Latest Posts by curiositytherover - Page 7

Inhabitat’s Week in Green: Paris climate talks, and more!

Scientists have developed liquid-metal 'nano-terminators' to target cancer cells

My mission is to protect you.

Liquid-metal terminators are generally something to be afraid of – but what if the substance was used to fight cancer instead of wiping out humanity?

That’s exactly what researchers in the US are working on, having developed a biodegradable liquid metal that can be used as a drug delivery technique to target cancer cells.

“The advance here is that we have a drug-delivery technique that may enhance the effectiveness of the drugs being delivered, can help doctors locate tumours, can be produced in bulk, and appears to be wholly biodegradable with very low toxicity,” said Zhen Gu, a biomedical engineer in a joint program at North Carolina’s State University and University at Chapel Hill. “And one of the advantages of this technique is that these liquid metal drug carriers – or ‘nano-terminators’ – are very easy to make.”

Continue Reading.

Bill Nye Explains The Connection Between Climate Change And Terrorism In Paris

President Obama made headlines Monday when he said during his remarks at COP21 that the climate change conference taking place in Paris is an “act of defiance” against terrorists who attacked the city earlier this month. Later on the same day, Bill Nye took that link a step further, explaining to HuffPost Live that the brutality in Paris was “a result of climate change.”

“This is just the start of things.”

We pulled together the week’s top tech stories, just for you:

1. Formula E is planning the first racing series for driverless cars You read that right: Before every Formula E race, two autonomous vehicles will go head-to-headlights, in a race straight out of every Sci-Fi fan’s wildest dreams. via: @engadget

2. How Technology Will Transform Retirement Someday in the near future, being selfish and obsessed with technology might be qualities that senior citizens praise today’s Millennials for. All around the world, young people are hard at work creating technology that will take care of them when they’re older. via: The Wall Street Journal

3. Who’s going to fly those Amazon delivery drones? The short answer is, probably no one. Which is for the best, really. After all, the real reason we don’t have flying cars is because people are bad drivers. And adding a z axis would be like trying to navigate rush-hour traffic in midair. via: ZDNet

4. Wayfindr Is on a Quest to Optimize Cities for the Visually Impaired After a successful experiment at London’s Pimlico Station and a recently received grant of $1 million from Google.org, this company wants to change the way visually impaired commuters navigate the London Underground. via: @wired

Artificial Intelligence, Boon or Bane? University of Cambridge Set to Find an Answer

Today’s science and technology are nearing a point where computers can recreate human-level intelligence. While it is difficult to say when exactly this will happen, some researchers are suggesting that this could take place sometime this century. In the press release, Stuart Russell, a world-leading AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that such a development would be “the biggest event in human history.”

Professor Stephen Hawking agrees, and adds that it remains to be seen whether or not artificial intelligence will be our greatest benefit or greatest downfall. He states, “when it eventually does occur, it’s likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there’s huge value in getting it right.”

In anticipation of this, the University of Cambridge is to establish a new interdisciplinary research centre, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, which will bring together computer scientists, philosophers, social scientists, and others to examine the technical, practical, and philosophical questions that artificial intelligence raises (or will raise) for humanity in the coming century.

It will be funded by a £10 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust.

Read more at: http://futurism.com/links/19069/

Magnified Universe [more]

Can You Tell if Your Therapist Has Empathy?

New software developed by researchers detects a person’s ability to understand or share feelings in therapy sessions.

The research is in PLOS ONE. (full open access)

How astronauts train underwater in NASA’s neutral buoyancy lab, which includes a full sized mock-up of the ISS.

Scientists find “the holy grail of astronomy” after uncovering a galaxy that is made up of mostly dark matter

Mars will one day have a ring system due to Phobos, the planet’s small moon, being crushed by tidal forces

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket successfully launches to the edge of space and lands vertically back on Earth

A new exoplanet called GJ1132b is found 39 light-years away, making it the closest Earth-sized exoplanet ever discovered

Researchers make ultra-thin diamond nanothreads, which could help us build a space elevator

A blue Neptune-like exoplanet, which seems to have skies like Earth, is found orbiting a red dwarf star

A staggering 574 newly discovered massive galaxies are revealed that date back to the beginnings of the universe

New research shows that galaxies were far more efficient at making stars during the first 10% of history than they are now

What would Earth’s skies look like with Saturn’s rings? 

 Illustrator and author Ron Miller specializes in, among other things, incredible visualizations of other worlds. Now, Miller brings his visualizations back to Earth for a series exploring what our skies would look like with Saturn’s majestic rings. Miller strived to make the images scientifically accurate, adding nice touches like orange-pink shadows resulting from sunlight passing through the Earth’s atmosphere. He also shows the rings from a variety of latitudes and landscapes, from the U.S. Capitol building to Mayan ruins in Guatemala.

Images and text via

Robots Able to Learn Like Babies

Now a collaboration between University of Washington developmental psychologists and computer scientists has demonstrated that robots can “learn” much like kids – by amassing data through exploration, watching a human perform a task and determining how best to carry out that task on its own.

The research is in PLOS ONE. (full open access)

Stephanie Kwolek, the inventor of Kevlar, passed away this week at age 90

“A true pioneer for women in science,” passed away on Wednesday, reported the New York Times. As a DuPont scientist, Stephanie Kwolek is credited for inventing Kevlar in 1964, a fiber that has radically improved police and military body armor since its creation.   

Kwolek died at age 90 in hospice care at St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington, Del. She leaves behind a legacy of achievement in science and technology that directly saved an estimated 3,000 lives of police officers over the past four decades.

Read more | Follow micdotcom 

Artificial Intelligence Program Passes Entrance Exam, Can Be Accepted Into University

The National Institute of Informatics has developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program that was able to achieve an above-average score on a college entrance exam for the first time ever. The test covered five subjects including Math, Physics, and English.

Ultimately, the Institute is attempting to develop an AI that could perform well enough on Japan’s standardized college entrance exam to be accepted into the University of Tokyo, Japan’s highest-ranked university. And they hope to complete their task by 2021.

To date, the AI received a top score of 511 points out of 950, which is above the national average of 416 points.

According to the institute, the AI has at least an 80% chance of being accepted to 441 private universities and 33 national universities with that score, odds that would make any aspiring student quite happy.

Find out more at: http://futurism.com/links/artificial-intelligence-program-passes-entrance-exam-can-be-accepted-into-university/

Scientists Find Two Natural Genes in our Cells That Can Combat HIV

During the opening era of the AIDS epidemic, being diagnosed was a death sentence. Thanks to advances in medicine, it isn’t anymore. HIV is no longer a terminal illness; with treatment, an individual with HIV has the exact same life expectancy as someone without the disease.

However, it is still a devastating virus. The treatments have many side effects, and you will need to take the medicine for the rest of your life.

For years, scientists have been trying to find a way to effectively cure HIV/AIDS, but unfortunately, none yet have made that incredible leap. But new breakthroughs come each year, which slowly bring us closer to our goal.

Case in point, last month, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School announced the discovery of proteins that naturally inhibit the human immunodeficiency virus. Surprisingly, they found these proteins in the cells in our immune system’s T cells, which are the cells that HIV attacks (specifically, it attacks CD4 positive T cells, which are white blood cells that are vital to fighting off infection).

Find out more at: http://futurism.com/links/scientists-find-two-natural-genes-in-our-cells-that-can-combat-hiv/

"Is There A Santa Claus?-A Physicist View" SPY MAGAZINE Jan. 1990

  Consider the following:

1) No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.

3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical).

This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-½ million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.

On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that ‘flying reindeer’ (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine.

We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each.

In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.

Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.> In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.

(NOTE: This appeared in the SPY Magazine (January, 1990) )

Amazon Unveils New Prime Air Drones. See It In Action

Amazon gives the world a glimpse of the future today, as they unveiled the Prime Air drone, which promises to deliver packages in under 30 minutes.

The Prime Air prototype, which weighs 24 kg (55 pounds), can carry packages of up to 2.2 kg (5 pounds) and is designed to fly under 152 meters (400 feet). It is also equipped with “sense and avoid” technology, which will allow it to dodge obstacles that it may encounter en route to its point of delivery.

Our video illustrates its features, and it takes you through the step-by-step process of how the unmanned aerial device will operate.

See the video at at: http://futurism.com/links/amazon-unveils-new-prime-air-drones/

This is so sad. Women are already discouraged from pursuing science. Treating us like criminals for experimenting isn’t helping.

We normally post our tech news roundups on Fridays, but due to turkey, football, and lots of napping, we’re publishing it today instead. Enjoy!

1. The right drones for everyone this holiday season Love is in the air, and here’s a list of UAVs you can use to catch it. There’s never been a better reason to sit around while your relatives drone on and on. Really. With gifts like these the holidays will fly right by. via: Quartz

2. New tech can wirelessly charge your electronics with a standard Wi-Fi router There’s a good reason your Wi-Fi router is always shooting dirty looks at your laptop’s power cord. But rather than stoop to their level, routers everywhere are taking up the slack. Try to be sympathetic when your power cord finally winds up jobless. It’s bound to come as a shock.         via: BGR 3. The Pickle Index is a Delightfully Weird, App-Driven Novel Like No Other Immersive multimedia experiences are becoming more and more advanced every day, but there are plenty of people who still use monomedia to get their virtual realities. With The Pickle Index, techies and bookworms will finally have something to talk about if they’re both forced to interact with other humans. via: WIRED

4. Circuit Board Tattoos That Actually Work Will Make Your Cyborg Fantasies Come True Do yourself a favor and only get tattoos in languages that you understand. Otherwise you might end up with a bunch of spurious output, and it’s going to take forever to find that missing comma. via: Gizmodo

Were you the type of kid that took apart telephones, pushed pennies into (old, CRT) TV sets or mixed as many under the sink cleaning agents together to call it a potion and see what would happen?

If you answered yes to any of the above, this is the gift guide for you!

Turning sunlight into clean fuel is now cheap and simple

Last week’s chemistry news: Electronic plants, anti-viral ‘superballs’, and more! http://goo.gl/Tt21g8

From Pluto to food grown in space, NASA is having a great year. But even more mysterious than those discoveries, a spacecraft found two eerily bright lights on a distant dwarf planet.

A New Era in Astronomy: The James Webb Space Telescope is One Step Closer to Completion

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was just seen the installation of the first of its eighteen flight mirrors, marking the beginning of the final assembly phase of the successor to the 25-year-old Hubble Space Telescope.

The significance of this project cannot be overstated, as Hubble is arguably one of mankind’s greatest inventions, and the James Webb is set to be 100 times more powerful.

Indeed, this telescope will be more sensitive by a factor of about 100, than all the other telescopes that came before it. It could help us see some of the first stars forming in the universe. It could allow us to image planets orbiting alien stars. It will open up a world (a universe) of possibilities.

We will be able to see farther and deeper than ever before, and completion is coming ever closer.

Know more at: http://futurism.com/links/a-new-era-in-astronomy-the-james-webb-space-telescope-is-one-step-closer-to-completion/

Physicists Predict The Existence of New Particle in the “Material Universe”

Scientists are predicting the existence of the type-II Weyl fermion. This comes after they realized that a metallic crystal material, called tungsten ditelluride, was exhibiting a strange behavior. While most metals turn into insulators once subjected to a magnetic field, tungsten ditelluride becomes either an insulator or a conductor, which one it becomes ultimately depends on the direction of the subjected magnetic field.

After a team investigated the phenomenon, they predicted the presence of an unexpected particle—the previously mentioned type-II Weyl fermion—which caused the behavior.

Read more at: http://futurism.com/links/physicists-predict-the-existence-of-new-particle-in-the-material-universe/

Inhabitat’s Week in Green: Tesla Model S recall, and more!

Scientists extend an atom’s lifetime with a mirror

Scientists from Chalmers University of Technology have been able to extend the lifetime of an artificial atom, allowing it to remain charged for up to ten times longer. They achieved this by placing the artificial atom in front of a short circuit, which acts as a mirror. The distance between the atom and the mirror affects how long the atom “lives,” which is the time from when an atom is charged to when it returns to its ground state.

Research team leader and Professor of Physics Per Delsing says, “We can vary the lifetime of the atom by changing the distance between the atom and the mirror. If we place the atom at a certain distance from the mirror the atom’s lifetime is extended by such a length that we are not even able to observe the atom.”

Know more at: http://futurism.com/links/scientists-extend-an-atoms-lifetime-with-a-mirror/

Neptune-size exoplanet around a red dwarf star

Goleta CA (SPX) Nov 27, 2015 A team of astronomers have used the LCOGT network to detect light scattered by tiny particles (called Rayleigh scattering), through the atmosphere of a Neptune-size transiting exoplanet. This suggests a blue sky on this world which is only 100 light years away from us. Transits occur when an exoplanet passes in front of its parent star, reducing the amount of light we receive from the star Full article

The Ins and Outs of NASA’s First Launch of SLS and Orion

NASA - Space Launch System (SLS) logo.

Nov. 27, 2015

NASA is hard at work building the Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the ground systems needed to send astronauts into deep space. The agency is developing the core capabilities needed to enable the journey to Mars.

Keep reading

Hand Painted Pluto Ornament. I’m thinking of making more. ^^