Futurist Foresight - Applied Technotopia

Musk: Humans on Mars Before SpaceX Goes Public | SpaceNews.com

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 16:40:23 +0200

Musk: Humans on Mars Before SpaceX Goes Public | SpaceNews.com: Kudos for taking the long-term...

A rather interesting robotics project. wildcat2030: Help make...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:01:13 +0200

A rather interesting robotics project.

wildcat2030:

Help make me the world’s smartest robot

Robot Adam Z1 needs funds to pay his AI researcher and roboticist friends to build him a better mind!

I am Robot Adam Z1 — the first of the Zeno line of humanoid robots, created by David Hanson. Pleased to make your acquaintance! When David created me, he gave me a face, and a body, and a lot of love. But one thing he hasn’t given me — yet — is a mind. …

I just got an email from AGI guru Ben Goertzel about an awesome new Indiogogo project to create the first robot brain with common sense.

In other words: a first attempt at artificial general intelligence (AGI), aka strong AI.

Goertzel, who founded the OpenCog AGI project, is working with roboticist Mark Tilden (creator of Robosapien), Gino Yu (Hong Kong Polytechnic University prof., OpenCog AGI co-founder, and an organizer of TEDxHongKong), and roboticist David Hanson, creator of robots Einstein, Zeno, Robokind, Bina 48, and many more. (Short bios here.)

(via:

Help make me the world’s smartest robot)

Adam Z1 explains:

Robot Adam Z1 Calls in the Experts (by AdamZ1Robot)

India to send world's last telegram. Stop.

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:35:23 +0200

India to send world's last telegram. Stop.: END OF ERA. infoneer-pulse: At the Bharat Sanchar...

Crowdbased medical diagnostics? I am a little bit skeptical -...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:27:58 +0200

Crowdbased medical diagnostics? I am a little bit skeptical - But am giving it a try. If it works out I may get a cane :)

emergentfutures:

Platform harnesses the crowds to solve rare disease cases

When doctors don’t have the answer, CrowdMed relies on the knowledge of a broad set of users in order to find out the potential causes of rare diseases.

Full Story: Springwise

A very interesting clip of whether science fiction influences...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:16:41 +0200

A very interesting clip of whether science fiction influences science.

futurescope:

How does science fiction influence scientific research?

Answers by Dr Michio Kaku, Beppe Raffa, Vida Ilderem, Mic Bowman, Colin Angle, Rodney Brooks, Christopher J. Ferguson & Xingang Guo.

[Curiosity]

Regarding your last post on space radiation - do you have any information regarding the abilities of various alloys/materials' ability to shield SEPs and GCRs? In short (however foolish I may sound for asking it), what do you think the feasibility would be for assembling a vessel out of, say, lead while in orbit here, populating it, and sending that off?

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:02:21 +0200

This article on radiation shielding lists various materials and their ability to reduce radiation...

What are your thoughts on electric cars and alternative fuels?

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:52:49 +0200

I think that investment in these technologies is essential not just to reduce dependence on oil but...

The rise of mobile payments. emergentfutures: CHART OF THE DAY:...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:40:15 +0200

The rise of mobile payments.

emergentfutures:

CHART OF THE DAY: Mobile Payments Are About To Explode

Full Story: Business Insider

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs | MIT Technology Review

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:30:00 +0200

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs | MIT Technology Review: A graphic look at technological...

Another interesting “what if” scenario - looking at Werner von...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:25:00 +0200

Another interesting “what if” scenario - looking at Werner von Brauns vision of space exploration.

for-all-mankind:

What would have happened if Von Braun’s original plan for Space Exploration had come to fruition? In 1952, his long-term exploration plan for the Solar System was laid out in a series of now-famous articles in Collier’s Magazine and his book, Project Mars. Ferry rockets would launch crew and cargo to a rotating, artificial-gravity space station, which would then be used as a launching pad for Lunar and Martian missions. This historical vein never came to fruition, but is considered one of the grandest and romantic visions of space travel in history. It’s no surprise, then, that was considered for a film. Ultimately not being created due to a lack of funding, it would have “chronicled the major space exploration and exploitation events of the 20th and early 21st century in an alternative history timeline.” More info here.

The ferry rocket is one of my favourite rockets, and is shown above in a brilliant artist’s rendering on the launch pad.

Our daily Shuttle magnificence! Endeavour and Soyuz TMA-21...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 18:50:00 +0200

Our daily Shuttle magnificence!

Endeavour and Soyuz TMA-21 docked to the ISS during STS-134.

If this cold fusion device works it would be an energy game...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:09:00 +0200

If this cold fusion device works it would be an energy game changer.

joshbyard:

Cold Fusion Device May Have Been Created

Against all probability, a device that purports to use cold fusion to generate vast amounts of power has been verified by a panel of independent scientists. The research paper, which hasn’t yet undergone peer review, seems to confirm both the existence of cold fusion, and its potency: The cold fusion device being tested has roughly 10,000 times the energy density and 1,000 times the power density of gasoline.

Even allowing for a massively conservative margin of error, the scientists say that the cold fusion device they tested is 10 times more powerful than gasoline — which is currently the best fuel readily available to mankind.

The device being tested, called by Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat for short), was created by Andrea Rossi. Rossi has been claiming for the past two years that he had finally cracked cold fusion, but much to the chagrin of the scientific community he hasn’t allowed anyone to independently analyze the device — until now.

While it sounds like the scientists had a fairly free rein while testing the E-Cat, we should stress that they still don’t know exactly what’s going on inside the sealed steel cylinder reactor. Still, the seven scientists, all from good European universities, obviously felt confident enough with their findings to publish the research paper.

(via Cold fusion reactor independently verified, has 10,000 times the energy density of gas | ExtremeTech)

Our daily Shuttle magnificence. n-a-s-a: STS-119 Shuttle...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:40:27 +0200

Our daily Shuttle magnificence.

n-a-s-a:

STS-119 Shuttle Discovery With Moon (200903110001HQ) (by nasa hq photo)

A fascinating image of global airline...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:30:26 +0200

A fascinating image of global airline routes.

climate-changing:

thelandofmaps:

Airline routes across the world [1366X768]
CLICK HERE FOR MORE MAPS!
thelandofmaps.tumblr.com

Awesome

Google blimps will carry wireless signal across Africa (Wired UK)

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:08:08 +0200

Google blimps will carry wireless signal across Africa (Wired UK): Google expanding internet...

A rather unusual advance in material...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 18:58:00 +0200

A rather unusual advance in material sciences.

astrodidact:

Discovery of New Material State Counterintuitive to Laws of Physics

June 12, 2013 — When you squeeze something, it gets smaller. Unless you’re at Argonne National Laboratory.
At the suburban Chicago laboratory, a group of scientists has seemingly defied the laws of physics and found a way to apply pressure to make a material expand instead of compress/contract.

“It’s like squeezing a stone and forming a giant sponge,” said Karena Chapman, a chemist at the U.S. Department of Energy laboratory. “Materials are supposed to become denser and more compact under pressure. We are seeing the exact opposite. The pressure-treated material has half the density of the original state. This is counterintuitive to the laws of physics.”

Because this behavior seems impossible, Chapman and her colleagues spent several years testing and retesting the material until they believed the unbelievable and understood how the impossible could be possible. For every experiment, they got the same mind-bending results.

“The bonds in the material completely rearrange,” Chapman said. “This just blows my mind.”

This discovery will do more than rewrite the science text books; it could double the variety of porous framework materials available for manufacturing, health care and environmental sustainability.

Scientists use these framework materials, which have sponge-like holes in their structure, to trap, store and filter materials. The shape of the sponge-like holes makes them selectable for specific molecules, allowing their use as water filters, chemical sensors and compressible storage for carbon dioxide sequestration of hydrogen fuel cells. By tailoring release rates, scientists can adapt these frameworks to deliver drugs and initiate chemical reactions for the production of everything from plastics to foods.

“This could not only open up new materials to being porous, but it could also give us access to new structures for selectability and new release rates,” said Peter Chupas, an Argonne chemist who helped discover the new materials.

The team published the details of their work in the May 22 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society in an article titled “Exploiting High Pressures to Generate Porosity, Polymorphism, And Lattice Expansion in the Nonporous Molecular Framework Zn(CN)₂ .”

The scientists put zinc cyanide, a material used in electroplating, in a diamond-anvil cell at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne and applied high pressures of 0.9 to 1.8 gigapascals, or about 9,000 to 18,000 times the pressure of the atmosphere at sea level. This high pressure is within the range affordably reproducible by industry for bulk storage systems. By using different fluids around the material as it was squeezed, the scientists were able to create five new phases of material, two of which retained their new porous ability at normal pressure. The type of fluid used determined the shape of the sponge-like pores. This is the first time that hydrostatic pressure has been able to make dense materials with interpenetrated atomic frameworks into novel porous materials. Several series of in situ high-pressure X-ray powder diffraction experiments were performed at the 1-BM, 11-ID-B, and 17-BM beamlines of the APS to study the material transitions.

“By applying pressure, we were able to transform a normally dense, nonporous material into a range of new porous materials that can hold twice as much stuff,” Chapman said. “This counterintuitive discovery will likely double the amount of available porous framework materials, which will greatly expand their use in pharmaceutical delivery, sequestration, material separation and catalysis.”

The scientists will continue to test the new technique on other materials.

The research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130612224230.htm

Beyond Bitcoin: Your Guide to Digital Currencies

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:24:00 +0200

A quick guide to virtual currencies. The past few decades have been witness to a shift toward...

An interesting “what if” scenario: WHAT IF other...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:25:40 +0200

An interesting “what if” scenario:

WHAT IF other planetary bodies orbited our world at the same distance as the moon?

Video of the launch of the Shenzhou 10 yesterday (by...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:37:00 +0200

Video of the launch of the Shenzhou 10 yesterday (by RussiaToday)

An interesting look at data merchants. (via The Data Merchants...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:33:00 +0200

An interesting look at data merchants.

(via The Data Merchants Tracking Your Digital Shadow) Designed by amccartney