How NASA might build its very first warp drive
I want to see this work as much as anyone else on io9, but every time I read an article on warp drive, I expend so much mental energy trying to wrap my head around the concept that my entire left hand side goes numb. Somewhere along the line my understanding of concepts such as the nature of Spacetime is deficient. Here's the problem. When I think about the idea of expanding the conceptual framework that describes the continuum between two abstract concepts, behind a spaceship, whilst contracting the conceptual framework that describes the continuum between two abstract concepts, in front of a spaceship; all I can think of is that this like saying that when in conversation with another person, I can reach out with my hand, grasp hold of the words that are coming out of that other persons mouth and fold them in half. If someone could point me towards some legible books that I could buy that would help me understand where my understanding has gone wrong, I would be grateful. Thanks.
Best U.S. Job: Become a Farmer to Make More than a Banker
If you want to become rich, Jim Rogers, investment whiz, best-selling author and one of Wall Street's towering personalities, has this advice: Become a farmer. Food prices have been high recently. Some have questioned how long that can continue. It's been decades since the American heartland has been a money pump and longer since farming was a major source of employment. But in the past few years, thanks to a wealthier (and hungrier) emerging-market middle class and a boom in biofuels, the business of growing has once again become a growth business. These days, a trip to Grand Island, Neb., a city of 48,500 surrounded by farms, is a trip to an economic bizarro land. Even housing has done well in the past few years. Even with the recent uptick, however, agriculture accounts for only 1% of U.S. But some experts believe agriculture can do more to fuel job growth.
Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home (w/ Video)
(Phys.org) —Forget to turn off the lights before leaving the apartment? No problem. Just raise your hand, finger-swipe the air, and your lights will power down. University of Washington computer scientists have developed gesture-recognition technology that brings this a step closer to reality. By using an adapted Wi-Fi router and a few wireless devices in the living room, users could control their electronics and household appliances from any room in the home with a simple gesture. "This is repurposing wireless signals that already exist in new ways," said lead researcher Shyam Gollakota, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. The UW research team that includes Shwetak Patel, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering and of electrical engineering and his lab, published their findings online this week. Error loading skin: Invalid XML When a person moves, there is a slight change in the frequency of the wireless signal.
African Futures | Aesthetics of the Anthropocene
Matthew Omelsky “After the End Times”: African Futures and Speculative Fictions Our current historical moment, as Slavoj Zizek has put it, is one of “apocalyptic time.” Written nearly a century ago, in a radically different moment of social crisis, Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia (1918) speaks hauntingly to our current impaired vision. In recent years, African artists have begun to articulate this “moment after,” ushering in a new paradigm in African literature and film that speculates upon post-crisis African futures. The coupling of Wanuri Kahiu’s short film Pumzi (2010) and Efe Okogu’s short story “Proposition 23” (2012) provides a productive point of entry into this emergent field in African cultural production. At stake in the work of Okogu and Kahiu is a nascent politics and aesthetics of the African Anthropocene. African topographies The distinctly African topographies in Pumzi and “Proposition 23” are of a dying, if not altogether dead, earth. Neuropolitics African futures now
Time Regained! by James Gleick
Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe by Lee Smolin Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 319 pp., $28.00 A pregnant moment in intellectual history occurs when H.G. What is time? Wells didn’t make this up. So spacetime was born. Philosophers like it, too. Moreover, it is solved by physics and not by philosophy. “Indeed,” he added, “I do not believe that there are any longer any philosophical problems about Time.” Now comes a book from the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin aiming to convince us that time is real after all. I used to believe in the essential unreality of time. I no longer believe that time is unreal. Smolin is a founder and faculty member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, an authority on quantum gravity who has also written on elementary particle theory, cosmology, and the philosophy of science. This is the view that most physicists deny and the view that Smolin proposes to demonstrate in his book. You cannot. H.G.
Video: Urine-powered mobile phone charger lets you spend a penny to make a call - Gadgets & Tech - Life & Style
Key to the breakthrough is the creation of a new microbial fuel cell (MFC) that turns organic matter – in the case, urine – into electricity. The MFCs are full of specially-grown bacteria that break down the chemicals in urine as part of their normal metabolic process. The bacteria produce electrons as they consume the matter and it this natural process that creates a small electrical charge to be stored in the MFC. “No one has harnessed power from urine to do this so it's an exciting discovery,” said Dr Ioannis Ieropoulos, an engineer at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory where the fuel cells were developed. “The beauty of this fuel source is that we are not relying on the erratic nature of the wind or the sun; we are actually reusing waste to create energy. After the urine has been processed by the MFCs the electrical charge is stored in a capacitor. The device is about the size of a car battery, but engineers believe that future versions will be smaller and more portable.
