Elon Musk has agreed to build what is being hailed the “world’s largest virtual power plant”, by rolling out solar panels and Tesla batteries to 50,000 homes in South Australia. The scheme, which will be completed over the next four years, will see any excess energy stored in each battery fed back into the grid to provide power to the rest of the state whenever required. The South Australian government claims participating households will generate a total of 250MW of electricity – about half as much energy produced by a typical coal-fired power station. Read more — Elon Musk about to launch…
This image shows AAV therapy affecting pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus. Credit: Blake Albright, Asokan Lab Gene therapies promise to revolutionize the treatment of many diseases, including neurological diseases such as ALS. But the small viruses that deliver therapeutic genes can have adverse side effects at high doses. UNC School of Medicine researchers have now found a structure on these viruses that makes them better at crossing from the bloodstream into the brain – a key factor for administering gene therapies at lower doses for treating brain and spinal disorders. This structural…
In quantum communication, the participating parties can detect eavesdropping by resorting to the fundamental principle of quantum mechanics — a measurement affects the measured quantity. Thus, an eavesdropper can be detected by identifying traces his measurements of the communication channel leave behind. The major drawback of quantum communication is the slow speed of data transfer, limited by the speed at which the parties can perform quantum measurements. Researchers at Bar-Ilan University have devised a method that overcomes this, and enables an increase in the rate of data transfer by…
Using a laser beam one quadrillion times brighter than the Sun, physicists have stopped electrons travelling at near-light speeds for the first time. The experiment produced a quantum mechanical phenomenon that was previously only thought to occur around black holes and quasars.
Maybe it’s because Robert Lepage is touring The Far Side of the Moon to the Adelaide Festival. Or that a new Star Trek is on TV. Or maybe it’s because I feel like the only person alive who really – really – liked Luc Besson’s Valerian, but space, fantasies of the final frontier, and the real voyages that human beings may yet dare to make into it are very much on my mind. This week saw a number of news items concerning our tentative outreach to the stars that, for all their frustrating revelations, might yet prick the aspiration for space missions back into the popular policy consciousness…
Nuclear physicists are using the nation’s most powerful supercomputer, Titan, at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to study particle interactions important to energy production in the sun and stars and to propel the search for new physics discoveries.
A prototype autonomous ship has officially been transferred to the U.S. Navy from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) after a two-year testing and evaluation program.
Moreover, the launch accomplished SpaceX’s overarching goal of making access to space travel affordable, with a price tag of $90 million per launch, compared to roughly $500 million for the second most powerful rocket, the United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy. Now that the Falcon Heavy ’ s abilities have been demonstrated, it can be used to send satellites, payloads, and potentially tourists into space.
Days since the historic launch, this surreal image of a Tesla Roadster and Starman cruising away from Earth has become a symbol and foreshadowing of humanity’s exciting future as a space-faring species. After all, SpaceX’s massive transformative purpose is not simply to make space travel affordable, but rather to allows humans to become a multi-planetary species. Ultimately, Tuesday’s launch left many speechless because it brought us closer to accomplishing this aspirational goal.
Given the hefty cost of space exploration, it’s natural to wonder why we should explore space. Sure, space exploration and travel can also expand our technological abilities as a nation or even as a species. There have been many inventions that would not have occurred without space travel. But that’s not the real reason we explore space.
#Transhumanism in the Sunday Times of London. 750,000 copies out today. My pres campaign in it briefly, as well as other transhumanists.
The new Netflix series Altered Carbon is set in a dystopian future where the super-rich can avail of technology that allows them to upload their consciousness to a new body every time they die, in effect giving them immortality.
It’s science fiction, of the kind previously explored in the novels of Philip K Dick and William Gibson, movies such as RoboCop and The Terminator, manga comics like Ghost in the Shell and even the Man-Machine album by German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk — but only until it comes to pass.
Dublin writer Mark O’Connell spent three years travelling the globe, meeting people who believe that they can actually achieve this by digitising their brains and transcending human flesh to become de facto cyborgs, impervious to…
