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Apr 15, 2014

Asian air pollution strengthens Pacific storms

Posted by in categories: climatology, environmental


Beijing haze
Researchers have found that pollutants are strengthening storms above the Pacific Ocean, which feeds into weather systems in other parts of the world.

The effect was most pronounced during the winter.

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Lead author Yuan Wang, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, said: “The effects are quite dramatic. The pollution results in thicker and taller clouds and heavier precipitation.”

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Apr 13, 2014

Check Out This Futuristic 3D Printed Car Body

Posted by in category: 3D printing

— Singularity Hub
EDAG-Genesis-3D-Printed-Car-Top-View
German auto firm, EDAG, made a stir at this year’s Geneva Motor Show with a fully 3D printed auto body called Genesis. And why not? Its smooth grey curves and futuristic honeycomb ooze sex appeal. And did we mention 3D printed cars?

EDAG aids major carmakers in design and production, and they’re no stranger to the 11-day Geneva Motor Show, a mecca where over 600,000 car enthusiasts come to ogle the best cars of today and glimpse a few visions of tomorrow.

3D printing, of course, falls squarely into the second category. EDAG thinks additive manufacturing has the power to improve the entire carmaking process from design to production—and Genesis is meant to embody that potential.

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Apr 13, 2014

The Explosive Evolution That Took Rocket Cars and Trains to Space Flight

Posted by in categories: engineering, space travel

Amy Shira Teitel — Motherboard

The Explosive Evolution That Took Rocket Cars and Trains to Space Flight

One night in the spring of 1914, what appeared to be an impossibly large comet whizzed through the skies over Innsbruck, the capital city of Tyrol in western Austria. It terrified the locals; it was too big and too low in the sky to be something as innocent and ordinary as an actual comet or a planet. It turned out to be something equally innocuous, however alien: a rocket-powered model airplane. Nineteen-year-old high school student Max Valier had launched his model with a firecracker as its engine. It was the first in a series of rocket-powered vehicles he would test in his short lifetime, all in the hope of eventually seeing rockets carry men into space.

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Apr 12, 2014

Bart Simpson And Homer Simpson On The White Swan!

Posted by in categories: futurism, humor, singularity

TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE POINT BY TONY BUZAN AND THE AUTHOR OF THE WHITE SWAN (ANDRES AGOSTINI), LET US CREATE A DIALOGUE SIMULACRUM BY BART SIMPSON AND HOMER SIMPSON.

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TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE POINT BY BUZAN AND THE AUTHOR, LET US CREATE A DIALOGUE SIMULACRUM BY BART SIMPSON AND HOMER SIMPSON.

Continue reading “Bart Simpson And Homer Simpson On The White Swan!” »

Apr 12, 2014

Portable Robot Printer Is Like A Roomba That Squirts Ink

Posted by in category: innovation

John Brownlee — Fast Company

Designed by Zuta Labs and now on Kickstarter, the Mini Mobile Robotic Printer is one for the mobile age. It cleverly sheds the bulk of consumer printing by re-imagining what a printer actually is.

Printers, of course, are annoyingly big pieces of hardware that remain tethered to our desktops, a particular insult while other gadgets become ever more mobile. The prime factors of printer bloat are the giant reservoirs of ink and toner needed to power them. Add to that the requirement that a printer be at least as big as a ream of paper.

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Apr 12, 2014

Navy’s New Railgun Can Hurl a Shell Over 5,000 MPH

Posted by in category: military

— Wired
The Navy is developing electromagnetic railgun launchers, long-range weapons that launch projectiles using electricity instead of chemical propellants.
The U.S. Navy is tapping the power of the Force to wage war.

Its latest weapon is an electromagnetic railgun launcher. It uses a form of electromagnetic energy known as the Lorentz force to hurl a 23-pound projectile at speeds exceeding Mach 7. Engineers already have tested this futuristic weapon on land, and the Navy plans to begin sea trials aboard a Joint High Speed Vessel Millinocket in 2016.

“The electromagnetic railgun represents an incredible new offensive capability for the U.S. Navy,” Rear Adm. Bryant Fuller, the Navy’s chief engineer, said in a statement. “This capability will allow us to effectively counter a wide range of threats at a relatively low cost, while keeping our ships and sailors safer by removing the need to carry as many high-explosive weapons.”

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Apr 10, 2014

Education Elucidated by Napoleon Bonaparte and Dr. Wernher von Braun!

Posted by in category: education

Education Elucidated by Napoleon Bonaparte and Dr. Wernher von Braun through the White Swan Idea:

WhiteSwanEureka

REFLECTING ON THE EDUCATION WE IMMEDIATELY NEED! NAPOLEON BONAPARTE ON EDUCATION (1769 – 1821) observed:

“…Education, strictly speaking, has several objectives: one needs to learn how to speak and write correctly, which is generally called grammar and belles letters. Each lyceum has provided for this object, and there is no well-educated man who has not learned his rhetoric .… After the need to speak and write correctly comes the ability to count and measure. The lyceums have provided this with classes in MATHEMATICS embracing arithmetical and MECHANICAL KNOWLEDGE IN THEIR DIFFERENT BRANCHES .… The elements of several other fields come next: chronology, geography, and the rudiments of history are also a part of the education of the lyceum .… A young man who leaves the lyceum at sixteen years of age thence knows not only the mechanics of his language and the classical authors, the divisions of discourse, the different figures of eloquence, the means of employing them either to calm or arouse passions, in short, everything that one learns in a course on belles letters. He also would know the principal epochs of history, the basic geographical divisions, and how to compute and measure. He has some general idea of the most striking natural phenomena and the principles of equilibrium and movement both with regard to solids and fluids .… Whether he desires to follow the career of the barrister, that of the sword, or ENGLISH, or letters; if he is destined to enter into the body of scholars, to be a geographer, engineer, or land surveyor — in all these cases he has received a general education necessary to become equipped to receive the remainder of instruction that his circumstances require, and it is at this moment, when he must make his choice of a profession, that the special studies present themselves …”. [113]

Continue reading “Education Elucidated by Napoleon Bonaparte and Dr. Wernher von Braun!” »

Apr 10, 2014

Bitcoin players knock on Washington doors

Posted by in category: bitcoin

— CNN Money

bitcoin washington
Bitcoin companies are hiring lobbyists, visiting lawmakers on Capitol Hill and writing to agencies about how they should write rules that will determine the future of the fast-growing virtual currency.

It’s all part of a push to shape how Washington ultimately regulates the independent, digital money that is growing in popularity.

“The most important thing we’re doing is explaining how Bitcoin works,” said Jim Harper, a lobbyist who was hired recently as counsel for the Bitcoin Foundation, an organization that represents Bitcoin companies and investors. Harper, who has lobbied for PayPal and VeriSign, is paid in bitcoin.

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Apr 9, 2014

Ground Zero of Interstellar Propulsion

Posted by in categories: defense, innovation, particle physics, philosophy, physics, science, space, space travel

Private Space exploration is gaining a lot of attention in the media today. It is expected to be the next big thing after social media, technology, and probably bio fuels . Can we take this further? With DARPA sponsoring the formation of the 100 Year Starship Study (100YSS) in 2011, can we do interstellar propulsion in our life times?

The Xodus One Foundation thinks this is feasible. To that end the Foundation has started the KickStarter project Ground Zero of Interstellar Propulsion to fund and accelerate this research. This project ends Fri, May 9 2014 7:39 AM MDT.

The community of interstellar propulsion researchers can be categorized into three groups, those who believe it cannot be done (Nay Sayers Group – NSG), those who believe that it requires some advanced form of conventional rockets (Advanced Rocket Group – ARG), and those who believe that it needs new physics (New Physics Group – NPG).

The Foundation belongs to the third group, the New Physics Group. The discovery in 2007 of the new massless formula for gravitational acceleration g=τc^2 , where τ is the change in time dilation over a specific height divided by that height, led to the inference that there is a new physics for interstellar propulsion that is waiting to be discovered.

Continue reading “Ground Zero of Interstellar Propulsion” »

Apr 8, 2014

Microsoft hopes to counter Apple with AI-driven ‘invisible user interfaces’ on future devices

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

AppleInsider Staff
Cortana, the Halo character after which Microsoft's Siri competitor is named
“User interface started with the command prompt, moved to graphics, then touch, and then gestures,” Microsoft research executive Yoram Yaakobi told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s now moving to invisible UI, where there is nothing to operate. The tech around you understands you and what you want to do. We’re putting this at the forefront of our efforts.”

With the push, dubbed “UI.Next,” Microsoft is pursuing a future in which users do not need to tell their device what to do — by touching or speaking to it, for instance — and instead passively consume information that the device has already prepared in anticipation of their needs.

Both Apple and Google have nodded in this direction already, though the technology is far from mature. Apple’s Passbook, for instance, can dynamically surface information like event tickets based on the user’s location, while Google’s Google Now will adjust a user’s schedule based on traffic conditions.

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