To mark the second season of the television series Mars, Hollywood director Ron Howard talked to the BBC about creating a realistic depiction of the first human colonies on the Red Planet.
If humankind is to expand out into the Universe, then Mars is likely to be our first stepping stone. With an atmosphere largely consisting of carbon dioxide and temperatures that vary between 20C and −125C, the Red Planet isn’t exactly ideal for human occupation.
We’d have to adapt to living almost entirely within sealed habitats — so outdoors-y types need not apply.
In the spirit of Halloween, where ghouls, ghosts, and vampires walk among us, our perception of reality will soon transform as well, forever possessed by the specter of Transhumanism!
Last year, I wrote about how people could transform themselves into one of my favorite horror creatures—a real-life werewolf—using modern science and tech. This merely scratches the surface, however, in terms of how far an individual can go. In a Transhumanist future, you’ll be empowered to not only question the extent of your humanity but equally put those questions into action.
The route one would be able to take would be in abundance. Some will choose a cybernetic route, replacing their organs and limbs for artificial machines, and even potentially adding newer organs and limbs alongside the ones they already have. Others may choose a more biological route by using gene-editing tech and synthetic biology, enhancing themselves at the genetic level and using stem cell therapies to maintain their bodily health for prolong periods of time.
And then there are those who’ll attempt to move far beyond their biological or technological state. Technologies like nanotech, mind uploading, etc. will allow individuals to downscale their physical appearance—or, perhaps, do away with it altogether; to become beams of light cascading across the digital world, living under the embodiment of code. And wherever that code resides, that’ll be your exterior shell. If you were to upload yourself into a smart home, for example, you would become that home, haunted by your digital presence.
A “portrait” that is the first piece of artificial-intelligence art sold by a major auction house shattered estimates, selling for 45 times what was expected.
“Portrait of Edmond de Belamy” was sold Thursday at Christies in New York for $432,500. It had been expected to go for $7,000 to $10,000. The buyer was not revealed.
The painting is one of 11 portraits of a fictional family created so far by the Paris-based art collective Obvious.
Backed by startup incubator Y Combinator, Acre Designs is poised to transform the house building industry with prefabricated, net zero energy homes that are affordable and sustainable.
New houses could soon deliver on a long-awaited promise and incorporate windows or roof tiles that harvest solar energy, research conducted at KAUST suggests.
Derya Baran, at the KAUST Solar Center, and her colleagues have developed a photovoltaic organic material that captures light efficiently and that potentially could be coated on building materials.
Traditional roof-mounted solar panels are made from slabs of silicon, but organic molecules can also capture energy from sunlight. These molecules could be formulated as inexpensive printable inks that are applied to regular building components such as windows. Turning sunlight into electricity is a multistep process, and the key to developing high-performance organic photovoltaic materials has been to find organic molecules that are good at every step, Baran explains.
The “slow motion” modes on modern smartphones crank up the speed of video recording so that when it’s played back at regular speed, the motion you see on the screen is slowed down. It’s a neat feature to mess around with, but slow motion capture has some very serious scientific applications as well. Capturing the microscopic world at high speeds can help researchers shed light on all kinds of interesting behaviors and phenomena that shape our reality.
Now, imaging specialists have built what is being called the fastest camera on the planet, allowing for the capture of movement at up to 10 trillion frames per second. Forget slowing down a video of a home run at your kid’s softball game, this incredible contraption can slow down light itself.
A new paper published in Light: Science & Applications explains how the camera works, and boy is it complicated. To put it in its most basic terms, the camera uses laser pulses so ultra-fast that they are measured in quadrillionths of a second and combines those frames with images captured from a second camera moving at the same speed, allowing for high-quality images generated 10 trillion times every second.
Backed by startup incubator Y Combinator, Acre Designs is poised to transform the house building industry with prefabricated, net zero energy homes that are affordable and sustainable.
Aerial footage shows rows of damaged and destroyed homes lining the beach in Mexico Beach, Florida, after Hurricane Michael slammed into the town on October 10, 2018. It was the strongest hurricane on record to hit the Florida Panhandle.
As a Master’s student at University of Houston’s Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA), I was exposed to many interesting aspects of space exploration. One that I’m particularly intrigued about is the daily lives of astronauts, and their most mundane activities — how they sleep, eat, shower, exercise, work, etc. When the time came to choose what to focus on for my design thesis, I knew it would have something to do with habitation, community, and daily lives in space.
My undergrad was in architecture and urban studies with an equal emphasis on both. This gave me an understanding of how dwellings changed throughout the centuries in relation to the evolution of cities. I think in most cases, our definition of “home” is very intertwined with our definition of “city”. And I believe as humans set sail for the stars, this intertwining will stay strong. What defines a home and a city varies greatly from culture to culture, and changes with time. However, in a broad sense, a home is for your personal and intimate activities, alone or with close family members, and a city is a collection of private and public areas where the community can interact and coexist.
