Breakthrough measurements of Jupiter’s hidden interior could revolutionize our understanding of giant planets.
- By Lee Billings on March 7, 2018
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The idea of placing humans in stasis is one that has been explored in exhaustive detail through science fiction. Simply put it is the ability to quite literally press pause on our bodies and then wake up at an undefined time in the future.
While many (mostly millionaires) have tried and failed to perfect the technology it’s something that the US Military is now taking very seriously.
Its top secret research division known as DARPA has confirmed that it is now launching a Biostasis program where it will try to find a way of slowing the human body to an almost complete standstill.
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The move is being heralded as a ‘significant milestone’ in the broader effort to build a world-beating quantum computer.
Building a quantum computer has been called the ‘space race of the 21st century’ – a difficult and ambitious challenge, with the potential to deliver revolutionary tools.
The team of researchers, which is led by Australian of the year Michelle Simmons, is the only group in the world that can see the exact position of their qubits, according to a release from the University of New South Wales.
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Is humanity doomed? Are we one of the last generations of homo sapiens — soon to be supplanted by engineered cyberbeings, with a distant semblance to their creators (us)?
On Jan. 24, historian and international best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari presented his view of the future at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Harari wrote Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and also Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
In a riveting 25-minute presentation, Harari painted a very gloomy — but possible — view of the future, based on his thesis that we are now in our third grand revolution: the control of data, following the control of land (Agrarian Revolution) and the control of machinery (Industrial Revolution). The point of no return, Harari contends, will happen when technology will be able to extract high-precision biometric data from people and report back to a centralized decision-making control system, owned by governments or by corporations — or both. By biometric, he means your pulse, pressure, sweat composition, dilation of your pupils, etc.: kind of a lie-detector on steroids.
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It’s hard for us to accept the idea that the brain stops growing, despite the large body of scientific evidence supporting this idea. The often-repeated statistic, based on years of research, is that the brain stops developing around the age of 25. More recently, an international team of neuroscientists argued in Nature that the human brain stops producing new neurons at age 13. The response from the scientific community to this most recent study has been significant, to say the least.
In their paper, published Wednesday, the researchers write that their findings “do not support the notion that robust adult neurogenesis continues in the human hippocampus.” In other words, none of the hippocampus tissue samples from adult brains they examined showed evidence of new neurons. Infants’ brains grow lots of new neurons, they report, and older children’s brains slow down a little. Meanwhile, none of their adult samples showed evidence of new neurons. And this is what other scientists don’t agree with.
“They may just not have looked carefully enough,” Jonas Frisén, Ph.D., of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, told STAT News on Wednesday. Frisén co-authored a paper in 2015 that contradicts the findings of the Nature paper. And Frisén isn’t the only one who thinks these researchers’ conclusion may be premature.
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