“I know that you’re a computer-generated image, but your smell, your touch, the way you feel, even the things you say and think seem so real.” — Commander William Riker.
Serious Wonder looks at various episodes of Star Trek to unlock their future-oriented humanist philosophy. — B.J. Murphy for Serious Wonder.
At Singularity University, space is one of our Global Grand Challenges (GGCs). The GGCs are defined as billion-person problems. They include, for example, water, food, and energy and serve as targets for the innovation and technologies that can make the world a better place.
You might be thinking: We have enough challenges here on Earth—why include space?
Continue reading “Space and Technology Review: Our Home Among the Stars” »
It takes 100 attoseconds for a krypton electron to respond to light. That might not seem like much, but someday it could limit the speed of optoelectronic circuits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQtQGoMRXaI
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Physicists in England claim they have discovered how to create matter from light, by smashing together individual massless photons– a feat that was first theorized back in 1934, and has been considered practically impossible until now. If this new discovery pans out, the final piece of the physics jigsaw puzzle that describes how light and matter interact would be complete. No one’s quite sure of the repercussions if matter can indeed be produced from photon-photon collision, but I’m sure something awesomely scientific will emerge before long.
Way back in 1930, British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac theorized that an electron and its antimatter counterpart (a positron) could be annihilated (combined) to produce two photons. Then, in 1934, two physicists — Breit and Wheeler — proposed that the opposite should also be true: That two photons could be smashed together to produce an electron and positron (a Breit-Wheeler pair). In other words, that light can be converted into matter, and vice versa — or, to phrase it another way, E=mc2 works in both directions. This would close one of the last gaps in particle physics that has been theorized, but has proven very hard to prove through observation.
It’s clearly some kind of jewelry or small weapon case, not a freaking laptop.
But just for arguments sake, why would advanced time travelers be using laptops at all? Why not a tablet? Oh god, now they’re going to go over every single ancient depiction of a person looking at a tablet and say it’s from the future. That would have made the library at Alexandria the ancient equivalent to a Best Buy big box store in our time…
Oh god, what have I done?
Too bad I can’t go back in time and…errr.
wink
Continue reading “Is This Ancient Greek ‘Laptop’ Proof That Time Travel Is Real?” »
Rupert Sanders’ live-action ‘Ghost in the Shell’ movie has added Michael Pitt as the villain, but it’s not the antagonist you might have expected.
Researchers have constructed the first comprehensive model of how neurons in the brain behave when faced with a complex decision-making process, and how they adapt and learn from mistakes.
The mathematical model, developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge, is the first biologically realistic account of the process, and is able to predict not only behaviour, but also neural activity. The results, reported in the Journal of Neuroscience, could aid in the understanding of conditions from obsessive compulsive disorder and addiction to Parkinson’s disease.
The model was compared to experimental data for a wide-ranging set of tasks, from simple binary choices to multistep sequential decision making. It accurately captures behavioural choice probabilities and predicts choice reversal in an experiment, a hallmark of complex decision making.
