Microsoft is entering the race to build a metaverse inside Teams, just days after Facebook rebranded to Meta in a push to build virtual spaces for both consumers and businesses. Microsoft is bringing Mesh, a collaborative platform for virtual experiences, directly into Microsoft Teams next year. It’s part of a big effort to combine the company’s mixed reality and HoloLens work with meetings and video calls that anyone can participate in thanks to animated avatars.
With today’s announcement, Microsoft and Meta seem to be on a collision course to compete heavily in the metaverse, particularly for the future of work.
Microsoft Mesh always felt like the future of Microsoft Teams meetings, and now it’s starting to come to life in the first half of 2022. Microsoft is building on efforts like Together Mode and other experiments for making meetings more interactive, after months of people working from home and adjusting to hybrid work.
The article details the discomfort astronauts may feel due to malfunctioning waste management systems. Luckily their critical systems are not compromised. It’s also very difficult for them to make these repairs up in orbit.
Well, I guess adult diapers are the way of the future. 😂
A NASA astronaut stationed aboard the International Space Station acknowledged this week that a design flaw in the toilet built into SpaceX’s Crew Dragon module will force she and her colleagues to use diapers during their upcoming return journey to Earth.
“Yes, we are unable to use the toilet on Dragon for the return trip, and of course, that’s suboptimal,” McArthur told reporters on Friday, according to Space.com.
Aside from upturning the economics of the automobile industry, Tesla has also begun innovation efforts in how we receive our day-to-day electrical power services.
Indeed, the day you begin to pay Tesla your electricity bills may soon come if they continue their success. Welcome dear, today we will talk about Tesla’s battery farm installations in Australia and how they changed the lives of many Australian citizens.
Tesla’s ‘battery farm’ in South Australia is officially known as the Hornsdale Power Reserve. Its construction history begins with the local southern Australian government searching for plausible plans for the improvement of their electrical power grid with a battery design in the region.
“We are absolutely losing some science,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tells The Register. “How much science we lose depends on how many satellites there end up being. You occasionally lose data. At the moment it’s one in every ten images.”
Telescopes can try waiting for a fleet of satellites to pass before they snap their images, though if astronomers are trying to track moving objects, such as near-Earth asteroids or comets, for example, it can be impossible to avoid the blight.
“As we raise the number of satellites, there starts to be multiple streaks in images you take. That’s no longer irritating, you really are losing science. Ten years from now, there may be so many that we can’t deal with it,” he added.
Our universe started with the big bang. But only for the right definition of “our universe”. And of “started” for that matter. In fact, probably the Big Bang is nothing like what you were taught. A hundred years ago we discovered the beginning of the universe. Observations of the retreating galaxies by Edwin Hubble and Vesto Slipher, combined with Einstein’s then-brand-new general theory of relativity, revealed that our universe is expanding. And if we reverse that expansion far enough – mathematically, purely according to Einstein’s equations, it seems inevitable that all space and mass and energy should once have been compacted into an infinitesimally small point – a singularity. It’s often said that the universe started with this singularity, and the Big Bang is thought of as the explosive expansion that followed. And before the Big Bang singularity? Well, they say there was no “before”, because time and space simply didn’t exist. If you think you’ve managed to get your head around that bizarre notion then I have bad news. That picture is wrong. At least, according to pretty much every serious physicist who studies the subject. The good news is that the truth is way cooler, at least as far as we understand it.
Recently, the SETI, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, released an application called SETI AT HOME, which allows any regular computer to help the SETI researchers find alien intelligence. This idea is brilliant since it saves an enormous amount of money by distributing processing power throughout computers all around the globe instead of buying super expensive supercomputers. So, anyone can go to their website and download this application to help the SETI researchers crunch data to find extraterrestrials. This way, the entire internet can be turned into a giant supercomputer! But what if we needed a processing capacity that far exceeded all the computers on Earth used in conjunction? Well, for such vast computational power, we may have to look beyond our planetary resources, directly to the stars! This is where the idea of the Matrioshka Brain proposed by Robert J. Bradbury comes in!
In his 1960 paper “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation”, physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson proposed the idea of a megastructure. Now commonly known as a Dyson Sphere, it was conceived to spot other advanced civilizations in the universe, particularly, Kardashev Type 2 civilizations that are capable of controlling all of the available energy in their stellar system! Dyson believed that a Type 2 civilization should be able to build this hypothetical megastructure around its star which would completely encircle it and harness all its energy.
Have you ever seen the popular movie called The Matrix? In it, the main character Neo realizes that he and everyone else he had ever known had been living in a computer-simulated reality. But even after taking the red pill and waking up from his virtual world, how can he be so sure that this new reality is the real one? Could it be that this new reality of his is also a simulation? In fact, how can anyone tell the difference between simulated reality and a non-simulated one? The short answer is, we cannot. Today we are looking at the simulation hypothesis which suggests that we all might be living in a simulation designed by an advanced civilization with computing power far superior to ours.
The simulation hypothesis was popularized by Nick Bostrum, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, in 2003. He proposed that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power may run simulations of their ancestors. Perhaps to learn about their culture and history. If this is the case he reasoned, then they may have run many simulations making a vast majority of minds simulated rather than original. So, there is a high chance that you and everyone you know might be just a simulation. Do not buy it? There is more!
According to Elon Musk, if we look at games just a few decades ago like Pong, it consisted of only two rectangles and a dot. But today, games have become very realistic with 3D modeling and are only improving further. So, with virtual reality and other advancements, it seems likely that we will be able to simulate every detail of our minds and bodies very accurately in a few thousand years if we don’t go extinct by then. So games will become indistinguishable from reality with an enormous number of these games. And if this is the case he argues, “then the odds that we are in base reality are 1 in billions”.
There are other reasons to think we might be in a simulation. For example, the more we learn about the universe, the more it appears to be based on mathematical laws. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT argues that our universe is exactly like a computer game which is defined by mathematical laws. So for him, we may be just characters in a computer game discovering the rules of our own universe.
It’s one of the most fascinating aspects of the natural world: shapes repeat over and over. The branches of a tree extending into the sky look much the same as blood vessels extending through a human lung, if upside-down. The largest mammal, the whale, is a scaled-up version of the smallest, the shrew. Recent research even suggests the structure of the human brain resembles that of the entire universe. It’s everywhere you look, really. Nature reuses its most successful shapes.
Theoretical physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico is concerned with fundamental questions in physics, and there are few more fundamental than this one: why does nature continually reuse the same non-linear shapes and structures from the smallest scale to the very largest? In a new Big Think video (see above), West explains that the scaling laws at work are nothing less than “the generic universal mathematical and physical properties of the multiple networks that make an organism viable and allow it to develop and grow.”
“I think it’s one of the more remarkable properties of life, actually,” West added.
Studying The Atoms Of Perception, Memory, Behavior and Consciousness — Dr. Christof Koch, Ph.D. — Chief Scientist, MindScope Program, Allen Institute.
Dr. Christof Koch, Ph.D. (https://alleninstitute.org/what-we-do/brain-science/about/te…stof-koch/) is Chief Scientist of the MindScope Program at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, originally funded by a donation of more than $500 million from Microsoft founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen.
With his B.S. and M.S. in physics from the University of Tübingen in Germany and his Ph.D. from the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Dr. Koch spent four years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT, and from 1987 until 2,013 was a professor at Caltech, from his initial appointment as Assistant Professor, Division of Biology and Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, to his final position as Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive & Behavioral Biology.
EVP, patient advocacy & engagement, national patient advocate foundation.
Gwen Darien is Executive Vice President for Patient Advocacy and Engagement, at the National Patient Advocate Foundation (https://www.npaf.org/), an organization with a mission of bringing patient voices to health system delivery reform, developing and driving initiatives promoting equitable access to affordable quality health care, and prioritizing the patient voice in health system delivery reform to achieve person-centered care. She is also Executive Vice President at their sister organization, Patient Advocate Foundation (https://www.patientadvocate.org/), a national non-profit organization which provides case management services and financial aid to Americans with chronic, life threatening and debilitating illnesses.
Gwen is a longtime patient advocate who has played leadership roles in some of the country’s preeminent nonprofit organizations.
