The Five Biggest Threats To Human Existence In the daily hubbub of current “crises” facing humanity, we forget about the many generations we hope are yet to come. Not those who will live 200 years from now, but 1,000 or 10,000 years from now. I use the word “hope” because we face risks, called existential risks, that threaten to wipe out humanity. Not everyone has ignored the long future though. But had these pioneers or futurologists not thought about humanity’s future, it would not have changed the outcome. We are in a more privileged position today. Future imperfect Yet, these risks remain understudied. If humanity becomes extinct, at the very least the loss is equivalent to the loss of all living individuals and the frustration of their goals. With that in mind, I have selected what I consider the five biggest threats to humanity’s existence. Finally, just because something is possible and potentially hazardous, doesn’t mean it is worth worrying about. 1. The Cuban Missile crisis was very close to turning nuclear. 2. 3. 4.
Reactionless motor: Needs more evidence. Photo by Paramount Pictures The ‘Net has been buzzing about a paper published by a team of engineers at NASA claiming that they have built a device that creates thrust without propellant. There have been lots of articles written about it, it’s spawned a zillion tweets, and I’m getting plenty of email asking me about it. Here’s the thing: I'm not convinced. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but I am saying it’s very, very likely to be some sort of measurement or experimental error. I could write a lot about this, but instead I’ll point you to two people who already have written excellent discussions on what’s going on here: John Baez on Google Plus (you should read both his first article and his second one) as well as my old friend Steve Novella. The bottom line here is what the team is proposing violates a very basic law of physics; all the forces inside the device appear to be balanced, yet a thrust is still generated. Photo by Brady et al., from the paper This device doesn’t have that yet.
Hologram Projectors For Your Smartphone Could Be Close | IFLScience Just in time for the new Star Wars film, it seems the technology from the originals is starting to come true. First it was lightsabers, then prosthetic arms like Luke Skywalker's, and now we're being promised hologram projectors like R2D2 - although maybe not as cute. At the moment if you want to project three dimensional holograms into space you need to use mirrors or multiple sources placed around where the hologram is formed, so that light can interact from different directions. Ostendo Technologies, a California start-up are dreaming much smaller. However, the more ambitious goal, which Ostendo's founder Hussein El-Ghoroury hopes to achieve as soon as 2016, is to create three dimensional displays projected from a single phone. What Ostendo are not revealing is how they manage to project these images onto the air from a single direction.
Gecko-Inspired Climbing Paddles Allow A Man To Climb A Glass Wall | IFLScience We’ve heard a lot of stories recently describing awesome bio-inspired materials, from superhydrophobic surfaces to 3D printed shark skin. Now DARPA has gone and topped the biomimetics chart by showcasing their gecko-inspired climbing paddles that allow humans to climb vertical glass walls. The technology may be a little less glamorous than a spidey suit, but who cares, this is an amazing achievement. The devices form part of DARPA’s Z-Man program which aims to develop bio-inspired climbing equipment for use in warfare that will do away with conventional tools that have not advanced much over the years. The demonstration involved a 218-pound (99 kilogram) man using two hand-held paddles to ascend a 25 foot (7.5 meter) glass wall, without needing a safety belay. And just to show off, they conducted another trial where the man was carrying a further 50 pounds of weight (22.5 kg). DARPA scientists had two main hurdles to overcome whilst attempting to mimic the gecko toe.
Emerging Neuro and Cognitive Technologies Sturdy 3D Material Behaves Like Graphene Scientists have discovered a new material than has the same electronic properties as two-dimensional graphene, but in a stable 3D form. Peeled from graphite, the super thin, wonder material graphene is so insanely conductive, researchers have recently created electricity just by dragging drop of seawater across it. But working only in two dimensions means it can’t really be used in complex hardware just yet. But thanks to its 3D form, this newly discovered material -- cadmium arsenide, Cd3As2 -- could be more easily shaped into practical devices like transistors, sensors, and electrodes. One of the hallmarks of graphene -- made up of one-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms -- is the weird behavior of its electrons. Earlier studies showed how a sodium bismuth compound can mimic graphene, but turns to powder when exposed to air. “We think this family of materials can be a good candidate for everyday use,” Chen says in a news release. This work was published in Nature Materials last month.
China makes graphene reinforced aluminum that is up to 58% stronger than regular aluminum alloys and uses just 0.3% graphene TweetGraphene-reinforced aluminum matrix nanocomposites were successfully synthesized through ball milling and powder metallurgy. The tensile strength and yield strength of graphene-reinforced aluminum matrix nanocomposites are remarkably enhanced by adding graphene nanoflakes(GNFs). Importantly, the ductility properties are remained excellently, which is firstly found in the second phase reinforced metal matrix nanocomposites. The microstructures were observed by OM, SEM and TEM method. The tensile strength and yield strength of graphene-reinforced aluminum matrix nanocomposites are remarkably enhanced by adding graphene nanoflakes (GNFs), they reported in their paper in the Journal of Materials Engineering. Importantly, the ductility properties are remained excellently, which is firstly found in the second phase reinforced metal matrix nanocomposites. If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon.
Driverless Cars: Optional by 2024, Mandatory by 2044 Sixty years ago this month, Isaac Asimov published a short story about a self-driving “automatobile” called Sally who had not only judgment but feelings, which spelled doom for the man who loved her. It will happen—and it won’t. Fully automated cars will be common. Today you can buy a top-of-the-line S-Class car from Mercedes-Benz that figuratively says “ahem” when you begin to stray out of your lane or tailgate. Accident rates will plummet, parking problems will vanish, streets will narrow, cities will bulk up, and commuting by automobile will become a mere extension of sleep, work, and recreation. “When we modeled that for Ann Arbor, Mich., we found we’d need only 15 percent of the cars now owned there,” for a per-mile cost savings of 75 percent, says Larry Burns, director of the Program on Sustainable Mobility at the Earth Institute of Columbia University, in New York City. What’s most striking about the new thinking is how suddenly it jelled. Many others were just as sure.
Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence: When Machines Know The promise of the Information Age is based on a unique partnership between humans and machines. Machines did the heavy lifting of transforming data into information, which allowed humans to then transform information into knowledge. Some humans still do routine data entry and management, but most of those jobs are now done by machines. As that happened, knowledge worker jobs emerged to handle the resulting explosion of information. Joseph Schumpeter described shifts like this as a kind of “creative destruction” unleashed by innovation - cycles of economic destruction and creation, catalyzed by waves of new technology. A Knowledge Hierarchy If you’re ever bored and looking for some fun, try telling a knowledge management expert that you’ve figured out the exact meaning of this diagram to the right. It’s a “knowledge hierarchy” or “DIKW Pyramid” (DIKW = Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom) and lots of people have lots of opinions about what it means. Embedded Knowledge At least for now.
Temporal Invisibility Cloak For Fiber Optic Communications Developed With electronic communication quickly taking over all traditional methods of sharing information, privacy has become of paramount importance. A team of researchers have developed a technique that is able to temporally cloak a signal when attempted spying is taking place along a fiber optic network. The research was led by Julien Fatome from the Université de Bourgogne and the paper was published in an open access format in Nature Communications. This is not the first attempt at concealing sensitive information sent electronically, though this appears to be the most complete. The key to the technique relies on the principle of light polarization, which refers to the directionality of the light’s electric and magnetic fields. The team was able to use the Omnipolarizer to completely shield data from a fiber optic cable from being read by unsecured sources. The polarization used in (a) allows the CW probe to copy the information that is being sent. [Hat tip: Neomatica]
Moto 360 Hands-On: The One We've Been Waiting For (Probably) Supercooled Helium Does Things That Don't Seem Possible We all know helium as a gas for blowing up balloons and making people talk like chipmunks. It's also incredibly important as a coolant for medical devices and scientific instrumentation. However, what is less known is that helium has two different liquid states, one of which is truly strange, bordering on creepy. Helium I occurs between 2.18° and 4.22° Kelvin (that is -270.97°C to -268.93°C ). It has a few quirks of its own. However, it is when we go below 2.18K that things get really weird. To understand what is going on you need to realize that all the fluids we normally encounter have viscosity. However, a “superfluid” has no viscosity at all. All of these are the result of quantum mechanics – something that normally occurs on a scale far too small for us to see. The wall climbing occurs in the form of a film 30 millionths of a millimeter thick, known as a Rollin film. The thermal conductivity works in a very different way from heat conduction in most materials.