Circa 2013
A far-flung team is trying to build the first digital lifeform to work out the basic principles of the brain.
Circa 2018
After 12 years of work, researchers at the University of Manchester in England have completed construction of a “SpiNNaker” (Spiking Neural Network Architecture) supercomputer. It can simulate the internal workings of up to a billion neurons through a whopping one million processing units.
The human brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons, exchanging signals through hundreds of trillions of synapses. While these numbers are imposing, a digital brain simulation needs far more than raw processing power: rather, what’s needed is a radical rethinking of the standard computer architecture on which most computers are built.
Digital Humans
Posted in futurism
Creating believable characters using high-quality character shader techniques, data scans of Actors, and improved geometry workflow.
Careful manufacturing yields a lithium-ion battery for compact medical devices by.
Katherine Bourzac
Sometimes science is super simple—and super tasty. A classic science experiment demonstrating how to use your microwave and a bar of chocolate to measure the speed of light is making the rounds, with easy-to-follow instructions for replicating the test at home.
🔬 You love badass science experiments. So do we. Let’s play around together.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, has previously said the drug would set “a new standard of care” for Covid-19 patients.
An MIT CSAIL AI system that can automatically decipher extinct languages offers hope of preserving a wealth of historical heritage.
Amanda Levete’s firm AL_A is partnering with Canadian energy company General Fusion to design a pioneering power plant that will use nuclear fusion.
The prototype plant will act as a demonstration facility for the technology, which uses hydrogen as fuel, with onsite facilities for experts and the general public to visit.
“General Fusion wants to transform how the world is energised by replicating the process that powers the sun and the stars,” said AL_A.
Though its a bit old, and sometimes innacurate or snarky in narration, it’s still the most detailed depiction of the cryonics process — the procedure itself on a real person, the person preserved before dying and her family as they decide to do this, deal with her death, and reflect on it after she’s preserved. It’s quite emotional and sometimes graphic, but well worth watching. Will it work? Maybe. But if you are NOT preserved there is NO chance at all. From your perspective it’d be like waking up right after dying in some distant future without feeling like any time passed at all.
That sounds a hell of a lot more appealing and likely than a bearded man on a fluffy cloud winking at me after I die.
Anita Riskin is one of hundreds of people who believe in cryonics — the process where doctors freeze human bodies. Preserve them, so that some time in the future they can be resuscitated — brought back to life. Now, as Anita Riskin sets out on her amazing journey, for the first time, you’ll see how it’s actually done — at times, quite graphically.
Firefly Aerospace currently plans for its maiden Alpha rocket launch to happen as early as Dec. 22, co-founder and CEO Tom Markusic told CNBC, as his company prepares for the next major milestone in its plan to offer a variety of space transportation services.
Markusic is confident in the launch date because of the “rigid” requirements of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where Firefly is finishing up work to prepare the launchpad at SLC-2. While “everything is susceptible to surprises,” with room in the schedule to launch as late as Jan. 31, Markusic said the “full gamut of rules” at Vandenberg means the company has put extra work into certification for Alpha’s first launch.
“We took the hard route to flight, and that was by going to a launch range that has very strict requirements,” Markusic said. “So our design has been highly vetted, as we have a lot of requirements that are put on us by the range and that makes the rocket ultimately more reliable.