This is an prototype design.
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Over the weekend in London we had a terrorist attack near London Bridge Station.
Everyday tourists are constantly uploading images onto social media and are often on the scene before First Responders and are unaware how events are going to unfold.
(after the incident images are uploaded to police / fire /insurance databases as in the London incident …please help our police by uploading any images of the London Bridge incident at http://www.ukpoliceimageappeal.co.uk ).
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While flooding has caused mass evacuations and road closures in Texas and Louisiana, Californians are doing all they they can do make it rain. Last week, for the first time since 2002, Los Angeles County officials authorized cloud seeding with the hope that the technology will force the clouds in their region to produce 15 percent more rainfall.
Cloud seeding is a rain-making technique developed by Bernard Vonnegut (brother of Kurt in 1946. Essentially, it is the process of shooting silver iodide into clouds, which attract water vapors because it shares a similar molecular structure to ice. It then freezes and, when the ice becomes heavy enough and falls, it melts its way down to the surface as rain.
In Los Angeles, the Utah-based company North American Weather Consultants — hired for $55,000 a year — set up land-based generators in 10 locations in L.A. county. These generators shoot the silver iodide up with the hope that the created stormwater will fall in the dams and watersheds within the area.
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LEAF attended the first Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit in Madrid recently. Here is another report from Elena Milova from the conference.
Elena Milova brings us another interesting interview from the recent International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit where she caught up with Senior Scientist at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) of Argentina Dr. Rodolfo Gustavo Goya.
Dr. Goya admits he used to be a rebel from a young age. At 17 he decided he was not happy about aging and that he wanted to make a difference. He became a biochemist in the hope he could do something about age-related health deterioration and he continues to rebel against mother nature to this day. Dr. Goya has lead a number of studies on cellular reprogramming and restoration of function in important organs like the thymus and brain. He is also daring to challenge death itself by studying different aspects of cryopreservation and openly supports cryonics as a logical extension of medicine.
The smallest and most advanced chips currently commercially available are made up of transistors with gates about 10 nm long, but IBM has now unveiled plans to cut them in half. To create 5 nm chips, the company is ditching the standard FinFET architecture in favor of a new structure built with a stack of four nanosheets, allowing some 30 billion transistors to be packed onto a chip the size of a fingernail and promising significant gains in power and efficiency.
First coined in the 1970s, Moore’s Law was the observation that the number of transistors on a single chip would double every two years. The trend has held up pretty well ever since, but the time frame of the doubling has slowed down a little in recent years. In consumer electronics, 14 nm chips are still stock-standard, but advances from the likes of Intel and Samsung mean that 10 nm versions have started hitting the high-end market.
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BITNATION: Governance 2.0
Posted in governance, security
From the archives.
Solar rotation rates. Credit: NASA
Most Astronomy 101 courses continually pound the idea that our own star is almost boringly average. After all, it’s only one of billions of G-spectral type, solar-like stars in the galaxy.
But the sun’s relative magnetic quiescence, in comparison to other sun-like stars, may be the reason we’re here to talk about it. Or so suggests new observations of a nearby bright solar type star that is a close analogue to our own.
The X Prize Foundation has launched a number of competitions over the years that includes everything from addressing water quality and women’s safety to exploring the depths of the ocean, to sending rovers to the moon. Now, it’s assembled a supergroup of some of the world’s best-known science fiction authors to help the organization imagine what the future will look like.
The Science Fiction Advisory Council is made up of 64 advisors, which includes some of the biggest names from the world of science fiction literature, film, and television: Charlie Jane Anders, Paolo Bacigalupi, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, David Goyer, Nancy Kress, Annalee Newitz, Larry Niven, Bruce Sterling, J. Michael Straczynski, Charles Stross, Andy Weir, and many others. Eric Desatnik, X Prize’s senior public relations director, told The Verge in an e-mail that he brought the idea of the advisory council to the foundation’s founder, Peter Diamandis last year, who “said yes before I could even finish my sentence.”
The goal, he explains, “is to accelerate positive change in the world by bringing together” people who have already been doing just that. He noted that several of the foundation’s projects, were inspired directly by science fiction stories, including this the tricorder-style device that was awarded a $2.6 million prize.
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