Toggle light / dark theme

James Dyson announced Tuesday he was investing £2.0 billion ($2.7 billion, 2.3 billion euro) into developing an electric car by 2020, a new venture for the British inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner.

The 70-year-old British entrepreneur said work began two and a half years ago on a project which he hopes will help tackle the scourge of air pollution.

“Dyson has begun work on a battery electric vehicle, due to be launched by 2020,” he said in an email to employees, referring to his eponymous company.

Read more

The military wants to “network everything to everything,” which sounds a bit like the setup for the Terminator franchise.


Service chiefs are converging on a single strategy for military dominance: connect everything to everything.

Leaders of the Air Force, Navy, Army and Marines are converging on a vision of the future military: connecting every asset on the global battlefield.

That means everything from F-35 jets overhead to the destroyers on the sea to the armor of the tanks crawling over the land to the multiplying devices in every troops’ pockets. Every weapon, vehicle, and device connected, sharing data, constantly aware of the presence and state of every other node in a truly global network. The effect: an unimaginably large cephapoloidal nervous system armed with the world’s most sophisticated weaponry.

Read more

I did a new interview on #transhumanism for some journalism students at Germany’s Technical University of Dortmund. It’s in English:


Mechanical bodyparts are very common nowadays – a lot of humans have a hip replacement or a pacemaker. Technology helps saving our lives rather often. Some people want to take this a lot further – a philosophical and scientific movement called Transhumanism. Zoltan Istvan Gyurko is one of the most famous Transhumanists, he even ran for president in 2016. In this interview, he talks about his first experiences with Transhumanism, immortality and the future of humanity.

By Marie-Louise Timcke und Paul Klur

Why is Transhumanism important for our society nowadays?

Zoltan Istvan: Well, Transhumanism is perhaps the most important subject matter that we have actually existing in society at the moment. Because humankind has been moving forward very slowly developing science and technology. But in ways that haven’t really rudimentary changed the human being. But all of a sudden, since the invention of the microchip, humanity is changing dramatically because of data, because of the internet, because of computers, because of smartphones. And what we have seen is almost nothing compared to what we’re going to see over the next ten or twenty years. Transhumanism is the field that wants to use science and technology to modify the human being and realise this kind of digitization of the actual self. But most importantly, the next ten years are going to be completely disruptive to whatever we thought it meant to be human beings.

Read more

So far, the only intervention that is known to increase lifespan in multiple species is caloric restriction (CR). Caloric restriction is known to increase lifespan in the majority of mouse strains tested[1]. The effects of CR have even been shown to influence how primates age and reduce the incidence of diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and brain atrophy[2].

Science has known about the effects of CR since the 1930s, when rat experiments first showed researchers this phenomenon[3]. However, despite the various health benefits of CR, how it delays aging has remained a mystery. A new study suggests that epigenetic drift may be the answer.

Read more

The new Nvidia Volta GPU computing platform is designed to accelerate AI for a broad range of enterprise and consumer applications, and will be adopted by Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, and Tencent in their data centres and cloud-service infrastructures, Nvidia said on Tuesday.


The new chip is claimed to be up to five times more powerful than the current Pascal-based chips deployed by the Chinese firms.

PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 26 September, 2017, 2:04pm.

UPDATED : Tuesday, 26 September, 2017, 4:00pm.

Read more