Stanislaw Lem’s forgotten masterwork Summa Technologiae, now in English half a century after publication, is a heady mix of prescience, philosophy and irony.
By Simon Ings
Summa Technologiae
Posted in biotech/medical, futurism
„Summa Technologie is a „mother-essay from which most of Lem’s later essayistic books stem. It was written in times when most of the discussed issues – today sometimes quite obvious ones – belonged to the world of fantasy. The ambition behind this project still amazes, especially if we take into consideration that Lem tried to set up a secular edifice of knowledge, competing in its universalism with Saint Thomas Aquinas and his Summa Theologica.
At the same time the book rivals world futurology — in the domain of foreseeing future ways of science and technology. Current generation, interested in biotechnology and informatics, shall find in Lem’s “Summa” the project and prophecy of todays’ successes of these disciplines.
The English translation (University Of Minnesota Press, 2013) is the work of Joanna Zylinska, professor of new media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Nobel prizewinner Jim Peebles, who helped create our model of how the universe evolved, discusses dark matter, the value of iconoclastic ideas and the astronomical anomalies to keep your eye on.
PRESS RELEASE — It is hard to imagine our lives without networks such as the internet or mobile phone networks. In the future, similar networks are planned for quantum technologies that will enable the tap-proof transmission of messages using quantum cryptography and make it possible to connect quantum computers to each other.
Like their conventional counterparts, such quantum networks require memory elements in which information can be temporarily stored and routed as needed. A team of researchers at the University of Basel led by Professor Philipp Treutlein has now developed such a memory element, which can be micro-fabricated and is, therefore, suitable for mass production. Their results were recently published in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.
Even though black holes swallow anything that comes near them — even light — they are still possible to locate by looking for signs of their effects. Black holes are extremely dense, so they have a lot of mass and a strong gravitational effect that can be observed from light-years away. But the universe is a big place, and researchers are hoping that the public can help them to identify more black holes in the name of scientific exploration.
A project called Black Hole Hunter invites members of the public to search through data collected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to look for signs of a black hole. Using a technique called gravitational microlensing, citizen scientists will look at how the brightness of light from various stars changes over time, looking for indications that a black hole could have passed in front of a star and bent the light coming from it. This should enable the project to identify black holes that would otherwise be invisible.
One of the researchers on the project, Matt Middleton of the University of Southampton, explained in a statement: Black holes are invisible. Their gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape, making them incredibly hard to see, even with specialist equipment. But that gravitational pull is also how we can detect them because it’s so strong that it can bend and focus light, acting like a lens that magnifies light from stars. We can detect this magnification and that’s how we know a black hole exists.
Data-centric applications benefit from dense, low-power memory. Here the authors use a combination of chalcogenide superlattices and nanocomposites to achieve low switching voltage (0.7 V) and fast speed (40 ns) in 40-nm-scale phase-change memory.
Team designed a photonic chip in a way that reduced the speed of light by more than 10,000 times. That could boost performance and applications in light sensing, communications and computing.
A report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has revealed that it is still cheaper to use humans for certain jobs than artificial intelligence (AI).
This comes amid concerns that AI will replace many jobs currently handled by humans. The report suggests that AI cannot replace the majority of jobs in cost-effective ways at present.
In a study addressing fears about AI replacing humans in various industries, MIT established that using AI to replace humans is only profitable in a few industries.
After just over 10 and a half days in space, Peregrine Mission One, which was hosted by the private space company, Astrobotic Technology, burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere over the South Pacific Ocean on January 18, 2024, at approximately 4:04 pm EST (1:04 pm EST). This concluded what is being deemed as a mostly successful mission for the first commercial mission for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, although the spacecraft was unable to land on the lunar surface due to a fuel leak that occurred about seven hours after launch on January 8, 2024. Despite this, Peregrine was able to test several of its onboard instruments during the short mission, which will provide valuable data for future missions to the Moon, specifically for NASA’s Artemis program.
Had Peregrine landed on the Moon, it would have marked the first time a US-built spacecraft would have landed on the lunar surface since NASA’s Apollo 17 in 1972. Despite this, four of the five instruments on Peregrine successfully collected data during the 10-day mission: Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS), Near-Infrared Volatile Spectrometer System (NIRVSS), Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS), Peregrine Ion-Trap Mass Spectrometer (PITMS), with the fifth instrument, NASA’s Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA), designed to only be used on the lunar surface.
“Astrobotic’s Peregrine mission provided an invaluable opportunity to test our science and instruments in space, optimizing our process for collecting data and providing a benchmark for future missions,” said Dr. Nicola Fox, who is the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. “The data collected in flight sets the stage for understanding how some of our instruments may behave in the harsh environment of space when some of the duplicates fly on future CLPS flights.”