Technology
It’s Time To Build A Space Elevator, Says LiftPort Group In Successful Kickstarter Campaign
Liftport is turning to Kickstarter to gather a community excited about building a space elevator. Building a tower into the Heavens is a prospect that is likely as old as human civilization itself, and for the last 50 years or so, scientists have proposed that the best way to realize the idea is to construct a space elevator. NASA scientists put together plans for such a tower in 2000, but those efforts have been toppled by funding cuts. Now, a once abandoned group of companies aiming to build the first space elevator has reformed and recommitted to the dream with a campaign on Kickstarter .Cloned Horses Given Okay For Olympics – A New Era Of Cloned Competition?
Prometea became the world's first cloned horse in 2003 and gave birth to her clone, Pegasus, in 2008. Cloned horses are galloping their way toward the Olympic Games. The organization that presides over international equestrian events has reversed its position on prohibiting cloned horses from participating in competitions.
It is possible to travel faster than light. You just wouldn't travel faster than light. Seems strange, but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy, two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine, or warp drive, could be created that would bend but not break the laws of physics.
Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Adam Curtis on How Technology Limits Us
by Maria Popova What Ayn Rand has to do with the Occupy movement. Documentarian Adam Curtis is among our era’s most influential cultural storytellers, with a penchant for debunking the established order of beliefs and ideologies. In The Century of the Self (2002), he traces the origin of consumerism and how Freud’s theories shaped twentieth-century manipulations of public opinion, from politics to marketing; in The Power of Nightmares (2004), he explores the rise of the politics of fear; in The Trap (2007), he examines the concept and evolution of freedom and the simplistic models of human nature on which it is based. His latest BBC documentary, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace , premiered last May, mere months before the global Occupy movement erupted, and paints an infinitely intriguing, though in my view wrong on many counts, portrait of technology as a limiting, rather than liberating, cultural and political force.
Future Shock: Techno-Paranoia Narrated by Orson Welles
by Maria Popova What the dawn of computing has to do with Herbie Hancock and humanoid robotics. In 1970, sociologist and futurist Alvin Toffler , the Ray Kurzweil of his day, wrote a book entitled Future Shock , which proposed a certain distressing psychological state , induced by change so rapid the human mind can’t digest it, and introduced the notion of “information overload” for the first time. In 1972, the book, already a bestseller, was adapted into a little-known documentary of the same name, narrated by Orson Welles . Exploring the shift from industrial society to what Toffler calls “super-industrial society,” the film tackles notions of consumerism and information overload — think BBC’s The Century of the Self meets Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows .Group Set To Sequence 1000 Genomes By The End Of The Year
Begun in 2008, the "1000 Genomes Project" aims to sequence 1000 genomes and gain a deeper understanding of what genetic variations may put people at risk for disease. When the Human Genome Project got underway in 1990 it was expected to take 15 years to sequence the over 3 billion chemical base pairs that spell out our genetic code. In true Moore’s Law tradition the emergence of faster and more efficient sequencing technologies along the way led to the Project’s early completion in 2003. Today, 22 years after scientists first committed to the audacious goal of sequencing the genome, the next generation of sequencers are setting their sites much higher.
Watson’s nerve center in Yorktown Heights, New York. In the past couple years, we’ve watched IBM’s supercomputer Watson mature at an alarming rate. A mere concept birthed five years ago, the cybernetic prodigy is now Jeopardy! champ and doctor in training. Up next?
IBM’s Watson Expands Commercial Applications, Aims to Go Mobile
Future of computing has Schrödinger’s cat inside
Editor's note: This article originally appeared on Reuters Opinion under the title "A Nobel that points us toward our quantum future." It was republished with permission. Scientists like to think that the true measure of our understanding is our ability to predict something, and, in experimental physics, control something. This year's Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to Serge Haroche and David Wineland for controlling the quantum world in ways that, not so long ago, were simply unthinkable.Space lifts: A lunatic idea?
WHEN Neil Armstrong, who died on August 25th (see Obituary ), took his giant leap for mankind, he did so from Eagle , a single-use craft of a type known as a lunar excursion module. Eagle , whose job was to ferry Mr Armstrong and his co-pilot Buzz Aldrin the 100km from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface and back, weighed half as much as the command and service module that was waiting in orbit to carry them all the way back to Earth, a journey of almost 400,000km. The weight of the lunar module, on top of the command and service module, was the main reason why the Saturn V rockets that shot Apollo astronauts into space needed to be the tallest, heaviest and most powerful ever flown, a record they still hold.
Tracking light in, essentially, a tiny pinball machine
If you want to communicate a lot of information very fast and in a very short time, then you have to use light. Indeed, modern communications relies on this. Yet, communications of the very small scale still rely on passing currents along wires. The wires connecting transistors on a chip consume a significant amount of power, and generate a significant amount of heat.For further information about Earth’s Space Elevator, LiftPort Group’s Tethered Tower system or the Lunar Space Elevator Infrastructure, please visit us at www.LiftPort.com . While you’re there, please stop by our forums – ask or answer a question! You might also want to look over LiftPort in the media; a long list of links can be found here . This campaign ended on the 50th Anniversary of President Kennedy's famous Moon Speech. I encourage to listen to all of it, but if you're pressed for time, listen at either 9min or 5min. You'll be glad you did - it sets the tone for everything else about this campaign.
Space Elevator Science - Climb to the Sky - A Tethered Tower by Michael Laine
A team of researchers from the University of Florida department of chemistry has developed a new technique for growing new materials from nanorods. Materials with enhanced properties engineered from nanostructures have the potential to revolutionize the marketplace in everything from data processing to human medicine. However, attempts to assemble nanoscale objects into sophisticated structures have been largely unsuccessful. The UF study represents a major breakthrough in the field, showing how thermodynamic forces can be used to manipulate growth of nanoparticles into superparticles with unprecedented precision. Proposed DDC (Double Domed Cylinder) model: radius of cylinder (R), the height of top dome (Ht), and the bottom dome (Hb)
New technique for nanostructure assembly
The grid of 2030: all renewable, 90 percent of the time
You've probably heard the argument: wind and solar power are well and good, but what about when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine? But it's always windy and sunny somewhere. Given a sufficient distribution of energy resources and a large enough network of electrically conducting tubes, plus a bit of storage, these problems can be overcome—technologically, at least.Gamers prove equal to surgeons in operating robotic surgery tools
Leo Reynolds A maternal nag familiar to the ears of many young gamers usually follows the lines of "you're wasting your life in front of a console." Browbeaten controller wielders rejoice—a new study from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) has proven the superior hand-eye coordination skills honed from hours of joystick-based gaming are the same talents required to master the world's most advanced robotic surgery tools. The study sought to identify the developmental effect video games have on training future surgeons. "A new era has started," explained Sami Kilic, lead author of the study and associate professor and director of minimally invasive gynecology at UTMB. Kilic was inspired to conduct the study after seeing his son easily take control of a robotic surgery simulator at a medical convention.Exclusive: 21 Proposals For A Better Future From Singularity U’s 2012 Class
GSP students of the Care9 team present their core innovation to transform global health. This year’s Graduate Studies Program (GSP) at Singularity University — the learning institution focused on future-shaping technologies — is wrapping up an intense 10-week summer . To celebrate, an expo event, including the Closing Ceremony, was held at the Computer History Museum. The GSP is the biggest program that the University runs every year, filtering through over 3,000 applications to identify 80 students tasked with impacting the lives of a billion people in the next 10 years along eight grand challenges: education, global health, energy, environment, food, water, security, and poverty. Over the last few weeks , students broke up into 21 teams and presented their ideas aimed at nothing short of changing the world.3D Printing
Programming