Lifeboat Foundation

Space is not the soundless vacuum movies would have us believe. In fact, judging by these eerie recordings of the music being thrown off by the oldest stars in the Milky Way, space actually sounds like a bit of a party.

The recordings were created by a team of scientists led by Andrea Miglio of the University of Birmingham, using data from NASA’s Kepler missions. After measuring the acoustic oscillations of some of the furthest known distant stars in the Milky Way’s M4 star cluster, the researchers were able to use that data to recreate the sounds and get an idea of just what noises the stars are throwing off. It’s a cacophony, for sure—but a surprisingly musical one that could slide pretty seamlessly into an ambient house track of your choice. (Free idea, DJs.)

Besides being excellent listening, the sounds are also scientifically useful. Measuring the tones from each star let the researchers derive a formula, which they’ve published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, to get more precise measurements of star masses and ages. Since the stars are so old, in some cases up to 13 billion years, researchers hope to use the sounds to get even more information about what the universe was like way back then.

Continue reading “Astronomers Recorded This Eerie Music From a 13-Billion-Year-Old Star” »

Very cool!

Schulich’s Music Multimedia Room has been used as a laboratory for CIRMMT and a favourite recording studio for orchestra-size ensembles since the Elizabeth Wirth Music Building opened in 2005.

By Lev Bratishenko.

Continue reading “$17M to shape the future of music” »

When you think about the headliners at a music festival, it’s unlikely that the first person to pop into your head would be Martine Rothblatt—the founder of Sirius XM, the one-time highest-paid female CEO in the world who made a robot clone of her wife, and the founder of the Terasem religion, which believes we’ll live forever by uploading our consciousness to the cloud. But Moogfest, a four-day citywide festival of music and technology in Durham, North Carolina, was not the average music festival. Unlike other festivals that make cursory overtures to technology, Moogfest dedicated as much time to explaining how technology influences creativity as to the creative output itself, even listing headline ‘technologists’ alongside its top-billed musical acts.

On the festival’s second day, Friday 20 May, Rothblatt took the stage to talk to a packed house at Durham’s Carolina Theater, in an atmosphere that felt far more like a TED talk than a music fest. Rothblatt, who is transgender, discussed the contentious North Carolina HB2 law, which bans transgender people from using public bathrooms of the gender they identify with; the idea that creativity would be better encouraged by free college tuition; and how she got to a point where she and her company, United Therapeutics, can actually think about 3D printing new body parts, and leaving our bodies behind—if we want. “You want to win more than you want to live,” she told the rapt crowd. “You yell ‘Geronimo’ as you jump crazily into monopolistic opposition.”

Quartz sat down with Rothblatt after her talk to chat more about her thoughts on AI, living forever, free education, and what happens to the soul once we’ve made digital copies of ourselves.

Continue reading “Entrepreneur and CEO Martine Rothblatt thinks we’ll 3D print new bodies and live forever on the internet” »

ENJOY!!! 2045 A.D. Cybernetically enhanced beings are in control of society. A new genetic disease is making humans reject their own organs, forcing one man to steal cybernetic implants from others to survive. By director Nguyen-Anh Nguyen.

Temple is a concept for a feature film project, produced by the team of the Akira Project.

Continue reading “A Sci-fi Cyberpunk Thriller HD: ‘Temple’” »

The consumer marketplace is flooded with a lively assortment of smart wearable electronics that do everything from monitor vital signs, fitness or sun exposure to play music, charge other electronics or even purify the air around you — all wirelessly.

Now, a team of University of Wisconsin—Madison engineers has created the world’s fastest stretchable, wearable integrated circuits, an advance that could drive the Internet of Things and a much more connected, high-speed wireless world.

Led by Zhenqiang “Jack” Ma, the Lynn H. Matthias Professor in Engineering and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in electrical and computer engineering at UW–Madison, the researchers published details of these powerful, highly efficient integrated circuits today, May 27, 2016, in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

Continue reading “Fast, stretchy circuits could yield new wave of wearable electronics” »

What I have come to appreciate with scientists and engineers is our diversity of interests and talents. And, this is definitely another case that proves that.

We talked to the artist about her debut album with songs called “Spooky Action” and “Gravity”.

While Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are moving forward with nextgen technologies such as VR & AR, QC, bio & nano technologies, etc used to advance areas such as Singularity and longevity.; Apples going bigger in the entertainment and media space.

Even if Apple never made an actual move to buy Time Warner, a tentative approach shows that the iPhone maker is serious about getting into media content.

Eddy Cue, who’s in charge of iTunes and Apple Music, brought up the idea of a possible deal with Time Warner corporate strategy head Olaf Olafsson in a meeting late last year, according to a person familiar with the situation. While the two never started negotiations, Time Warner, which owns HBO and the Warner Brothers studio, is on the top of the list of media companies Apple would buy should it eventually commit to the content business, the person said.

Continue reading “Apple’s flirtation with buying HBO parent hints at content ambitions” »

Temporary concept; however, those first alerts (aka help me; I fallen and can’t get up) already covers this plus with the direction we’re going with BMI in the next 5 years this will not be needed.

What if you could dial 911 by squeezing your smartphone in a certain pattern in your palm? A different pattern might turn the music on or flip a page on the screen.

New software developed by University of Michigan engineers and inspired, in part, by a Batman movie, could give any smartphone the capacity to sense force or pressure on its screen or body. ForcePhone offers new ways for people to command their mobile devices.

Continue reading “Force-feeling phone: Software lets mobile devices sense pressure” »

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— An international team of physicists including Illinois Wesleyan University Professor of Physics Gabe Spalding has shown waves of light can seem to travel back in time.

It may seem like science fiction, but the experiment did not violate the laws of physics. Spalding, his physics student Joseph Richards ’16 and a team of scientists tackled a century-old intuition from Lord Rayleigh regarding the speed of sound. Rayleigh theorized that music being played on an object traveling faster than the speed of sound, a supersonic jet for example, would result in a listener hearing the music playing in reverse. The Spalding team simulated what an observer standing still would see when looking at a superluminal (faster than the speed of light) occurrence. The results of the scientists’ experiment, conducted last summer at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, have been published in Science Advances.

“The existence of an absolute limit, the speed of light, is the natural source of the question: what would happen if we cross this limit?” lead author Mattero Clerici told a writer for a post on IFLScience. “Light sources, however, may move faster than the speed of light when their speed is not associated with the physical motion of matter. Following this line of thought, we devised a way to experimentally investigate the [effects] of superluminal motion.”