Lifeboat Foundation

Varjo’s VR headset lets you see virtual objects in much greater detail, and could be used for training, design or entertainment.

Ever watch ‘Your Brain on Blank’? Ever have a question about the brain? Then you’re in the right place. Join us as neuroscience Ph.D. candidate Shannon Odell takes a few minutes to answer some of the write-in questions from our viewers about how different stimuli affect your brain.

An expanding arcade of video games takes aim at easing autism traits, from poor visual attention to problems with motor skills, but the evidence of the games’ effectiveness remains limited.

It seems that Microsoft isn’t done experimenting with blockchain technology.

Microsoft and Ernst & Young (EY) announced the launch of a blockchain solution for content rights and royalties management on Wednesday.

The blockchain solution is first implemented for Microsoft’s game publisher partners. Indeed, gaming giant Ubisoft is already experimenting with the technology.

Continue reading “Microsoft launches ambitious blockchain project to help creators get paid” »

Neural networks running on GPUs have achieved some amazing advances in artificial intelligence, but the two are accidental bedfellows. IBM researchers hope a new chip design tailored specifically to run neural nets could provide a faster and more efficient alternative.

It wasn’t until the turn of this decade that researchers realized GPUs (graphics processing units) designed for video games could be used as hardware accelerators to run much bigger neural networks than previously possible.

That was thanks to these chips’ ability to carry out lots of computations in parallel rather than having to work through them sequentially like a traditional CPU. That’s particularly useful for simultaneously calculating the weights of the hundreds of neurons that make up today’s deep learning networks.

Continue reading “This New Chip Design Could Make Neural Nets More Efficient and a Lot Faster” »

It’ll be like that movie Passengers, but less creepy. #til

Hawking is being interred at Westminster Abbey on Friday, with a thousand members of the public (selected through a lottery system) present for the ceremony. The physicist’s remains will be placed between those of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

His voice will be broadcast into space after the service honoring his life.

Hawking’s words “have been set to an original score by composer Vangelis, most famous for his Chariots of Fire film theme,” the BBC reports.

Continue reading “Stephen Hawking’s Voice Will Be Broadcast Into Space” »

This summer, the fifth instalment of the Jurassic Park franchise will be on the big screen, reinforcing a love of dinosaurs that has been with many of us since childhood. There is something awe inspiring about the biggest, fiercest, and “deadest” creatures that have ever walked the planet. But the films have had an additional benefit – they have sparked an interest in dinosaur DNA.

The “Mr DNA” sequence in the original movie is a great piece of science communication and the concept of extracting DNA from the bodies of “dino” blood-engorged mosquitoes is an outstanding piece of fiction. It is, however, just fiction.

Continue reading “Jurassic World: Can we really resurrect a dinosaur?” »

Nothing goes out of date more quickly than films set in the future. Big-screen visions of tomorrow always reflect the era in which they were made – hence the disco outfits in Flash Gordon. Most soon become quaint relics rather than uncanny prophecies of the shape of things to come. But then, on the other hand, there is Children of Men. Alfonso Cuarón’s feverish dystopian chase thriller is set in a decade’s time, in 2027, but it also came out a decade ago. By now, we should be chuckling at how far off-target its predictions were, both in their overall picture and their background minutiae. Instead, it’s tempting to ask whether Cuarón had access to a crystal ball.

Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian thriller is one of the 21st Century’s most acclaimed films – and its version of the future is now disturbingly familiar. Nicholas Barber looks back.