I’m excited and honored to share a new feature article about #transhumanism, the Immortality Bus, and my life extension work in The New York Times Magazine, which will also be in print around the world in Sunday’s edition. This 5000-word article captures many angles and is a strong testament to the growing importance of the transhumanist movement:
Zoltan Istvan ran for president with a modest goal in mind: human immortality.
Cannot wait to see the outcomes as it will prove how Quantum principles are in fact a core peice in biology that will open up more innovation in areas like BMI, cell circuitry, etc.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will conduct a Proposers Day via webcast on Feb. 21 to discuss the RadioBio program that aims to determine whether purposeful signaling through electromagnetic waves occurs between biological cells.
“If we can prove that purposeful signaling is happening, the next step would be to discover how the process works,” Mike Fiddy, DARPA program manager, said in a statement released Tuesday.
“This insight could eventually lead to a broad range of technologies important in biology as well as new small antenna designs, and other innovative concepts for communication systems in ever increasing cluttered electromagnetic environments,” Fiddy added.
Engineers at the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, or ARDEC, have been making advancements in an initiative called “Component Miniaturization.”
Its mission focuses on making armament systems more precise, energy efficient, scalable and effective by reducing the size of critical components in sub-systems such as safe and arm devices, electronics packages, power supplies and inertial measurement systems. Size reductions in one sub-system can have a positive effect on another. For example, a smaller and more efficient electronics package design can reduce power supply demands as well as reduce the need for heavier supporting structures. The space savings and mass savings could then be used to add a larger explosive warhead or increase control surfaces for additional maneuverability. The reduced size and mass could also allow for additional portability to smaller calibers or to systems with greater launch velocities.
The initiative involves several discrete projects, some of which are described below:
The leading projects for developing a hypersonic spaceplane are Reaction Engines of the UK and Hypermach.
Reaction Engines Skylon
Reaction Engines of the UK is a leader in developing a hypersonic vehicle and hypersonic components. The British government finalized a £60 million to the project: this investment will provide support at a “crucial stage” to allow a full-scale prototype of the SABRE engine to be built. If all goes to plan, the first ground-based engine tests could happen in 2019, and Skylon could be performing unmanned test flights by 2025. In November 2015, BAE Systems invested £20.6 million in Reaction Engines to acquire 20 per cent of its share capital and agreed to provide industrial, technology development and project management expertise to support Reaction Engines during its development phase. It could carry 15 tonnes of cargo to a 300 km equatorial orbit on each trip, and up to 11 tonnes to the International Space Station, almost 45% more than the capacity of the European Space Agency’s ATV vehicle.
Electromagnetic pulses lasting one millionth of a millionth of a second may hold the key to advances in medical imaging, communications and drug development. But the pulses, called terahertz waves, have long required elaborate and expensive equipment to use.
Now, researchers at Princeton University have drastically shrunk much of that equipment: moving from a tabletop setup with lasers and mirrors to a pair of microchips small enough to fit on a fingertip.
In two articles recently published in the IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, the researchers describe one microchip that can generate terahertz waves, and a second chip that can capture and read intricate details of these waves.
Everyone knows prevention is better than a cure, and that’s as true for law enforcement as it is for medicine. But there’s little evidence that a growing trend towards “predictive policing” is the answer, and it could even bake in racial bias.
Police departments faced with tight budgets are increasingly turning to machine learning-enabled software that can sift through crime data to help predict where crimes are likely to occur and who might commit them.
Using statistics in law enforcement is nothing new. A statistical system for tracking crime called Compstat was pioneered in New York in 1994 and quickly became popular elsewhere. Since then, crime has fallen 75 percent in New York, which has been credited by some to the technology. But while Compstat simply helped identify historical hotspots, “predictive policing” uses intelligent algorithms to forecast tomorrow’s hotspots and offenders.
Global population growth and migration trends make it increasingly likely that the US Army will find itself fighting in megacities in the future. In order to be prepared for the challenges this will pose, the Army should create a unit manned, equipped, and trained entirely for this purpose.
At school you may have been taught that helium was a noble gas because it was totally unreactive.
But, new research suggests it might not be as virtuous as we first thought.
An international team of scientists has created a stable helium compound which is composed of both helium and sodium atoms, and say their discovery marks a ‘new frontier of chemistry.’
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will conduct a Proposers Day via webcast on Feb. 21 to discuss the RadioBio program that aims to determine whether purposeful signaling through electromagnetic waves occurs between biological cells.
