Via Virtual Reality, Mother Encounters Deceased Daughter ‘But that barrier was going to melt away someday soon. The transhumanists had promised…’ — Stephen Baxter, 2008.
BabyX AI Real Enough For You ‘…what’s to keep me from showing face, Man? I’m showing a voice this instant… I can show a face the same way.’ — Robert Heinlein, 1966.
Someday, You Might Like VR Enough To Move In ‘That barrier was going to melt away someday soon. The transhumanists had promised…’ — Stephen Baxter, 2008.
This approach can be described as “physical eschatology” – a term coined by the astronomer Martin Rees for using astrophysics to model where the Universe is going. Rees took a cue from theology, in which “eschatology” is the study of ultimate things such as the end of the world. And the classic paper on the topic is Freeman Dyson’s 1979 paper on life in open universes, which outlined likely or possible existential catastrophes that could threaten life far into the future, from the death of the Sun to the detachment of stars from galaxies.
How long can civilisation survive? To thrive for billions of years, there will be a few troublesome problems to solve – from the death of the Sun to the decay of matter.
THE Call of Duty Black Ops 5 release date is expected to be announced in the coming months by Activision, but it doesn’t appear that it will be stealing the limelight from Modern Warfare.
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Cases of the new virus on the quarantined Diamond Princess reached 135 Monday, including 20 Americans. Conditions below decks could risk further spread.
The spacecraft’s science instruments were turned off by a fault protection routine, which allows the spacecraft to automatically take actions to protect itself.
The Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW) program has been killed by the US Air Force as the service looks to make budget cuts in the area of hypersonic prototyping in the coming year.
Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek revealed Monday that budget pressure, rather than performance, influenced the service’s decision to abandon its HCSW program and continue its development of the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) — its other hypersonic weapon program.
“We will continue to work collaboratively with our sister services to see how we can most effectively leverage each other’s capabilities, ensuring the most prudent use of taxpayer dollars,” she said in a statement emailed to Defense News on February 10.
If you’ve ever opened an umbrella or set up a folding chair, you’ve used a deployable structure—an object that can transition from a compact state to an expanded one. You’ve probably noticed that such structures usually require rather complicated locking mechanisms to hold them in place. And, if you’ve ever tried to open an umbrella in the wind or fold a particularly persnickety folding chair, you know that today’s deployable structures aren’t always reliable or autonomous.
Now, a team of researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have harnessed the domino effect to design deployable systems that expand quickly with a small push and are stable and locked into place after deployment.
The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Computer chips use billions of tiny switches, called transistors, to process information. The more transistors on a chip, the faster the computer.
A material shaped like a one-dimensional DNA helix might further push the limits on a transistor’s size. The material comes from a rare earth element called tellurium.
Researchers found that the material, encapsulated in a nanotube made of boron nitride, helps build a field-effect transistor with a diameter of two nanometers. Transistors on the market are made of bulkier silicon and range between 10 and 20 nanometers in scale.
A scrupulous gatekeeper stands between the brain and its circulatory system to let in the good and keep out the bad, but this porter, called the blood-brain barrier, also blocks trial drugs to treat diseases like Alzheimer’s or cancer from getting into the brain.
Now a team led by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has engineered a way of studying the barrier more closely with the intent of helping drug developers do the same. In a new study, the researchers cultured the human blood-brain barrier on a chip, recreating its physiology more realistically than predecessor chips.
The new chip devised a healthy environment for the barrier’s central component, a brain cell called the astrocyte, which is not a neuron, but which acts as neurons’ intercessors with the circulatory system. Astrocytes interface in human brains with cells in the vasculature called endothelial cells to collaborate with them as the blood-brain barrier.
