This 50-year-old NASA invention could kill cancer (via The Verge)
Read more
The United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced that it plans to spend $2 billion on developing new artificial intelligence (AI) technologies as part of a campaign called “AI Next”. The money will be used to fund new and existing research programs at DARPA.
The US Department of Defense’s innovation agency is focusing on pushing beyond second-wave machine learning techniques towards contextual reasoning capabilities.
Read more
Tau Zero Foundation
Posted in space travel
In a several-hour live interview on September 6–7, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk managed to slip in a few words about Neuralink, a side-project company formed by Musk for the purpose of bridging the gap between potential superhuman AI and the human brain itself.
Although the eccentric CEO/CTO wouldn’t say much more, he did tease a potentially revolutionary update from the fully-stealthed startup “in a few months”.
Read more
The US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has created a brain-computer interface that enables a person to control everything from a swarm of drones to an advanced fighter jet using nothing but their thoughts and a special brain chip.
Life imitates art, in defense tech no less than in society. In the 1982 techno-thriller film “Firefox,” Clint Eastwood steals a fictional Soviet fighter jet called the “MiG-31 Firefox,” a Mach 6-capable stealth fighter he piloted with his thoughts. But now in 2018, the US military has gone even further: you can control a whole group of drones or fighter jets with your thoughts.
Read more
Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887−1961), one of the giants of contemporary science, considered entanglement the most interesting property in quantum mechanics. In his view, it was this phenomenon that truly distinguished the quantum world from the classical world. Entanglement occurs when groups of particles or waves are created or interact in such a way that the quantum state of each particle or wave cannot be described independently of the others, however far apart they are. Experiments performed at the University of São Paulo’s Physics Institute (IF-USP) in Brazil have succeeded in entangling six light waves generated by a simple laser light source known as an optical parametric oscillator.
Articles about these experiments have been published in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review A. The experiments are highlighted in a special news feature posted online.
“Our platform is capable of generating a massive entanglement of many optical modes with different but well-defined frequencies, as if connecting the nodes of a large network. The quantum states thus produced can be controlled by a single parameter: the power of the external laser that pumps the system,” said Marcelo Martinelli, one of the coordinators of the experiments. Martinelli is a professor at IF-USP and the principal investigator for the project.
Read more
Japan is preparing to carry out the first test in space for a so-called “space elevator” that could one day transport people and cargo to orbiting stations way above Earth. Several organizations are looking into the feasibility of the project, with one group aiming for an ambitious-sounding 2050 launch.
Read more
