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Jul 8, 2017
Radioactive Diamond Batteries: Making Good Use Of Nuclear Waste
Posted by Dan Kummer in category: nuclear energy
Such a battery produces very low power, but has no moving parts, no emissions of any type including radiation, needs no maintenance, does not need to be recharged and will operate for thousands of years.
The team grew a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radiation field, was able to generate a small electrical current. And the radioactive field can be produced by the diamond itself by making the diamond from radioactive carbon-14 extracted from nuclear waste.
Even better, the amount of radioactivity in each diamond battery is a lot less than in a single banana.
Jul 8, 2017
The mystery planet that could destroy the Earth
Posted by Sean Brazell in categories: entertainment, space
Just in time for summer movie season comes news that something huge is lurking out there at the edge of the solar system. It’s really big. It’s never before been detected. It’s warping gravity fields.
No, it’s not the latest Michael Bay disaster-fest or the mothership from “Independence Day.” It’s not the hypothesized Planet 9 that everyone was talking about a little over a year ago. Probably it’s another planet. Or maybe that mothership.
Jul 8, 2017
Could a Robot Be President?
Posted by Zoltan Istvan in categories: ethics, geopolitics, robotics/AI, transhumanism
Great story in Politico Magazine on #transhumanism and a future AI President. My direct digital democracy ideas and others are mentioned: “Istvan, for one, envisions regular national elections, in which voters would decide on the robot’s priorities and how it should come out on moral issues like abortion; the voters would then have a chance in the next election to change those choices. The initial programming of the system would no doubt be controversial, and the programmers would probably need to be elected, too. All of this would require amending the Constitution, Istvan acknowledges.”
Yes, it sounds nuts. But some techno-optimists really believe a computer could make better decisions for the country—without the drama and shortsightedness we accept from our human leaders.
Jul 8, 2017
Breakthrough high temperature ceramic for hypersonic vehicles and more
Posted by Klaus Baldauf in categories: energy, military, space
Breakthrough high temperature ceramic for hypersonic vehicles, space, energy and military applications.
Jul 8, 2017
What we get wrong about technology
Posted by Derick Lee in categories: food, internet, mobile phones, robotics/AI, sustainability
The toilet-paper principle suggests that we should be paying as much attention to the cheapest technologies as to the most sophisticated. One candidate: cheap sensors and cheap internet connections. There are multiple sensors in every smartphone, but increasingly they’re everywhere, from jet engines to the soil of Californian almond farms — spotting patterns, fixing problems and eking out efficiency gains.
Forget flying cars or humanoid robots. The most disruptive inventions are often cheap, simple and easy to overlook.
Jul 7, 2017
The future of work: will humans remain employed in an era of AI and robotics?
Posted by Alexandra Whittington in categories: automation, business, economics, employment, robotics/AI
The vital question for governments around the world, whatever their country’s economic situation, needs to be: what is the future of work in an era of exponential technological development?
Tags: AI, automation, future
Jul 7, 2017
A future without phone chargers may be coming soon
Posted by Shane Hinshaw in categories: futurism, mobile phones
Jul 7, 2017
Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg Again Calls for Basic Income
Posted by Shane Hinshaw in categories: economics, government
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a trip to Homer, Alaska, this weekend to do characteristically Alaskan things, like catching fish, cutting fish, watching other people catch fish, oh, and thinking hard about the concept of basic income.
Zuckerberg visited Homer as part of his personal challenge to visit every state in America in 2017. While there, he took some time out of fishing to write a blog post about Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, a state-sponsored form of basic income that redistributes profits from the state’s natural resources to its residents once a year, usually handing them around $1,000 per person (some years as much as $2,000).
“This is a novel approach to basic income in a few ways. First, it’s funded by natural resources rather than raising taxes,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Second, it comes from conservative principles of smaller government, rather than progressive principles of a larger safety net. This shows basic income is a bipartisan idea.
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