Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: futurism – Page 1,141

Out of all the pressures we face in our everyday lives, there’s no denying that the nature of time has the most profound effect. As our days, weeks, months, and years go by, time moves from past to present to future, and never the other way around.

But according to the physics that govern our Universe, the same things will occur regardless of what direction time is travelling in. And now physicists suggest that gravity isn’t strong enough to force every object in the Universe into a forward-moving direction anyway.

So does time as we know it actually exist, or is it all in our heads? First off, let’s run through a little refresher about the so-called arrow of time.

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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s your Uber ride arriving to take you to work.

Uber is researching how to offer customers short-haul flights on vertical-takeoff aircraft in future, the ride-hailing company’s Product Head Jeff Holden told a a Recode reporter on stage at the Nantucket Conference on Sunday.

Holden said the company is looking into drone-like aircraft, “so we can someday offer our customers as many options as possible to move around.”

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Interacting with people through brainwaves either via technology or a telepathic six sense has been long explored in the genre of science-fiction: in Hollywood blockbuster X-Men the character Professor X is telepathic and has the ability to tap into and read other people’s minds.

While the concept of telepathy or thought-controlled communication was once thought to be a futuristic concept or a concept reserved only for the realm of science-fiction, technology today is advancing fast, with the world soon to expect the commercialisation of holograms as explored in The Time Machine, autonomous cars as seen in iRobot and now brainwave communication like in X-Men.

While science-fiction explores the dark side of these technologies, the real world is exploring a multitude of applications to enhance and improve people’s everyday lives.

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Frugality, crafting inexpensive knock-offs and making do with little may be the ethos of India’s pharmaceutical industry, its manufacturing sector and the spirit with which our scientists conduct their research but an Indian-origin bio-engineer at Stanford University has just won one of America’s grandest prizes — the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant — worth Rs.4 crore for designing a $1 microscope.

Towards do-it-yourself science

Manu Prakash from Rampur, Uttar Pradesh and an engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, has made a name for fashioning ingenious devices that make the essence of science — observation and experiments — accessible to those who can’t afford expensive instruments.

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