Debat. Technology. Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics. A mathematical problem underlying fundamental questions in particle and quantum physics is provably unsolvable, according to scientists at UCL, Universidad Complutense de Madrid - ICMAT and Technical University of Munich.
It is the first major problem in physics for which such a fundamental limitation could be proven. The findings are important because they show that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour. A small spectral gap – the energy needed to transfer an electron from a low-energy state to an excited state – is the central property of semiconductors. Four Futures. In his speech to the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park, Slavoj Žižek lamented that “It’s easy to imagine the end of the world, but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism.”
It’s a paraphrase of a remark that Fredric Jameson made some years ago, when the hegemony of neoliberalism still appeared absolute. Yet the very existence of Occupy Wall Street suggests that the end of capitalism has become a bit easier to imagine of late. The World Is Not As Hungry As You Might Think : Goats and Soda. Back in 1798, English philosopher Thomas Malthus predicted that the world would eventually run out of food for its growing population.
"The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race," he wrote. The newly released Global Hunger Index paints a different picture. Deaths due to mass famine have plummeted, according to data from the International Food Policy Research Institute, Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide. Between 1870 and 1970, about 1.4 million people died each year in what Alex de Waal, one of the index report authors, calls "epidemics of starvation. " By contrast, about 40,000 people have died each year since 2000 from large-scale hunger. Technostism. Technostism Technostism: full workplace automation, or the pursuit of such in the name of profiting directly from automated labor.
I created technostism to be an alternative to the debate of whether or not we should issue a ‘universal basic income’. Huffingtonpost. Clean energy growth is ‘off track’ to avert climate change, says energy agency. Rain clouds are seen in the sky where a Haliade 150 offshore wind turbine operates at Alstom’s offshore wind site in Le Carnet, on the Loire Estuary, near Saint Nazaire, western France, April 27, 2014.
(REUTERS/Stephane Mahe) First the good news: In a new report on the near term future of the global renewable energy industry, the International Energy Agency is projecting impressive growth. Renewable sources like wind, solar, and hydropower should constitute nearly two-thirds of new net power capacity brought online across the globe between now and 2020. Chinese science comes of age - Focus on Asia. As well as publishing more and better science, China is increasingly committed to open science, writes Ed Gerstner Most people like to think that their nations are at centre of things in the world.
For China, this is more than just an aspiration – the Chinese word for China, Zhongguo, literally means ‘Middle Kingdom’. This goes beyond its place in the world as the most populous nation – numbering over 1.35 billion people – or one of its oldest civilizations – having been unified by Emperor Qin Shi Huang in 221 BCE. China is immensely proud of its scientific tradition – a tradition that produced the ‘four great inventions’ of the compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing, not to mention cast iron, negative numbers, India ink and more.
The future of cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin and beyond. Chris Ryan/Nature When the digital currency Bitcoin came to life in January 2009, it was noticed by almost no one apart from the handful of programmers who followed cryptography discussion groups.
Its origins were shadowy: it had been conceived the previous year by a still-mysterious person or group known only by the alias Satoshi Nakamoto1. And its purpose seemed quixotic: Bitcoin was to be a 'cryptocurrency', in which strong encryption algorithms were exploited in a new way to secure transactions. Uk.businessinsider. This solar farm is a good start.
Chris Carlson/AP Solar energy is a seriously underrated resource. Everyone you know will be able to rate you on the terrifying ‘Yelp for people’ — whether you want them to or not. You can already rate restaurants, hotels, movies, college classes, government agencies and bowel movements online.
So the most surprising thing about Peeple — basically Yelp, but for humans — may be the fact that no one has yet had the gall to launch something like it. [After Internet backlash, Peeple co-founder will rethink app] Scientists Invent a New, Lighter Steel That's as Strong as Titanium. From shipping containers to skyscrapers to turbines, good old steel is still the workhorse of our modern world.
Now, scientists are discovering new secrets to make the material better, lighter, and stronger. Today a team of material scientists at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea announced what they're calling one of the biggest steel breakthroughs of the last few decades: an altogether new type of flexible, ultra-strong, lightweight steel. Solar Cells Made Obsolete. Sweden is shifting to a 6-hour work day. Despite research telling us it’s a really bad idea, many of us end up working 50-hour weeks or more because we think we’ll get more done and reap the benefits later. And according to a study published last month involving 600,000 people, those of us who clock up a 55-hour week will have a 33 percent greater risk of having a stroke than those who maintain a 35- to 40-hour week.
With this in mind, Sweden is moving towards a standard 6-hour work day, with businesses across the country having already implemented the change, and a retirement home embarking on a year-long experiment to compare the costs and benefits of a shorter working day. A Universal Basic Income Is The Bipartisan Solution To Poverty We've Been Waiting For. There's a simple way to end poverty: the government just gives everyone enough money, so nobody is poor. No ifs, buts, conditions, or tests. Everyone gets the minimum they need to survive, even if they already have plenty. The era of cheap labour is over. There will soon be children alive who don’t remember the McDonald’s serving counter. Those uncertain seconds as you decided which till to queue at, that nervous wait as the last Big Mac got snatched before your server could grab it.
The whole frenetic, nylon-clad performance is being replaced by touchscreens. You take a ticket, scan your contactless card and wait. The food giant plans to roll out the screens at the vast majority of its UK stores. Fortune. Tom Darden, the founder and CEO of the $2.2 billion private equity fund Cherokee Investment Partners, made his mark by acquiring and cleaning up hundreds of environmentally contaminated sites. Today he is also an early stage investor in clean technology, having put his own money into dozens of companies in areas ranging from smart grid to renewable energy, and prefab green buildings.
More recently he’s backed a new approach to fusion, a potentially abundant and carbon-free form of energy that would operate at a much lower temperatures than big government projects around the world, which require temperatures of 100 million degrees centigrade and more. This new technology, called Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) is related but very different from the cold fusion technology that in 1989 researchers Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed to have licked when they revealed to the world a simple tabletop machine designed to achieve a fusion reaction at room temperature. Astronomer Finds No Evidence of Kardashev Type III Civilizations in Local Universe.
So-called Kardashev Type III civilizations – galaxy-spanning civilizations that command power equal to all of the stars in their galaxy – are very rare or entirely absent from the local Universe, according to Prof Michael Garrett of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) and Leiden Observatory. This illustration shows what the activities of a Kardashev Type III civilisation might look like – encapsulating the energy of stars by so-called Dyson spheres is one way to harness enormous energies on galactic scales; the resulting waste heat products should be detectable by telescopes.
Image credit: Danielle Futselaar / ASTRON. In 1964, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed that a civilization’s level of technological advancement could be measured based on the amount of energy that this civilization is able to utilize. ORNL integrated energy demo connects 3D-printed building, vehicle. Einstein’s Lost Hypothesis - Issue 7: Waste. Self-Sustaining Islands, the Future of Farming? Edward Snowden: we may never spot space aliens thanks to encryption. China Is Building The Mother Of All Reputation Systems To Monitor Citizen Behavior. As tech threatens jobs, we must test a universal basic income. Find, track, destroy: Anti-drone system takes UAVs out of the sky.
The Growing Precariat: Why We Need a Universal Basic Income. Brynjolfsson and McAfee: The jobs that AI can't replace. How technology may change our labor and leisure. WiTricity: MIT Startup's Wireless Charging Tech for Drones. Quora. 3D body scanning set to disrupt clothing industry. Building a Self-Planting Farm for Our Resources-Deprived Future. Robotic unicycle drones could one day deliver packages to your door. Will Machines Take Your Job? Our Paradoxical Economy Courtesy of Technology and the Lack of Basic Income — Basic income. Five Dollar 3D Printed Stethoscope Outmatches Two Hundred Dollar Model.
The LHC finds evidence of particle activity beyond the Standard Model. "Spooky" Quantum Entanglement Reveals Invisible Objects. Energy storage megashift ahead. Electrical circuit made of gel can repair itself. Microscopic fish are 3-D-printed to do more than swim: Researchers demonstrate a novel method to build microscopic robots with complex shapes and functionalities. A startup that grows metal expands with money from Founders Fund - Fortune. More than half of students chasing dying careers, report warns. Futuristic biplane design eliminates sonic boom. Brain model with maturity of 5-week-old fetus grown in a lab. DARPA Funds Stage 2 of XS-1 Spaceplane Design Competition. D-Wave Releases the Second Version of Its Revolutionary "Quantum" Computer. Magnetic Wormhole Created in Lab - Scientific American.
Thermoelectrics: A Lot Of Heat Is Wasted, So Why Not Convert It Into Power? : All Tech Considered. Crazy-Efficient Rotary Engine Lands Million-Dollar DARPA Contract. Robots Will Take Fast-Food Jobs, But Not Because of Minimum Wage Hikes. 'Artificial leaf' could power communities of the future. Minimum-wage offensive could speed arrival of robot-powered restaurants. The Peregrinating Penguin: The Maximally Deployable Modular City.
Intel's new storage chip is 1,000 times faster than flash memory. Algae: The Future of Just About Everything. Solar Cells Could Capture Infrared Rays for More Power. The Rise of Open Curriculum — Bright. Nye Tesla-batterier vinker farvel til DONG og IT-tidsalder. Huffingtonpost. Massless particle discovery could radically accelerate electronics. Renewable energy boom will mean vastly cheaper electricity. Uh-oh, a robot just passed the self-awareness test. Can the Inflationary Multiverse Explain the Fermi Paradox? Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Researchers Connect Animal Brains To Share Thoughts and Solve Challenging Problems - Futurism. Computer program fixes old code faster than expert engineers. New wireless charger can simultaneously power 30 mobile phones at distance.
Wave generator supplies US electrical grid for the first time. Boeing just patented a jet engine powered by lasers and nuclear explosions (BA) We've just started work on the technology to power a Star-Trek style replicator. In Defense of the Three-Day Work Week. ZERO WASTE Grocery Store: This is what every market on Earth should look like. Scientists have built artificial neurons that fully mimic human brain cells - ScienceAlert. A World Without Work. A World Without Work. Will Advances in Technology Create a Jobless Future? The Humans Who Dream Of Companies That Won't Need Us. Pope's climate change encyclical tells rich nations: 'Pay your debt to the poor' Solar: The First 1% Was the Hardest. FINLAND: New Government Commits to a Basic Income Experiment. Gravity-defying 3D printer to print bridge over water in Amsterdam. Chief Google Engineer: Humans Will Have Hybrid Brains by 2030. Laser-powered spacecraft energy delivery system could save the Earth from asteroids.
Stanford engineers develop computer that operates on water droplets. Tiny Robotic Tentacles Can Lasso an Ant. SpaceX Continues Ambitious Plan for Internet Satellites in Space - Futurism. PRECOBS App Predicts Crimes Before They Happen - Futurism. This Week in Tech: A Laser System to Protect the Earth from Asteroids, Robotic Tentacles Gentle Enough to Lasso an Ant, A Computer That Runs on Water, and More! : Futurology.
This Week in Science: The First Asteroid Mining Mission, The Discovery of an Evolutionary Missing Link, A New Chip that Mimics that Human Brain, and More! : Futurology. Stop fighting for bullshit jobs // Propaganda [003] : Futurology. A place to freely discuss energy, "free energy", expensive energy, whatever. (no spam filter)