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Jul 1, 2016

Interstellar Comparisons

Posted by in categories: engineering, environmental, space travel

Adam Crowl talking about the energy of the Sun and what we can do with it.


No one thinks big better than Adam Crowl, a Centauri Dreams regular and mainstay of the Icarus Interstellar attempt to reconfigure the Project Daedalus starship design of the 1970’s. If you’re looking for ideas for science fiction stories, you’ll find them in the essay below, where Adam considers the uses to which we might put the abundant energies of the Sun. Starships are a given, but what about terraforming not just one but many Solar System objects? Can we imagine a distant future when our own Moon is awash with seas, and snow is falling on a Venus in the process of transformation? To keep up with Adam, be sure to check his Crowlspace site regularly. It’s where I found an earlier version of this now updated and revised essay.

By Adam Crowl

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Jul 1, 2016

Half Of North America’s Electricity Will Be Emissions-Free By 2025

Posted by in categories: climatology, nuclear energy, sustainability

North american leaders set goals to mitigate climate change.

President Obama, Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada and President Peña Nieto of Mexico met in Ottawa on Wednesday, agreeing on goals and targets to lower emissions, raise efficiency and bring better protections to the environment.

Renewables, nuclear and carbon capture and storage technology will be on the table to help North Americans meet their goal of 50 percent clean, emissions-free energy by 2025.

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Jul 1, 2016

Scientists Accidentally Create a Battery That Can Outlast Your Device

Posted by in category: futurism

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lzFzBpwl8aU

Scientists at University of California, Irving stumble across the secret to long-lasting rechargeable batteries.

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Jul 1, 2016

Research team reproduces major functional principles of the brain using technology

Posted by in categories: computing, neuroscience, robotics/AI

How does the human brain collect, process and store the flow of data which it constantly encounters? How does it manage cognitive tasks, which require complex interaction between various areas of the brain and overload high performance computers that work much more quickly? Why can the brain cope with all of this using much less energy? It is the aim of the research team from Kiel led by Professor Hermann Kohlstedt, Head of the Nanoelectronics Department at Kiel University (CAU) and spokesman of the national collaborative research project “Memristive devices for neural systems” (FOR 2093) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to track this impressive efficiency of the human brain using technology and to implement its method of operation in artificial neural networks. The scientists from Kiel have now succeeded in electronically reproducing two fundamental principles of operation of the human brain, memory and synchronisation. They recently published their results in Applied Physics Letters.

The is a master of energy efficiency. It has approximately 100 billion nerve cells, also known as neurons, which manage with power of only about 20 Watt. Modern high performance computers would require many thousands of times more energy to perform similarly complex calculations as the brain manages. The neurons in the brain are linked to each other with synapses and form a highly complex network. The term “learning” in the neurological sense means that the synaptic connections in the brain are not determined statically. Instead they are continually readjusting on the basis of environmental influences, for example sensations. This makes it possible to store new memory content locally, known as the neurological plasticity of the brain.

In addition to the spatial ability of the neural connections to adjust, there is another important building block to process information in the brain: the synchronisation of neural groups. Electrical impulses, so-called action potentials, form the basic unit of information processing in the brain. These impulses permanently transmit information between the neurons and in doing so they cross and influence the synaptic connections in the brain. “In the case of conscious sensory perceptions the spatial irregular occurrence of neural impulses changes into ordered structures suddenly and for a limited time,” says Professor Thorsten Bartsch, a neurologist at Kiel University and member of the research group. The previously independent impulses of the neurons synchronise themselves in this case even over areas of the brain that are not close together. Evidence of this synchronised “firing” in humans can also be shown by measuring brain waves (electroencephalography, EEG).

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Jul 1, 2016

The World Will Be Continuously Upgradable When Everything Is Connected

Posted by in categories: finance, food, mobile phones, singularity, transportation

Exponential Finance celebrates the incredible opportunity at the intersection of technology and finance. Apply here to join Singularity University, CNBC, and hundreds of the world’s most forward-thinking financial leaders at Exponential Finance in June 2017.

One day in the future, we’ll look back in wonder at how our physical objects used to be singular, disconnected pieces of matter.

We’ll be in awe of the fact that a car used to be just a piece of metal full of gears and belts that we would drive from one place to another, that a refrigerator was a box that kept our food cold — and a phone was a piece of plastic we used to communicate to one other person at a time.

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Jul 1, 2016

This Robot Works In A Hospital

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

A Belgian hospital is experimenting with robot “employees”.

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Jul 1, 2016

Something To Celebrate: The Ozone Hole Is Really Healing

Posted by in category: climatology

Only volcanoes are being difficult about the ‘hole’ thing.

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Jul 1, 2016

Impossible vanishing stars could be signs of advanced alien life

Posted by in category: alien life

By Shannon Hall

It’s a cosmic game of hide-and-seek. A team of astronomers say that the next search for advanced extraterrestrial civilisations should look for stars – or even galaxies – that have vanished without a trace, as anything so unexplainable could only be due to life far more intelligent than us.

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Jul 1, 2016

The World’s First Human Brain-to-Brain Interface

Posted by in categories: internet, neuroscience

[3:19] Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco test the first human brain-to-brain interface, allowing the brain to be controlled over the internet. When Rajesh plays a video game and thinks about firing at a target, the EEG picks up the signal and sends it across the internet, the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation or TMS stimulates the region of Andrea’s brain that controls hand movement. This causes Andrea’s index finger to fire the cannon and blow up the target. [Source: World Science Festival YouTube link] Comments.

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Jul 1, 2016

These omni-directional car wheels are basically witchcraft

Posted by in category: transportation

Ever seen a car pivot in place before, without the use of wheel dollies?

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