to beat the world’s top amateurs.

Dota 2 is a multiplayer battle arena game. Two teams of five take on each other across a large map, defending their own base whilst trying to attack their opponents. It is the game that has the largest prize money of any e-sport, so there are many professional players able to play at a very high level.