Transport safety advances the same way physicist Max Planck saw science progressing: one funeral at a time.
That’s bad news for the people of China, whose roads are some of the world’s most dangerous. But it’s an advantage for the slew of Chinese companies racing to overtake Silicon Valley and Detroit in developing self-driving vehicles.
The Guinness Book of World records, a record of the extraordinary (and often insane) stunts people will pull for notoriety, and now the book has its first virtual reality entry. Watch as Derek Westerman swaps reality for Tilt Brush inside the HTC Vive and stays there for 25 hours straight.
It’s a desire within most of us, to do something extraordinary in life. Most of us are content to achieve this by parent children, going bungee jumping or backpacking around Europe. But there are a group of people for whom only documented proof of their unique abilities or achievements is enough – they’re the record breakers, as documented since 1955 by the world famous Guinness World Records.
Derek Westerman from Super Deluxe, a YouTube collective dedicated to making “Funny and smart videos from funny and smart weirdos who are probably a lot like you”, now joins that dubious collective. As of April 7th, he holds the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous virtual reality session, and he did it all whilst immersed ‘in’ a single application over a 25 hour period.
Interesting article by CNET, the leading tech site in traffic, on how a strong science, longevity, and technology platform could end up in Washington in 2016:
CNET exclusive: The only pro-immortality candidate could eventually team up with one of the big names in the race.
LOS ANGELES Some of the richest, smartest and most powerful humans have an important message for the rest of us as they convened this week to discuss pressing global issues: the robots are coming.
At the Milken Institute’s Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, at least four panels so far have focused on technology taking over markets to mining — and most importantly, jobs.
“Most of the benefits we see from automation is about higher quality and fewer errors, but in many cases it does reduce labor,” Michael Chui, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, said on Tuesday during a panel on “Is Any Job Truly Safe?”
Lung Biotechnology, a biotech firm, commissioned 1,000 medical drones that’ll deliver transplant organs to a network of hospitals pending FAA and FDA approval.
1st P-band radar in space will measure the amount of biomass and carbon locked in the world’s forests and how this changes over time — Biomass satellite will provide support to United Nations treaties, notably the Reduction of Emissions due to Deforestation and Forest Degradation
Airbus Defence and Space, the world’s second largest space company has signed a contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to build its next Earth Explorer mission, the Biomass satellite. Biomass is due to launch in 2021 and will measure forest biomass to assess terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes for five years.
The spacecraft will carry the first space-borne P-band synthetic aperture radar to deliver exceptionally accurate maps of tropical, temperate and boreal forest biomass that are not obtainable by ground measurement techniques. The mission will collect frequent information on global forests to determine the distribution of above-ground biomass in these forests and measure annual changes. The 5-year mission will see at least eight growth cycles in the worlds’ forests.
Today, we’re announcing a new series of workshops and an interagency working group to learn more about the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence.
There is a lot of excitement about artificial intelligence (AI) and how to create computers capable of intelligent behavior. After years of steady but slow progress on making computers “smarter” at everyday tasks, a series of breakthroughs in the research community and industry have recently spurred momentum and investment in the development of this field.
Today’s AI is confined to narrow, specific tasks, and isn’t anything like the general, adaptable intelligence that humans exhibit. Despite this, AI’s influence on the world is growing. The rate of progress we have seen will have broad implications for fields ranging from healthcare to image- and voice-recognition. In healthcare, the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative and the Cancer Moonshot will rely on AI to find patterns in medical data and, ultimately, to help doctors diagnose diseases and suggest treatments to improve patient care and health outcomes.