Lifeboat Foundation

According to Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the 4-IR follows the first, second, and third Industrial Revolutions—the mechanical, electrical, and digital, respectively. The 4-IR builds on the digital revolution, but Schwab sees the 4-IR as an exponential takeoff and convergence of existing and emerging fields, including Big Data; artificial intelligence; machine learning; quantum computing; and genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. The consequence is the merging of the physical, digital, and biological worlds. The blurring of these categories ultimately challenges the very ontologies by which we understand ourselves and the world, including “what it means to be human.”

The specific applications that make up the 4-R are too numerous and sundry to treat in full, but they include a ubiquitous internet, the internet of things, the internet of bodies, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and more.

While Schwab and the WEF promote a particular vision for the 4-IR, the developments he announces are not his brainchildren, and there is nothing original about his formulations. Transhumanists and Singularitarians (or prophets of the technological singularity), such as Ray Kurzweil and many others, forecasted these and more revolutionary developments,. long before Schwab heralded them. The significance of Schwab and the WEF’s take on the new technological revolution is the attempt to harness it to a particular end, presumably “a fairer, greener future.”

If the alcohol percentage in the glass allows it, let us look at what happens inside the glass. A slight, constant rubbing of the rim can cause a pretty big storm. Droplets detach from the smooth surface of the drink and rhythmically bob up and down, while the troubled waves bounce off the see-through sides. The whole show creates dynamic forms and shapes that depend on the frequency of the sound, which is sensitive to the smallest caress of the fingertip. Stories about rubbing genie lamps only gained academic interest in the 1970s. The field of research that studies the shape of sound waves became known as However, sound waves and the effect they have on matter had become an object of fascination long before that.

When glasses were clinking at the Philadelphia Convention in 1,787 to celebrate the signing of the Constitution, 6,505 kilometres away in the town of Lipsk amateurs of various scientific curiosities were avidly reading Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges (Discoveries in the Theory of Sound), written by Ernst Chladni, a lawyer, geologist, inventor, designer and acoustician. This exemplary son of a law professor graduated in the same field of study as his father, on Dad’s orders. Nevertheless, the heir dreamed of a different future. He waited for his father to pass on, then abandoned paragraphs in favour of his fantasies – sound experiments – without remorse. Admittedly, it was too late to go for the career of a musician, but the young man’s proclivity for performing slowly became more and more apparent. Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni was sucked into a whirlwind of soundwaves for good. He toured all over Europe, amazing his audiences (and Napoleon himself) with various sound shows and instruments of his own making. His signature moves must have inspired the jealousy of local illusionists. Chladni proved that sound can be seen, and developed his own technique of visualizing vibrations on a metal plate. He produced images that were never dreamed of, even in philosophy.

A team of physicists has discovered how DNA

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).

Today marks the official retail availability of Intel’s 12^th Generation Core processors, starting with the overclockable versions this side of the New Year, and the rest in 2022. These new processors are the first widescale launch of a hybrid processor design for mainstream Windows-based desktops using the underlying x86 architecture: Intel has created two types of core, a performance core and an efficiency core, to work together and provide the best of performance and low power in a singular package. This hybrid design and new platform however has a number of rocks in the river to navigate: adapting Windows 10 Windows 11 and all sorts of software to work properly, but also introduction of DDR5 at a time when DDR5 is still not widely available. There are so many potential pitfalls for this product, and we’re testing the flagship Core i9-12900K in a few key areas to see how it tackles them.

Let’s Talk Processors

Since August, Intel has been talking about the design of its 12^th Generation Core processor family, also known as Alder Lake. We’ve already detailed over 16,000 words on the topic, covering the fundamentals of each new core, how Intel has worked with Microsoft to improve Windows performance with the new design, as features like DDR5, chipsets, and overclocking. We’ll briefly cover the highlights here, but these two articles are worth the read for those that want to know.

DigiLens has raised funding from Samsung Electronics in a round that values the augmented reality smart glasses makers at more than $500 million.

Sunnyvale, California-based DigiLens did not say the exact amount it raised for the development of its extended reality glasses (XR), which will offer AR features, such as overlaying digital images on what you see.

DigiLens CEO Chris Pickett said in a previous interview with VentureBeat that the latest smart glasses are more advanced than models the company showed in 2019.

Data derived from the interactions between people should allow the organization to refine business processes, Microsoft said at Ignite 2021.

SRI Newsletter, a report from IAC2021 Dubaiby Prof. Bernard Foing, SRI President, and.

Paramount important too, space philosophy and humanities are now well recognized and accepted by the space community. The first IAF Congress I attended, 1998 at Melbourne, was dramatically void of philosophy, yet participants already were missing it. I saw many young people at IAC2021, scientists, designers, economists, scholars of various disciplines, including philosophy. And, heartwarming indeed, Space Renaissance had a great enthusiastic welcome. The space people know us (and know me!), many people which I didn’t know personally shook my hand, asked me for comments and short talks, were enthusiast about the Space Renaissance… All of that is for sure due to the big work we made for our recent congress, and of course to the great world-wide influence of our new President, Prof. Bernard Foing. Yet, there is something deeper, in the feeling of this peculiar sub-assembly of humankind, that was looking ahead enough to dedicate their life to human expansion into outer space. The last two years – characterized by the Covid pandemics — have worked hard, to shape and forge space leaders, raising the awareness of the urgency to kick-off the civilian space development. And it is now maybe a general acknowledge that the space philosophers were right, when they were rushing for an acceleration of the enabling technologies, low cost access to space, space tourism, space safety, … The need to get rid of space debris was well present in several speeches, even if only a few dare to target space debris as a huge source of business development, when we’ll start capturing and reusing them.

Simple sponges contain cells that appear to send signals to digestive chambers, a communication system that offer hints about how brains evolved.

Lightspeed is the fastest velocity in the universe. Except when it isn’t. Anyone who’s seen a prism split white light into a rainbow has witnessed how material properties can influence the behavior of quantum objects: in this case, the speed at which light propagates.

Electrons also behave differently in materials than they do in free space, and understanding how is critical for scientists studying material properties and engineers looking to develop new technologies. “An electron’s wave nature is very particular. And if you want to design devices in the future that take advantage of this quantum mechanical nature, you need to know those wavefunctions really well,” explained co-author Joe Costello, a UC Santa Barbara graduate student in condensed matter physics.

In a new paper, co-lead authors Costello, Seamus O’Hara and Qile Wu and their collaborators developed a method to calculate this wave nature, called a Bloch wavefunction, from physical measurements. “This is the first time that there’s been experimental reconstruction of a Bloch wavefunction,” said senior author Mark Sherwin, a professor of condensed matter physics at UC Santa Barbara. The team’s findings appear in the journal Nature, coming out more than 90 years after Felix Bloch first described the behavior of electrons in crystalline solids.