The first games for Oculus Rift are pretty sweet, though some can cause motion sickness.
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Let’s make everything free
Posted in futurism
In a controversial move, Kuwait has passed a law making it mandatory for all its 1.3 million citizens and 2.9 million foreign residents to have their DNA entered onto a national database.
Anyone who refuses to submit their DNA for testing risks one year in prison and a fine of up to US$33,000, and those who provide a fake sample can be jailed for seven years.
The decision came after an Islamic State-led suicide bombing in Kuwait City on 26 June, which killed 26 people and wounded 227 more. The government hopes that the new database, which is projected to cost around US$400 million, will make it quicker and easier to make arrests in the future.
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POSTECH has created a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) that not only adds life to drones but can also replace lithium-ion batteries in smartphones.
Battery life. Two words that can turn anyone who owns an electronic device into a total wreck. But scientists at POSTECH may have found the solution to prevent you from having a panic attack each time you see your device almost out of juice.
Prof. Gyeong Man Choi and his Ph.D. student Kun Joong Kim have developed a miniaturized solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) powerful enough to extend the flying time of drones to more than an hour. And that’s just the start.
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Breakthrough Knee Replacement
Posted in cyborgs, transhumanism
BEIJING China’s production and sale of electric cars will more than double this year, the industry minister said on Sunday.
More than 300,000 electric cars were sold in China last year, Miao Wei, the head of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told reporters on the sidelines of the annual meeting of parliament on Sunday.
The reliability, mileage and lifespan of electric batteries needs improvement and China needs to speed up the installation of electric car charging stations, Miao said.
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Researchers in Finland have figured out a way to reliably make quantum computers — technology that’s tipped to revolutionise computing in the coming years — even more powerful. And all they had to do was throw common sense out the window.
You’re almost certainly reading this article on a classical computer — which includes all phones, laptops, and tablets — meaning that your computer can only ever do one thing at a time. It reads one bit, then the next bit, then the next bit, and so on. The reading is lightning fast and combines millions or billions or trillions of bits to give you what you want, but the bits are always read and used in order.
So if your computer searches for the solution to a problem, it tries one answer (a particular batch of ones and zeros), checks how far the result is from the goal, tries another answer (a different batch), and repeats. For complicated problems, that process can take an incredibly long time. Sometimes, that’s good. Very clever multiplication secures your bank account, and faster or more efficient equation-solvers put that in jeopardy.
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