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Nov 24, 2015
NASA gives MIT a humanoid robot to develop software for future space missions
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: information science, robotics/AI, space travel
A team led by MIT Professor Russ Tedrake has been selected by NASA to develop algorithms for the 6-foot-tall “Valkyrie” robot in support of future space travel to Mars and beyond.
Nov 24, 2015
Hacking the Brain — Restoring Lost Abilities With the Latest Neurotechnologies
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: biotech/medical, computing, cyborgs, genetics, nanotechnology, neuroscience, Ray Kurzweil
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Ray Kurzweil’s wild prediction that in the 2030s, nanobots will connect our brains to the cloud, merging biology with the digital world.
Let’s talk about what’s happening today.
Over the past few decades, billions of dollars have been poured into three areas of research: neuroprosthetics, brain-computer interfaces and optogenetics.
Nov 24, 2015
Saving Passengers from a falling Plane!
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in category: transportation
The Russians are studying how to save the passenger aircraft before falling!
Visit: www.technologyvista.com
Nov 23, 2015
Will NASA Ever Send Astronauts To Pluto?
Posted by Bruce Dorminey in category: space travel
With its nitrogen-dominated atmosphere and water-rich icy surface, Pluto seems much more hospitable than even the most sanguine planetary scientists would have wagered a decade ago. But could it ever play host to an Antarctic-styled research station?
That is, as a base to routinely house researcher/astronauts out to give humans a foothold in the outer reaches of our solar system?
“The notion of a Pluto base figures prominently in the anime ‘Star Blazers’ from my childhood, so it’d be wonderful if there were a good reason for it,” said Gerard van Belle, a research astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Az., where Clyde Tombaugh discovered the diminutive dwarf planet some 85 years ago.
Nov 23, 2015
Google Glass Successor Dumps Some Glass — By Jessica E. Lessin | The Information
Posted by Odette Bohr Dienel in categories: augmented reality, business, wearables
“We’ve learned that Google’s revamped Google Glass project, dubbed Project Aura, is working on a wearable with a screen—and at least one without.”
Nov 23, 2015
Will Our Descendants Survive the Destruction of the Universe?
Posted by Montie Adkins in categories: existential risks, futurism
Now there’s a lifeboat. However my life may be extended, if anyone lives that long or some future generation has to deal with it, at some point this universe will be far less friendly to life than it already is. So, a way out?
Billions of years from now, the universe as we know it will cease to exist. The good news is, that gives us a lot of time to prepare, and maybe even figure out a way to cheat cosmic death. Here are some possible ways our descendants might survive a cosmological apocalypse.
The Universe, like the organisms that reside within it, is a mortal entity. Born in the Big Bang, it will eventually meet its fate through an equally cataclysmic process, whether it be in the form of a Big Rip, a Big Crunch, or an eternal deep freeze. Regardless, all life as we know it will be extinguished.
Continue reading “Will Our Descendants Survive the Destruction of the Universe?” »
Nov 23, 2015
Aubrey de Grey: Can We and Should We Give Ourselves Indefinite Youth? Oh Yes
Posted by Montie Adkins in categories: biotech/medical, life extension
The marginalization of anti-aging research is our most shameful humanitarian failure.
Aging is a hot topic among the chattering classes these days. What with biotech companies like Calico and Human Longevity Inc. being founded with the mission to defeat aging, and venerable institutions such as Prudential proclaiming the imminence of superlongevity on billboards, there’s no denying that this is a time of great interest in our oldest and deepest-held dream — to escape from the tyranny of inexorable and ultimately fatal physiological decline.
But hang on — is the buzz around aging really reflective of what’s being done to realize this goal? The briefest dispassionate analysis reveals a different story altogether. The proportion of government spending allocated in the industrialized world to diseases and disabilities of old age is appropriately high, but it is overwhelmingly dedicated to the transparently quixotic approach of attacking those ailments directly — as if they were infections — rather than attacking their lifelong accumulating causes.
The solar system might be a lot hairier than we thought. A new study publishing this week in the Astrophysical Journal by Gary Prézeau of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, proposes the existence of long filaments of dark matter, or “hairs.”
Dark matter is an invisible, mysterious substance that makes up about 27 percent of all matter and energy in the universe. The regular matter, which makes up everything we can see around us, is only 5 percent of the universe. The rest is dark energy, a strange phenomenon associated with the acceleration of our expanding universe.
Neither dark matter nor dark energy has ever been directly detected, although many experiments are trying to unlock the mysteries of dark matter, whether from deep underground or in space.
