Menu

Blog

Page 7614

May 30, 2020

Anesthesia’s effect on consciousness solved, settling century-old scientific debate

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Summary: Exposure to anesthesia causes lipid clusters to move from an ordered state to a disordered one, then back again. These changes lead to subsequent effects that cause changes in consciousness.

Source: Scripps Research Institute

Surgery would be inconceivable without general anesthesia, so it may come as a surprise that despite its 175-year history of medical use, doctors and scientists have been unable to explain how anesthetics temporarily render patients unconscious.

May 30, 2020

Bill Faloon — If Nothing Else Kills Us, Aging Will (Longevity #005)

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, food, life extension, neuroscience, quantum physics

https://facebook.com/LongevityFB https://instagram.com/longevityyy

https://linkedin.com/company/longevityy

- Please also subscribe and hit the notification bell and click “all” on these YouTube channels:

Continue reading “Bill Faloon — If Nothing Else Kills Us, Aging Will (Longevity #005)” »

May 30, 2020

U.S. Army signs deal with SpaceX to assess Starlink broadband

Posted by in categories: internet, military

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army will experiment using Starlink broadband to move data across military networks. An agreement signed with SpaceX on May 20 gives the Army three years to try out the service.

The Army and SpaceX signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement known as a CRADA, an Army source told SpaceNews.

The project will be overseen by the Combat Capabilities Development Command’s C5ISR Center based at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

May 30, 2020

Kelvin Dafiaghor Photo 3

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Day 6 at the Artificial Intelligence Hub robotic boot camp, the kids continued the programming class using python. There was an online training section with Camp Peavy, he showed the kids robots he built and shared articles on how to build them. it was an awesome experience. It is our vision to domesticate Artificial Intelligence in Africa and we wont stop until we get there. #TakeOver.


Kelvin Dafiaghor added a new photo.

May 30, 2020

The Navy’s Patent for a Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is Wild

Posted by in categories: nuclear energy, policy, space travel

Circa 2019


Scientists have longed to create the perfect energy source. Ideally, that source would eventually replace greenhouse gas-spewing fossil fuels, power cars, boats, and planes, and send spacecraft to remote parts of the universe. So far, nuclear fusion energy has seemed like the most likely option to help us reach those goals.

The big problem? It’s difficult to harness, and we’re nowhere near producing it at the scales we need in order to cause a seismic shift in energy policy. That’s why teams of researchers across the world are racing to improve our understanding of this reaction.

Continue reading “The Navy’s Patent for a Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is Wild” »

May 30, 2020

World record internet speed achieved that is 1 million times faster than current broadband

Posted by in categories: computing, entertainment, internet

Researchers in Australia have achieved a world record internet speed of 44.2 terabits per second, allowing users to download 1,000 HD movies in a single second.

A team from Monash, Swinburne and RMIT universities used a “micro-comb” optical chip containing hundreds of infrared lasers to transfer data across existing communications infrastructure in Melbourne.

May 30, 2020

Watch: Deepfake Has Leonard Nimoy As Young Spock In J.J. Abrams’ ‘Star Trek’

Posted by in categories: entertainment, robotics/AI

Over the last few years, creating fake videos that swap the face of one person onto another using artificial intelligence and machine learning has become a bit of a hobby for a number of enthusiasts online, with the results of these “deepfakes” getting better and better. Today, a new one applies that tech to Star Trek.

Continue reading “Watch: Deepfake Has Leonard Nimoy As Young Spock In J.J. Abrams’ ‘Star Trek’” »

May 30, 2020

The story of cheaper batteries, from smartphones to Teslas

Posted by in categories: economics, mobile phones, sustainability, transportation

In 2010, a lithium-ion battery pack with 1 kWh of capacity—enough to power an electric car for three or four miles—cost more than $1,000. By 2019, the figure had fallen to $156, according to data compiled by BloombergNEF. That’s a massive drop, and experts expect continued—though perhaps not as rapid—progress in the coming decade. Several forecasters project the average cost of a kilowatt-hour of lithium-ion battery capacity to fall below $100 by the mid-2020s.

That’s the result of a virtuous circle where better, cheaper batteries expand the market, which in turn drives investments that produce further improvements in cost and performance. The trend is hugely significant because cheap batteries will be essential to shifting the world economy away from carbon-intensive energy sources like coal and gasoline.

Batteries and electric motors have emerged as the most promising technology for replacing cars powered by internal combustion engines. The high cost of batteries has historically made electric cars much more expensive than conventional cars. But once battery packs get cheap enough—again, experts estimate around $100 per kWh for non-luxury vehicles—electric cars should actually become cheaper than equivalent gas-powered cars. The cost advantage will be even bigger once you factor in the low cost of charging an electric car, so we can expect falling battery costs to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles.

May 30, 2020

Quasicrystals Are Nature’s Impossible Matter

Posted by in categories: chemistry, robotics/AI, space

VICE.


What do a frying pan, an LED light, and the most cutting edge camouflage in the world have in common? Well, that largely depends on who you ask. Most people would struggle to find the link, but for University of Michigan chemical engineers Sharon Glotzer and Michael Engel, there is a substantial connection, indeed one that has flipped the world of materials science on its head since its discovery over 30 years ago.

The magic ingredient common to all three items is the quasiperiodic crystal, the “impossible” atomic arrangement discovered by Dan Shechtman in 1982. Basically, a quasicrystal is a crystalline structure that breaks the periodicity (meaning it has translational symmetry, or the ability to shift the crystal one unit cell without changing the pattern) of a normal crystal for an ordered, yet aperiodic arrangement. This means that quasicrystalline patterns will fill all available space, but in such a way that the pattern of its atomic arrangement never repeats. Glotzer and Engel recently managed to simulate the most complex quasicrystal ever, a discovery which may revolutionize the field of crystallography by blowing open the door for a whole host of applications that were previously inconceivable outside of science-fiction, like making yourself invisible or shape-shifting robots.

Continue reading “Quasicrystals Are Nature’s Impossible Matter” »

May 30, 2020

Early Bird uses 10 times less energy to train deep neural networks

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

Rice University’s Early Bird could care less about the worm; it’s looking for megatons of greenhouse gas emissions.

Early Bird is an energy-efficient method for training deep neural networks (DNNs), the form of artificial intelligence (AI) behind self-driving cars, intelligent assistants, facial recognition and dozens more high-tech applications.

Researchers from Rice and Texas A&M University unveiled Early Bird April 29 in a spotlight paper at ICLR 2020, the International Conference on Learning Representations. A study by lead authors Haoran You and Chaojian Li of Rice’s Efficient and Intelligent Computing (EIC) Lab showed Early Bird could use 10.7 times less energy to train a DNN to the same level of accuracy or better than typical training. EIC Lab director Yingyan Lin led the research along with Rice’s Richard Baraniuk and Texas A&M’s Zhangyang Wang.