While not a complete figment of our imagination, the universe may only become real because we’re looking at it.
By Douglas Heaven
Samuel Johnson thought the idea was so preposterous that kicking a rock was enough to silence discussion. “I refute it thus,” he cried as his foot rebounded from reality. Had he known about quantum mechanics, he might have spared himself the stubbed toe.
Hopefully this doesnt negatively effect the self driving truck.
One of Uber’s top engineers will no longer be able to work on a key self-driving car technology, a federal judge ordered, adding a new hurdle in the ride-hailing company’s race to get to market.
Uber will be able to continue working on its self-driving car technology, the judge said, but embattled engineer Anthony Levandowski must be removed from any work relating to a key technology called LIDAR, which helps cars “see.”
Alphabet’s self-driving car unit, Waymo, has sued Uber, claiming that the ride-hailing start-up is using key parts of Waymo’s self-driving technology.
Scientists have successfully re-awoken coma patients so they can communicate with their family by ‘zapping’ their brain with a low-intensity current.
Two people in a vegetative state, and another 13 in a minimally-conscious coma, were able to show new signs of awareness after receiving brain stimulation, New Scientist reported.
The effect lasted for up to a week, according to researchers at the University of Liege in Belgium.
SAN FRANCISCO Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] must promptly return stolen confidential files to Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Waymo self-driving car unit, a federal judge ruled, while stopping short of shutting down the ride-services company’s autonomous car program.
The judge wrote that Uber knew, or should have known, that an ex-Waymo engineer it later hired had taken Waymo files potentially containing trade secrets, and that some of the intellectual property had “seeped into” Uber’s own development efforts.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco, unsealed on Monday, marked a blow to Uber, which is engaged in a battle with Waymo to dominate the fast-growing field of self-driving cars expected to revolutionize the automotive industry.
The results of the collaborative research, published today in Investigative Opthamology and Visual Science, could spell the end of painful injections directly into the eye to treat the increasingly common eye disorder known as age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
AMD affects more than 600,000 people in the UK and predictions suggest this figure could rise sharply in future because of an ageing population.
Our Space Apps London hosts Inmarsat are launching today with a SpaceX rocket!
The SpaceX Falcon 9 🚀 has been raised to launch position and we are go for #I5F4 lift-off at 19:20 EDT/00:20 BST today! Watch all the live action here: http://www.inmarsat.com/i5f4/
Quantum communication is a strange beast, but one of the weirdest proposed forms of it is called counterfactual communication — a type of quantum communication where no particles travel between two recipients.
Theoretical physicists have long proposed that such a form of communication would be possible, but now, for the first time, researchers have been able to experimentally achieve it — transferring a black and white bitmap image from one location to another without sending any physical particles.
If that sounds a little too out-there for you, don’t worry, this is quantum mechanics, after all. It’s meant to be complicated. But once you break it down, counterfactual quantum communication actually isn’t as bizarre as it sounds.
Sometimes, albeit rarely, people object to rejuvenation biotechnologies saying that ageing has its pluses too, thus subtly implying that we should leave it alone in order not to lose these pluses. The thing is, they’re not talking about the same kind of ageing that science is trying to undo. They’re mixing up chronological and biological ageing, and they’re not at all the same thing.
This objection is very simple to explain and even simpler to dismantle, because it boils down to a gross misunderstanding.
Whoever raises this objection generally says that with ageing comes experience, that later in life people are generally happier, more accomplished, and so on. I have nothing to object to that, except that all those nice things are a (possible) consequence of chronological ageing, most definitely not of biological ageing. It is not very often that people mix the two up, but at times they do, so let us clarify once and for all what the difference is.
Chronological ageing is nothing more, nothing less than the passing of time. Becoming chronologically older simply means that the time you’ve existed for is getting longer. There’s nothing wrong with it, and no one (to my knowledge) wants to stop, ‘cure’, or reverse chronological ageing—especially because that would be a bit complicated to do and it would have annoying side-effects, such as time freezing or rewinding your life back to your elementary school years, possibly dragging the entire universe along, and would do nothing to eliminate the ill health of old age. Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun—and I speak as a chap with a thing for time travel.
