2018: Meteor Showers
Posted in futurism
Researchers at the USC Roski Eye Institute, in collaboration with other institutions in California, have shown that a new stem cell-based retinal implant could help people with dry age-related macular degeneration.
The researchers have published the results of their phase 1/2a study in the journal Science Translational Medicine [1].
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Pod transportation company, Skytran, has received $32.5 million in funding. Skytran is a NASA Space Act company that is developing a pod-based personal rapid transportation system.
Some of the funding is from former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt.
They will have a network of computer-controlled, 2-person jet-like vehicles using SkyTran magnetic levitation technology.
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1) bringing ET3 to maturity, including full-scale commercial deployment (2−5 years); 2) expanding ET3 networks around the globe at national levels (30 years); 3) connecting national ET3 networks into the international network (15 years) and creating one city called Earth.
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Dreams are so strange and carry so much significance to us that we often feel the need to tell people about our nocturnal adventures, sometimes at tedious length.
But if you understand what goes on inside the brain as dreams take their course, they start to make a lot more sense. And dreams are much more important than you might think.
Here are some common questions answered about the nighttime hallucinations we call dreams.
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MIT spin off company Ayar Labs is combining light and electronics to create faster, more efficient computers. The new optoelectronic chips are designed to speed up data transmission to and from conventional processor chips in a way that will also reduce energy consumption in chip-to-chip communications by 95 percent and could cut overall energy usages by large data firms by up to 50 percent.
Since the invention of the silicon chip 60 years ago, the power of computers has doubled every two years, but the speed at which computer systems work hasn’t shown quite such dramatic progress. The problem is one of data transmission and the bottlenecks that any technology runs into, slowing down the whole to the speed of its most sluggish part.
Think of a computer as like an air passenger system. If you concentrate on the aircraft, airport runway architecture, supply logistics, and air traffic control, it’s easy to speed up travel between, for example, New York and Washington DC to under one hour. That sounds fantastic, but if it takes you two hours to get through security at one hand and another two hours to collect your baggage at the other, then it’s faster to drive.
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Detecting Methane from Miles Away
Posted in electronics
A new laser-based field instrument developed by a collaborative team of researchers can quantify methane leaks as tiny as 1/4 of a human exhalation from nearly…a mile away. The system, constructed around a dual-frequency comb spectrometer, provides efficient, accurate data collection at a fraction of the cost of previous technologies. The research was partially funded by DARPA’s Spectral Combs from UV to THz (SCOUT) program.
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Our mindless future
Posted in futurism
We’re never short of reasons to look up at the night sky — whether it’s the rare second blue moon we were just treated to, or a meteor shower.
But in case you need a little motivation to get out of the house and into the fresh air this month, we have a beautiful one for you: checking out the ever-changing celestial geometry above our heads.
This April, the gas giant Jupiter forms a rare and fleeting triangle with two bright stars in our night sky, and it’ll be visible with the naked eye if you know where to look.
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