For decades, physicists have struggled to create a quantum theory of gravity. Now an approach that dates to the 1970s is attracting newfound attention.
To map Earth’s atmosphere, satellite data must be carefully collected, processed, and archived. We cover its journey from outer space to the ground.
Throughout human history, doomsayers — people predicting the end of the world — have lived largely on the fringes of society. Today, a doomsday industry is booming thanks to TV shows, movies, hyper-partisan politics, and the news media. With the country’s collective anxiety on the rise, even the nation’s wealthiest people are jumping on board, spending millions of dollars on survival readiness in preparation for unknown calamities.
We sent Thomas Morton to see how people across the country are planning to weather the coming storm.
Continue reading “The Rich Are Preparing For The Apocalypse Better Than You | VICE on HBO” »
It doesn’t seem like all that long ago that even the idea of an electric Ferrari was controversial. Indeed, it was 2016 when then-Ferrari Chairman Sergio Marchionne said that, “with Ferrari, (an electric car) is almost an obscene concept,” before he finished up with, “you’d have to shoot me first.” Well, Sergio– times sure do change, don’t they? At least, that’s what a series of plans for an electric Ferrari from a leaked patent filing would seem to say about the matter!
In fairness to Marchionne, he would pass on before Ferrari built a pure electric car, succumbing as he did to cancer at the age of 66. Tragic as that was, what isn’t tragic is Ferrari joining the rest of the automotive universe in the 21st century with plans to build a for-real battery-powered Ferrari by 2025.
The push for Ferrari to finally go electric was, no doubt, accelerated by the success of the electric Porsche Taycan and, obviously, the rapid growth of Tesla (and, likely, the staggering growth of TSLA stock). With the launch of its first PHEV last year and recently announced plans to go “60% hybrid by 2022”, then, the step towards all-electric seems ready to happen.
Artificial intelligence helped detect an outbreak of the coronavirus one week before the CDC issued a warning.
The BlueDot algorithm scours news reports and airline ticketing data to predict the spread of diseases like those linked to the flu outbreak in China.
The University of Queensland (UQ) announced on Friday it has been asked to develop a vaccine for the recent Chinese coronavirus outbreak, using the university’s recently developed rapid response technology.
In a statement, the university announced it had received a request to develop a vaccine from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which describes itself as “an innovative partnership between public, private, philanthropic, and civil organisations” which seeks to develop vaccines to protect the world against outbreaks.
Head of the university’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, Professor Paul Young, said in a statement that UQ has novel technology for the rapid development of vaccines, which could provide a vaccine within six months.
New transhumanism and biohacking story out by one of Asia’s most influential newspapers: South China Morning Post:
From brain supplements to chip implants to nootropics, humans are using technology, medicine and extreme diets to improve their brainpower, health and longevity.
Continue reading “The biohacker who wants to become cyborg to be more perfect” »
Live Spacewalk: Watch as astronauts complete the intricate process of repairing the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a dark matter and antimatter detector outside the International Space Station.
On Sat., Jan. 25 at 6:50 a.m. EST, tune in for a live spacewalk as Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Andrew Morgan of NASA perform the fourth and final spacewalk to repair AMS, which has far outlived its planned three-year lifespan. In addition to revitalizing an important piece of scientific equipment, the process of creating the tools and procedures for these spacewalks is preparing teams for the types of spacewalks that may be required on Moon and Mars missions.
In our current information society and digital media culture, the stories, images, voices and traces we leave behind, construct the narrative of who we are. Our identity has become synonymous with our online data. Digital media empowers us. However, its inescapable presence within our lives reveals potential for consequences beyond mortality. Our digital death is effusively about data. What if all your data was used to create a digital afterlife presence capable of generating communication in your style of speaking and thinking? For those of us actively participating within the digital realm this could soon be a reality flowing into mainstream society. The digital footprint we now obtain comes with concerns of privacy, power, remembering & forgetting. Constructing these affordances within a curation towards death, causes for more daunting concerns about our western societies and our roles within it. One must ask themselves, how do we construct our ways of remembering in this digital age, knowing our immortality could be reconstructed to live on forever?
Season 2, episode 1 of Black Mirror, ‘Be Right Back’ hauntingly confronts us with our worries about how to deal with the death of loved ones. The episode demonstrates a frontal onslaught on humanities fragility when it comes to dealing with death & the concepts of how we decide to remember. The episode showcases technology, able of creating artificial intelligence that sounds, talks and thinks like you would. Black Mirror, the dystopian Netflix series, offers up a future that is eerily close to ours. Its success comes mainly from showing us a sci-fi angle that borders reality. But much like the title suggests, the black mirrors we face each day, the screens and technology that rule our lives, cast back a reflection of us and our society that is not just ‘close’ but already here.
