Walk around a virtual apartment or an art gallery with the Gear VR.
Demo by Interactive Lab.
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Walking with Gear VR
Posted in habitats, virtual reality
Category: habitats – Page 132
The article states that European royal houses are all closely related. Well in humanities history it’s thought that over 80% of all marriages were between second cousins or closer. While until the industrial revolution the nobility would have been the only demographic who could travel further than as far as you can walk from your home and back in a day. So until the industrial revolution the nobility were probably the most genetically diverse demographic.
‘Virgin births’ happen in nature more than we thought, says Frank Swain, so what’s stopping human beings from doing the same?
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Gearing up to offer one-gigabit-per-second Internet service in five U.S. cities this year. The first five cities to see the blazing speed are Nashville, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, and Miami.
Comcast, the Internet provider everyone loves to hate, is gearing up to offer one-gigabit-per-second Internet service in five U.S. cities this year. The first five cities to see the blazing speed are Nashville, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, and Miami. In line with Google Fiber, Verizon FiOs, and municipal offerings at one-gigabit speeds to the home, the new Comcast service will dramatically increase download speeds. Most subscribers currently receive download speeds of 25–100 megabits per second. For the customers with a 100Mbps connection, the increase boosts their speed 10 times over. For customers with 25 megabit connections, it’s 40 times faster. At that rate, one could download a full-length HD movie in around seven seconds. Not bad.
What sets Comcast’s gigabit service apart is the fact that the Internet provider is not using fiber optic lines to achieve the mega-fast speeds. Instead the company is using the existing coaxial cable lines that are already piped into people’s homes, giving Comcast a potentially huge advantage over a project like Google Fiber—which requires digging costly trenches through cities to lay fiber cables.
Hardware Boost
Comcast’s gigabit-over-coax Internet requires a new kind of cable modem. That device is charmingly classified under a new DOCSIS 3.1 standard, an acronym for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. And while it looks like any other black box, this new standard is capable of pumping data at 10 Gbps over existing coaxial cable. Still, Comcast is ushering in its new service with only a tenth of that power—currently offering one gigabit per second downstream speeds with 35Mbps upstream.
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Russia’s ongoing nuclear fallout challenges.
MUSLYUMOVO, Russia (AP) — At first glance, Gilani Dambaev looks like a healthy 60-year-old man and the river flowing past his rural family home appears pristine. But Dambaev is riddled with diseases that his doctors link to a lifetime’s exposure to excessive radiation, and the Geiger counter beeps loudly as a reporter strolls down to the muddy riverbank.
Some 50 kilometers (30 miles) upstream from Dambaev’s crumbling village lies Mayak, a nuclear complex that has been responsible for at least two of the country’s biggest radioactive accidents. Worse, environmentalists say, is the facility’s decades-old record of using the Arctic-bound waters of the Techa River to dump waste from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, hundreds of tons of which is imported annually from neighboring nations.
The results can be felt in every aching household along the Techa, where doctors record rates of chromosomal abnormalities, birth defects and cancers vastly higher than the Russian average — and citizens such as Dambaev are left to rue the government’s failure over four decades to admit the danger.
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When Thomas Edison wanted a filament for his light bulb, he scoured the globe collecting thousands of candidates before settling on bamboo. (It was years before people were able to make tungsten work properly.) That’s our traditional way of getting materials. We picked up stones for axes, chopped wood for housing and carved tools out of bone.
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Getting beyond the commercial space hype; will the new captains of the space industry really bring about interplanetary commerce? Here’s my take with views from two execs at The Space Frontier Foundation.
The entrepreneurial captains of the new commercial space frontier are sometimes brash, sometimes brazen, and often larger than life. But are they really going to get us beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO)?
For those of us who grew up in an era when NASA budgets were a tenet of Cold War geopolitics, it’s understandable that we approach this new phase of private space funding with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. But are we Apollo-ites simply being too skeptical?
After all, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has proven that it can deliver goods to the International Space Station (ISS) and is in the midst of testing reusable rockets. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has successfully tested its own reusable rocket. And Robert Bigelow’s Bigelow Aerospace has just made good on its inflatable habitat now attached to the ISS.
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The pace of progress in computers has been accelerating, and today, computers and networks are in nearly every industry and home across the world.
Many observers first noticed this acceleration with the advent of modern microchips, but as Ray Kurzweil wrote in his book The Singularity Is Near, we can find a number of eerily similar trends in other areas too.
According to Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns, technological progress is moving ahead at an exponential rate, especially in information technologies.
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Many folks talk about the whole AI revolution; and indeed it does change some things and opens the door the for opportunities. However, has it truly changed the under lying technology? No; AI is still reliant on existing digital technology. The real tech revolution will come in the form of Quantum tech over the next 7 to 8 years; and it will change everything in our lives and industry. Quantum will change everything that we know about technology including devices, medical technologies, communications including the net, security, e-currency, etc. https://lnkd.in/bJnS37r
If you were born in the 1970s or 1980s, you probably remember the Jetsons family. The Jetsons are to the future what the Flintstones are to the past. That futuristic lifestyle vision goes back several decades; self-driving vehicles, robotic home helpers and so on. What looked like a cartoon series built on prolific imagination seems somewhat more real today. Newly developed technologies are becoming available and connecting everything to the internet. This is the-internet-of-things era.
These ‘things’ are not new. They are just standard devices – lights, garage doors, kitchen appliances, household appliances – equipped with a little intelligence. Intelligence that is possible thanks to three emerging technologies: sensors to collect information from surroundings; the ability to control something; and communication capability allowing devices to talk to each other.
Think of cars that park on their own or that brake automatically to avoid a collision; smart assistants that will notify you to leave early for a calendar appointment in case heavy traffic en route; or a robotic vacuum cleaner that starts cleaning once everyone has left the house. This is the Jetsons’ kind of future.
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A major concerned for Lockheed is the long passage of time between the crew’s training and the moment a serious issue does come up during a mission—which could be a few years later. “They may not remember the training. Having the right kind of on-board documentation and flight computer to be able to provide the astronauts the information they need when they need it, is important,” Pratt said. “Not just having the alarm go off but having the alarm go off and the PDF file of the manual come up at the same time. That’s really useful in helping the crew understand how to operate their own vehicle.”
Even though Lockheed Martin’s early habitat concept will service exploration missions near the Moon, the company is always thinking about the manned mission to Mars, which will require a far more advanced successor to their current designs. Engineers will need to go through a few iterations of the concept after the health effects of long-duration human spaceflight are known and as new technology is developed. This is the basis that NASA created NextSTEP on.
The federal space agency is looking for a modular habitat that can grow, evolve and be added to. “New modules are built upon the lessons of the previous modules,” Hopkins said.
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