From Humanity Plus:
Anders Sandberg of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute delivered our first 2015 Reg Winter Lecture, taking us on a dizzying tour of transhumanism and human enhancement, which covered why chimpanzees are confused, why the Euro would be in better shape if the politicians put out bowls of stimulants at the next emergency summit, and how some of his friends are experimenting with do it yourself brain hacking.
Entanglement between distant quantum objects is an important ingredient for future information technologies. Researchers at the ETH have now developed a method with which such states can be created a thousand times faster than before.
A U.S. science satellite slated to launch to Mars in March has been grounded due to a leak in a key research instrument, NASA said on Tuesday, creating uncertainty about the future of a widely anticipated effort to study the interior of the planet.
The spacecraft, known as InSight, was designed to help scientists learn more about the formation of rocky planets, including Earth.
The cancellation raises questions about the future of the research effort, as it will be another two years before Earth and Mars are favourably aligned for a launch. NASA has not said if it will have funding for the program, which was capped at $425 million US.
For decades now we’ve been teased with hoverboard concepts, either from science fiction or highly limited real-life versions, but now aerospace company Arca is taking orders for what it claims is the real deal. The ArcaBoard appears to be the closest thing to the technology from Back to the Future: Part II that we’ve seen so far.
Nextbigfuture wrote about Nautilus Minerals several times since 2010. Nautilus Minerals is the first company to commercially explore the seafloor for massive sulphide systems, a potential source of high grade copper, gold, zinc and silver. Nautilus is developing a production system using existing technologies adapted from the offshore oil and gas industry, dredging and mining industries to enable the extraction of these high grade Seafloor Massive Sulphide (SMS) systems on a commercial scale.
Nautilus’ copper-gold project, Solwara 1, is under development in the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea.
Here is an update based on a presentation on August 2015.