The human brain is constantly picking up patterns in everyday experiences — and can do so without conscious thought, finds a study of neuronal activity in people who had electrodes implanted in their brain tissue for medical reasons.
I’m diving deep into the concept of the Universal Productivity Dividend, a potential solution and alternative to UBI for the coming overhaul of the world’s entire socioeconomic system, when total job automation occurs.
We’ll explore what UPD is, how it works, and whether it could be the key to a more equitable future.
Since the Industrial Revolution, machines have been augmenting human labor. But the technological + AI advancements of the 2020s, and what’s coming, is a TOTALLY new shift for humanity.
With jobs up for automation, every sector is at risk – leading us to mass unemployment. Is UPD a real solution? Listen in and find out.
Star Bound is a book for anyone who wants to learn about the American space program but isn’t sure where to start. First and foremost, it’s a history—short, sweet, and straightforward. From rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard’s primitive flight tests in 1926 through the creation of NASA, from our first steps on the moon to construction of the International Space Station and planning a trip to Mars, readers will meet the people and projects that have put the United States at the forefront of space exploration. Along the way, they’ll learn:
• How the United States beat the Soviets to the moon.
• Why astronauts float in space (Hint: It’s not for lack of gravity!)
A few weeks ago, I attended the Seven Pines Symposium on Fundamental Problems in Physics outside Minneapolis, where I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion with Sir Roger Penrose. The way it worked was, Penrose spoke for a half hour about his ideas about conscious ness (Gödel, quantum gravity, microtubules, uncomputability, you know the drill), then I delivered a half-hour “response,” and then there was an hour of questions and discussion from the floor. Below, I’m sharing the prepared notes for my talk, as well as some very brief recollections about the discussion afterward. (Sorry, there’s no audio or video.) I unfortunately don’t have the text or transparencies for Penrose’s talk available to me, but—with one exception, which I touch on in my own talk—his talk very much followed the outlines of his famous books, The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind.
Still, I thought it might be of interest to some readers how I organized this material for the specific, unenviable task of debating the guy who proved that our universe contains spacetime singularities.
Battery performance is heavily influenced by the non-uniformity and failure of individual electrode particles. Understanding the reaction mechanisms and failure modes at nanoscale level is key to advancing battery technologies and extending their lifespan. However, capturing real-time electrochemical evolution at this scale remains challenging due to the limitations of existing sensing methods, which lack the necessary spatial resolution and sensitivity.
Dynamical analysis of resting-state fMRI networks reveals a consistent increase in structure-function correlation and entropy decrease upon both general anesthesia-induced and deep sleep-induced loss of consciousness in humans.
Mars was once a very wet planet, as is evident in its surface geological features. Scientists know that over the last 3 billion years, at least some water went deep underground, but what happened to the rest? Now, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) missions are helping unlock that mystery.
“There are only two places water can go. It can freeze into the ground, or the water molecule can break into atoms, and the atoms can escape from the top of the atmosphere into space,” explained study leader John Clarke of the Center for Space Physics at Boston University in Massachusetts. “To understand how much water there was and what happened to it, we need to understand how the atoms escape into space.”
Clarke and his team combined data from Hubble and MAVEN to measure the number and current escape rate of the hydrogen atoms escaping into space. This information allowed them to extrapolate the escape rate backwards through time to understand the history of water on the red planet.