Sophia Nasr is a science writer for Simulation Curriculum’s free Pluto Safari app. You might guess that a small and distant world almost 40 times farther from the sun than the Earth is from the sun would not have an atmosphere, but in the case of Pluto, you’d be wrong. In fact, Pluto is a complex world, particularly when it comes to weather patterns.
The Bitcoin price advance is curving upward above $300 and 1900 CNY. The advance is so persistent that the technical indicators in the intra-day charts have become somewhat meaningless due to compounding divergence. Technical analysis considers the likelihood of a surprise reversal, as opposed to non-stop advance. Read more
Scientists have been experimenting with brain-to-brain interfaces for years. Miguel Nicolelis, a neurobiologist at Duke University Medical Center, has created a “Brainet” or a network of interconnected brains with four rats. With electrodes implanted directly in the cortex rodents exchange information to create an organic computing device. Collectively, they were able to solve computational problems including image processing, storing and recalling information and even predicting precipitation.
Read the full story by Mona Lalwani at Engadget
The Leap is a short film from Karel van Bellingen that takes place decades from now, where interstellar travel has opened up access to a new world, but only for a select few who can afford the journey. This is a film that packs a lot in to just half an hour.
A patient’s set to undergo the world’s first head transplant. Here’s what’s involved. Read more: http://bit.ly/1FYP4Ep.
A full Sunday feature on transhumanism (with mentions of Transhumanist Parties) in one of Germany’s largest papers (circulation 400,000): http://www.faz.net/…/transhumanismus-bring-mir-den-kopf-von… and the English: http://translate.google.com/translate…
“It’s much easier to replicate experiments and catch fraud if you have access to the original data. Some journals currently reward researchers for sharing the data that they used in an experiment. In the highest level of this new framework, data sharing would not only become compulsory, but independent analysts would conduct the same tests on it as those reported by the researchers, to see whether they get the same results.” Read more
At this point, it’s safe to say that we’re going to be receiving a new ‘highest resolution image ever’ of Pluto on a close to 24 hour basis. Yesterday, we got our first peek at geologic features on the dwarf planet’s surface. And today, New Horizons beamed back the best image to date of four mysterious dark splotches near Pluto’s south pole.
Duke scientists successfully linked the brains of two rats and three monkeys this week—bringing us one step closer to a superbrain that could harness the power of collective thought.
IBM Watson CTO: Quantum computing could advance artificial intelligence by orders of magnitude.
Quantum computers have already been used to test artificial intelligence by researchers in China, albeit in a very limited capacity. Earlier in 2015, a team from the country’s University of Science and Technology developed a quantum system capable of recognising handwritten characters in a demonstration they dubbed quantum artificial intelligence.
This demonstration was on a quantum computer using only four qubits, leading to speculation of what a system using hundreds – or even thousands – of qubits would be capable of. Such machines do not yet exist, at least not commercially, but Canada-based quantum computing firm D-Wave systems recently claimed it has built a 1,000 qubit quantum computer.
According to Seth Lloyd, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a machine of just 300 qubits could be used to “map the whole universe”, processing all the information that has existed since the Big Bang.