By Eduard Gismatullin — Irish Examiner
More than 70 individuals with a combined wealth of $200bn (€145bn) are investing in space projects including travel, Knight Frank said ahead of its release of The Wealth Report 2014 on Wednesday.
A suborbital trip from London to Sydney will take about two hours and 12 minutes or one-tenth the time of flying by plane.
Cameron Scott — Singularity Hub
Silicon Valley sprung up on big open stretches of land where military installations had once been. Early semiconductor and computing businesses needed the space. But as Moore’s law progressed and mobile computing became the thing, the tech industry crept up into the seven-by-seven mile peninsula that is San Francisco. The city’s South of Market district is now nearly a strip mall of tech startups.
But tucked away in one of the neighborhood’s utilitarian office buildings is a technology company that harkens back to the early days of Silicon Valley: Planet Labs, founded by former NASA engineers, which builds satellites to photograph the Earth. Even so, the company doesn’t need a ton of space: Its satellites are about the size of a breadbox. The company recently recruited a batch of Stanford University students and built 28 satellites in 17 days in its cramped SoMa offices (pictured above).
By Carolyn Cox — Geekosystem
Tomorrow is apparently “Future Day,” and not just in the same way that today is present day. March 1st is an unofficial holiday for transhumanists, designed to “elevat[e]the human condition” and maybe help us prepare for the robot uprising.
Started in 2012, “Future Day” was created Ben Goertzel and Adam A.Ford of the transhuman nonprofit Humanity+ to engender conversations about humanity’s role in a rapidly changing world. Future Day’s website states,
The news has been turning into science fiction for a while now. TVs that watch the watcher, growing tiny kidneys, 3D printing, the car of tomorrow, Amazon’s fleet of delivery drones – so many news stories now “sound like science fiction” that the term returns 1,290,000 search results on Google.
The pace of technological innovation is accelerating so quickly that it’s possible to perform this test in reverse. Google an imaginary idea from science fiction and you’ll almost certainly find scientists researching the possibility. Warp drive? The Multiverse? A space elevator to the stars? Maybe I can formulate this as Walter’s law – “Any idea described in sci-fi will on a long enough timescale be made real by science.”
Continue reading “Are we already living in the technological singularity?” »
By Gigaom
3D printing is slow; so slow that printing an object several feet long is an arduous task that can take days. As a result, most 3D printers are tailored to printing small objects that take a few hours at most.
That could change for industrial-sized printers after the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and machine tool manufacturer Cincinnati Incorporated signed an agreement this month, 3Dprint.com reported today. The partnership will focus on creating a 3D printer capable of printing objects at 200–500 times the speed and 10 times the size of most current printers.
Written By: Jason Dorrier
Steven Kotler — Singularity Hub
So video games are addictive—this we know.
It comes down to dopamine, one of the brain’s basic signaling molecules. Emotionally, we feel dopamine as pleasure, engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. It’s released whenever we take risks, or encounter novelty. From an evolutionary standpoint, it reinforces exploratory behavior.
More importantly, dopamine is a motivator. It’s released when we have the expectation of reward. And once this neurotransmitter becomes hardwired into a psychological reward loop, the desire to get more of that reward becomes the brain’s overarching preoccupation. Cocaine, widely considered the most addictive drug on the planet, does little more than flood the brain with dopamine and block its reuptake (sort of like SSRI’s block the reuptake of serotonin).
Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub
Remember when Jeff Bezos said Amazon would deliver packages using drones at some point in the next few years? Bezos and Amazon may be beat to the punch by a government in the Middle East. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently launched a million dollar contest to develop and implement a fleet of delivery drones within a year.
Competitors will design drones to deliver government documents. The drone’s cargo compartment would be secured biometrically—requiring a finger print or retina scan to release the paperwork inside. The UAE plans to announce a winner in May, and after six months of testing in the dust and heat, begin regular service.
Future Wow
Star Trek really did foretell much of the technology we use today. The fertile imagination of Gene Roddenberry and his writing team gave us many ideas for technologies that we now use or will in the near future.
By Avi Roy, University of Buckingham and Sven Bulterijs, Yale University
The complexity in biology is astounding. That is why biologists are thankful that model organisms, like the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, can be used to breakdown biological processes into simpler units.
C. elegans is a particular favourite. It grows in the exact same way from a single fertilised egg cell to 959 cells as an adult. Its body is transparent which has allowed scientists to map its growth and study internal changes to great detail.
In a paper published in Nature recently, En-Zhi Shen at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing and colleagues have used C. elegans to make an intriguing discovery. Based on a process that occurs in each cell’s power house, mitochondria, they claim to be able to predict the lifespan of that organism.
Continue reading “Predicting lifespan in a flash … at least in worms” »
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Future Wow
