Watch this: prototype NASA robot prowls the underside of frozen lakes, oceans http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/24/5839902/watch-this-prototy…ozen-lakes
Limb regeneration: do salamanders hold the key? http://www.kurzweilai.net/limb-regeneration-do-salamanders-hold-the-key
Global Ocean Commission Tells Us What We Don’t Want to Hear http://www.21stcentech.com/global-ocean-commissions-latest-report-hear/
Gallup Examines the State of the American Consumer http://thegallupblog.gallup.com/2014/06/gallup-examines-state-of-american.html
This Band Of Small Robots Could Build Entire Skyscrapers Without Human Help http://www.fastcoexist.com/3032003/this-band-of-small-robots…man-help#2
Kurzweil AI
Washington State University researchers have used a super-cold cloud of atoms that behaves like a single atom, opening a new experimental path to potentially powerful quantum computing.
Physicist Peter Engels and his colleagues cooled about one million atoms of rubidium to 100 billionths of a degree above absolute zero.
— BBC News
A campaign has been launched to make Jersey a world leader in digital currencies.
Bitcoin payments are already accepted in a handful of places but an industry expert says, if the States allow banks to accept and trade with it, Jersey could become a magnet for new business.
Robbie Andrews, of bit.coin.je, an industry body set up to promote and campaign for the currency, wants to create a “Bitcoin Isle”.
Rudina Seseri (@rudina11), Wan Li Zhu (@zhurama) — Tech Crunch
The robotics revolution has been in the making for decades, but market expectations have historically outpaced technology readiness. While industrial and military sectors have adopted a number of high-priced robotics solutions, the consumer sector has lagged due to lack of technological maturity and high costs.
In recent years, we have seen accelerated levels of innovation in both software and hardware that are now driving new possibilities for consumer readiness and adoption of personal robotics.
— The Blaze
Billionaire Elon Musk has a passion for advancing technology; he recently announced plans to create the world’s single largest solar production and told CNBC he wants to put humans on Mars by the end of the 2020s.
But it appears there’s one area of technology he isn’t ready to push: artificial intelligence.
— Venture Beat
We can finally talk about virtual reality games with a straight face.
At this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) video game trade show in Los Angeles, a small pool of VR games held their own against a big slate of indie titles and triple-A blockbusters. This is the first year that Oculus VR, the poster boy for VR’s resurgence with its popular Oculus Rift headset, had a presence on the expo floor, an elegant booth that wasn’t too far from Oculus’s biggest competitor, Sony’s Project Morpheus. Neither company has set a release date for their devices (Samsung, the third challenger for the VR crown, is trying to beat them both to market).
Robert McMillan — Wired
Every six months, a team of supercomputing academics compiles a list of the most powerful computers on the planet. It’s called the Top500 list, and it has become a competition of sorts. National labs vie against universities, military facilities, NASA, and even temporary cloud-based supercomputers—all to see who’s building the worlds’ largest number-crunching machines.
This year, the machine on the top of the list is Tihane-2, a Chinese system that can perform 33.86 quadrillion calculations per second. But here’s the thing. Tihane-2 was on top back in November of 2013, and a year ago too. In fact, when you look at the top 10 machines on the June list, there’s only one new entry–an unidentified Cray supercomputer, operated by the U.S. government. It’s ranked tenth.
Cameron Scott — Singularity Hub
Deep brain stimulation as a treatment for epilepsy and movement disorders, most notably Parkinson’s disease, has rapidly gone from experimental to standard practice. With devices to provide delicate electro-stimulation to the brain now available and with maps of which neurons do what steadily gaining detail, attention is now shifting to using the approach to treat mental illness.
Steven Kotler — Singularity Hub
Violence is contagious, this we know. Time and again, researchers have found that exposure to aggression links directly to increases in violent behavior. This is why, for example, 30% of abused children grow up to be abusers themselves. It’s also why, as Gary Slutkin, a professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Illinois, Chicago and the executive director of CURE Violence, recently told New Scientist: “[P]eople who have observed violence are 30 times more likely to commit it. Under certain conditions it can be up to 100 to 1,000 times more likely.”
