Lifeboat Foundation

Self-driving cars could disrupt the airline and hotel industries within 20 years as people sleep in their vehicles on the road, according to a senior strategist at Audi.

Short-haul travel will be transformed and the hassle of getting to and from airports eliminated, said Sven Schuwirth, vice president of brand strategy and digital business at the German car brand.

Business travellers will be able to avoid taking domestic flights to meetings and will sleep and work in their cars en route instead of checking into city-centre hotels, he said.

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In general relativity, closed timelike curves can break causality with remarkable and unsettling consequences. At the classical level, they induce causal paradoxes disturbing enough to motivate conjectures that explicitly prevent their existence. At the quantum level such problems can be resolved through the Deutschian formalism, however this induces radical benefits—from cloning unknown quantum states to solving problems intractable to quantum computers. Instinctively, one expects these benefits to vanish if causality is respected. Here we show that in harnessing entanglement, we can efficiently solve NP-complete problems and clone arbitrary quantum states—even when all time-travelling systems are completely isolated from the past. Thus, the many defining benefits of Deutschian closed timelike curves can still be harnessed, even when causality is preserved. Our results unveil a subtle interplay between entanglement and general relativity, and significantly improve the potential of probing the radical effects that may exist at the interface between relativity and quantum theory.

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“What happens when you put artists and technologists together? Forty-nine years ago last month, Robert Rauschenberg and a Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer named Billy Kluver answered that question with a tennis match.”

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Scientists have developed a graphene based microphone nearly 32 times more sensitive than microphones of standard nickel-based construction.

The researchers, based at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, created a vibrating membrane — the part of a condenser microphone which converts the sound to a current — from graphene, and were able to show up to 15 dB higher sensitivity compared to a commercial microphone, at frequencies up to 11 kHz.

The results are published today, 27th November 2015, in the journal 2D Mater ials.

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As advancements in technology continue at an ever-increasing pace, will there ever come a day when we’ll be able to use science to cheat death? Australian startup company Humai seems to think so; it claims to be working on a way to transfer a person’s consciousness into an artificial body after they’ve died.

“We want to bring you back to life after you die,” says Humai CEO Josh Bocanegra on the company’s website. “We’re using artificial intelligence and nanotechnology to store data of conversational styles, behavioral patterns, thought processes and information about how your body functions from the inside-out. This data will be coded into multiple sensor technologies, which will be built into an artificial body with the brain of a deceased human. Using cloning technology, we will restore the brain as it matures.”

In an interview with Australian Popular Science, Bocanegra said: “We’ll first collect extensive data on our members for years prior to their death via various apps we’re developing.” After death, the company will cryogenically freeze members’ brains until the technology is fully developed, at which point the brains will be implanted into an artificial body.

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“I believe the children are our future,” philosopher Whitney Houston once opined. Well, if she was talking about car design, she wasn’t wrong.

OK, not ‘children’ exactly. But certainly students. Audi has today unveiled the results of its ‘Design Universe’ think-tank, in which young designers at four top universities have explored how the Audi of tomorrow might look.

Take the car above, as an example. It’s called the Audi Quantum, and was designed by a pair of students at the Scuola Politecnica di Design in Milan. Looks suitably futuristic, no? There are retina scanners that, um, scan the driver’s retina and configure the interior settings before he or she climbs in.

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Scientists in the UK have invented a new type of touchscreen material that requires very little power to illuminate, offering up a cheap alternative to today’s smartphone and tablet screens, with vivid colours and high visibility in direct sunlight.

The team is already in talks with some of the world’s largest consumer electronics corporations to see if their new material can replace current LCD touchscreens in the next couple of years, which could spell the end for daily smartphone charging. “We can create an entire new market,” one of the researchers, Peiman Hosseini, told The Telegraph. “You have to charge smartwatches every night, which is slowing adoption. But if you had a smartwatch or smart glass that didn’t need much power, you could recharge it just once a week.”

Developed by Bodie Technologies, a University of Oxford spin-off company, the new display is reportedly made from a type of phase-change material called germanium-antimony-tellurium, or GST. The researchers are being understandably cagey about exactly how it’s made as they shop the technology around, but it’s based on a paper they published last year describing how a rigid or flexible display can be formed from microscopic ‘stacks’ of GST and electrode layers.

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Injecting billions of immune cells back into the body boosts insulin production, preventing the need for daily injections.

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Samsung on Thursday revealed it is now mass producing memory modules boasting the largest capacity and the highest energy efficiency of any DRAM module. The 128GB DDR4 sticks in question were made possible by utilizing the through silicon via (TSV) interconnect technique.

Foregoing traditional wire bonding, the TSV technique involves grinding chips down to a few dozen micrometers, piercing them with hundreds of tiny holes and vertically connecting them with electrodes passing through the holes. Although not new, the advanced circuitry does allow for a significant boost in signal transmission.

The 128GB modules are comprised of 144 DDR4 chips arranged into 4GB DRAM packages (18 per side for a total of 36), each containing four 20nm 8Gb chips. Samsung says the modules have a special design in which the master chip of each 4GB package embeds the data buffer function, further optimizing performance and power consumption.

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