Lifeboat Foundation

Each year, an estimated 70 million sharks are killed for their fins. The brutal shark finning process involves cutting off a live shark’s fins and returning the debilitated animal back into the water to die a slow death. Highly valued in traditional Asian medicine and cuisine, the fins can sell for as much as $300 a pound on the black market.

What if an artificial shark fin could remove sharks from the equation completely?

New Wave Foods, a San Francisco-based sustainable seafood company, is developing a bioengineered fin product that could pull the rug out from underneath the shark trade.

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Yes, conceivably. And if/when we achieve the levels of technology necessary for simulation, the universe will become our playground. Eagleman’s latest book is “The Brain: The Story of You” (http://goo.gl/2IgDRb).

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Continue reading “David Eagleman: Can a Computer Simulate Consciousness?” »

ABSTRACT

According to Einstein, General Relativity contains the essence of Mach’s ideas. Mach’s principle can be summarized by stating that the inertia of a body is determined by the rest of the mass-energy content of the universe. Inertia here arises from mass-energy there. The latter, was a statement made by John Wheeler in his 1995 book, Gravitation and Inertia, coauthored by Ciufolini. Einstein believed that to be fully Machian, gravity would need a radiative component, an action-at-a-dis- tance character, so that gravitational influences on a body from far away could be felt immediately. In 1960’s, Hoyle and Narlikar (HN) developed such a theory which was a gravitational version of the Absorber theory derived by Wheeler-Feynman for classical electrodynamics and later expanded upon by Davies and Narlikar for quantum electrodynamics. The HN-field equation has the same type of mass fluctuation terms as in the Woodward Mach effect thruster theory. The force equation, used to predict the thrust in our device, can be derived from the mass fluctuation. We outline a new method for deriving the force equation. We present new experimental tests of the thruster to show that the thrust seen in our device is not due to either heating or Dean Drive effects. Successful replications have been performed by groups in Austria and Canada, but their work is still pending in the peer review literature.

Keywords:

Mach Effect Drive, Transient Mass Fluctuations, Mach’s Principle, Action at a Distance, Advanced Waves, Event Horizon.

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ABSTRACT

The Mach Effect Thruster (MET) is a propellant―less space drive which uses Mach’s principle to produce thrust in an accelerating material which is undergoing mass―energy fluctuations, [1] –[3]. Mach’s principle is a statement that the inertia of a body is the result of the gravitational interaction of the body with the rest of the mass-energy in the universe. The MET device uses electric power of 100 — 200 Watts to operate. The thrust produced by these devices, at the present time, are small on the order of a few micro-Newtons. We give a physical description of the MET device and apparatus for measuring thrusts. Next we explain the basic theory behind the device which involves gravitation and advanced waves to incorporate instantaneous action at a distance. The advanced wave concept is a means to conserve momentum of the system with the universe. There is no momentun violation in this theory. We briefly review absorber theory by summarizing Dirac, Wheeler-Feynman and Hoyle-Narlikar (HN). We show how Woodward’s mass fluctuation formula can be derived from first principles using the HN-theory which is a fully Machian version of Einstein’s relativity. HN-theory reduces to Einstein’s field equations in the limit of smooth fluid distribution of matter and a simple coordinate transformation.

Keywords:

Continue reading “Theory of a Mach Effect Thruster I” »

Short Bytes: Artificial Intelligence holds a special place in the future of the humanity. Many tech giants, including Facebook, have long been working on improving the AI to make lives better. Facebook has decided to reveal its milestones in Artificial Intelligence Research in the form of a progress report.

It doesn’t matter if you are scared of AI like Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking or if you have an opinion same as that of Google’s chief of Artificial Intelligence that computers are remarkably dumb. Companies are still going through the byzantine process of training the machines and creating human brain algorithms. Meanwhile, Facebook has just announced its progress report.

Facebook’s AI research team (FAIR) will present at NIPS, an Artificial Intelligence conference, its report card and reveal the team’s achievements regarding its state-of-the-art systems. Facebook has been trying to improve the image recognition and has created a system that speeds up the process by 30% using 10 times less training data from previous benchmarks.

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In a classic eureka moment, a team of physicists led by The City College of New York and including Herriot-Watt University and Corning Incorporated is showing how beams from ordinary laser pointers mimic quantum entanglement with the potential of doubling the data speed of laser communication.

Quantum entanglement is a phrase more likely to be heard on popular sci-fi television shows such as “Fringe” and “Doctor Who.” Described by Albert Einstein as “spooky action at a distance,” when two quantum things are entangled, if one is ‘touched’ the other will ‘feel it,’ even if separated by a great distance.

“At the heart of quantum entanglement is ‘nonseparability’ — two entangled things are described by an unfactorizable equation,” said City College PhD student Giovanni Milione. “Interestingly, a conventional laser beam (a laser pointer)’s shape and polarization can also be nonseparable.”

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This means that BPG not only is way smaller than JPEG but also delivers a better quality. And that’s not all! It also supports animations!

And when I say animation, I actually say GIF-like movies with MP4 quality that are actually smaller than the mp4 it was built from.

Let’s see an example (I have not included a GIF example because the same quality size and frame rate means that the GIF will have exactly 33.8MB)

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Can the laws of physics change over time and space?

As far as physicists can tell, the cosmos has been playing by the same rulebook since the time of the Big Bang. But could the laws have been different in the past, and could they change in the future? Might different laws prevail in some distant corner of the cosmos?

“It’s not a completely crazy possibility,” says Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech, who points out that, when we ask if the laws of physics are mutable, we’re actually asking two separate questions: First, do the equations of quantum mechanics and gravity change over time and space? And second, do the numerical constants that populate those equations vary?

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Self-driving cars are already cruising the streets. But before they can become widespread, carmakers must solve an impossible ethical dilemma of algorithmic morality.

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