Toggle light / dark theme

While she’s still in the thick of her publicity tour for Captain America: Winter Soldier, Scarlett Johansson’s next big genre project is getting underway.

Today, Paramount Pictures announced that The Ghost in the Shell has started filming, providing fans with their first look at the anticipated adaptation.

The film is based onShirowMasamune’s cyberpunkmanga of the same name.

Read more

“Advanced cyber-learning environments that involve virtual reality and artificial intelligence innovations are becoming powerful tools that can facilitate the explorations and conversations needed to solve society’s challenges,” said NYU engineer Dr Winslow Burleson. “Cyber-learning is an essential tool for envisioning, refining, and creating a utopian world in which we are actively ‘elearning to be’ — deeply engaged in intrinsically motivating experiences that empower each of us to reach our full potential.”

Read more

And at its core are two divergent hypotheses.

On the one hand, it could be that consciousness exists as a constant, uninterrupted stream of perception, like how it feels to watch a movie. You sit down with your popcorn and experience a film from beginning to end in one continuous flow, unaware of any segmentation or breakup as you go.

But another hypothesis of consciousness reflects what a film technically is: a series of individual frames of time stitched together into a reel that – when played back – appear seamless. So which is it? Is consciousness a seamless film, or is it a reel composed of discrete moments?

Read more

DARPA’s newest invention is the Gremlin: a drone that be deployed from a bomber while in flight, execute its mission, and then return to an extraction point where a cargo plane yanks it out of the sky and brings it safely home.

The drones are capable of flying unmanned, but being able to retrieve them makes them reusable, which is both cost-effective and convenient. But drone retrieval also protects U.S. military technology and secrets. Sending fleets of tiny Gremlins on intelligence-gathering missions is one thing, but being able to recapture them instead of leaving them in the hands of hostiles is a huge boon to the military. Gremlin drones have up to three hours to accomplish reconnaissance missions, at which time they automatically fly back to a retrieval area to be collected by a C-130 cargo plane.

Related: DARPA’s 130-foot submarine-hunting drone will take to the sea in April.

Read more

But a new study suggests that it’s actually more like the frames of a movie reel running through a projector.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about consciousness and how it arises in the brain. Even though perception—such as vision and hearing—feels smooth and uninterrupted, neuroscientists aren’t entirely sure if it flows continuously like water through a tap or if it’s more like the aforementioned 24-frame-per-second movie reel.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/8-things-we-simply-dont-understand-ab…-949442979

Read more