Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: computing

This one’s kinda hard to swallow so take a deep breath, open your minds, and pretend it’s 2100. I CONTACT is essentially a mouse fitted to your eyeball. The lens is inserted like any other normal contact lens except it’s laced with sensors to track eye movement, relaying that position to a receiver connected to your computer. Theoretically that should give you full control over a mouse cursor. I’d imagine holding a blink correlates to mouse clicks.

The idea was originally created for people with disabilities but anyone could use it. Those of us too lazy to use a mouse now have a free hand to do whatever it is people do when they sit at the computer for endless hours. I love the idea but there is a caveat. How is the lens powered? Perhaps in the future, electrical power can be harnessed from the human body, just not in a Matrix creepy-like way.

Designers: eun-gyeong gwon & eun-jae lee.

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Okay, if you’ve got some spare time, check out this amazing website called Stuff in Space. It’s a simulation of every satellite (alive or dead), space station, and large piece of space junk orbiting the Earth right now.

You can zoom in and out, rotate the Earth and its satellites around. Pick any one object and discover more information about it. Or just leave it running and watch all the objects buzz around in real time. Humans have been busy launching a lot of stuff, and it’s only going to increase.

The simulation was made by James Yoder, an incoming Electrical and Computer Engineering freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, and it’s based on data supplied by Space Track, which is a service of the Joint Space Operations Center. They have a bunch of handy data feeds and APIs that you can use track orbital objects, but I’ve never seen anything as creative as this.

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Mechanical engineers at the University of California, Riverside, have reported success in using inexpensive materials to produce thermoelectric devices that transform low-level waste heat into electricity.

Their advance could enable a wide variety of commercial applications. For example, integrating thermoelectric generating devices into computer chips could enable the they produce to provide a power source. Waste heat from automobile engines could run a car’s electronics and provide cooling. Photovoltaic solar cells could be made more efficient by harnessing the heat from sunlight striking them to generate more electricity.

Also, using the same basic technology, economical thermoelectric refrigerators could be produced that would be more energy efficient and with fewer moving parts than refrigerators that use compressors and coolant. Current thermoelectric refrigerators are expensive and relatively inefficient. In essence, they operate in reverse of , with an electric current applied to generate a temperature gradient that could be used in cooling.

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Investors are sounding the alarm after a little-known U.S. government agency green lit what could be the next trillion-dollar technology.

This tight-lipped agency, known as DARPA, has a history of developing some of the most transformative technologies known to man. But what many don’t realize is that it can PAY to follow DARPA’s biggest projects.

In fact, one DARPA-funded venture was a computer network designed to provide interconnectivity among users – we now call this network the internet.

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Pod transportation company, Skytran, has received $32.5 million in funding. Skytran is a NASA Space Act company that is developing a pod-based personal rapid transportation system.

Some of the funding is from former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt.

They will have a network of computer-controlled, 2-person jet-like vehicles using SkyTran magnetic levitation technology.

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MIT spin off company Ayar Labs is combining light and electronics to create faster, more efficient computers. The new optoelectronic chips are designed to speed up data transmission to and from conventional processor chips in a way that will also reduce energy consumption in chip-to-chip communications by 95 percent and could cut overall energy usages by large data firms by up to 50 percent.

Since the invention of the silicon chip 60 years ago, the power of computers has doubled every two years, but the speed at which computer systems work hasn’t shown quite such dramatic progress. The problem is one of data transmission and the bottlenecks that any technology runs into, slowing down the whole to the speed of its most sluggish part.

Think of a computer as like an air passenger system. If you concentrate on the aircraft, airport runway architecture, supply logistics, and air traffic control, it’s easy to speed up travel between, for example, New York and Washington DC to under one hour. That sounds fantastic, but if it takes you two hours to get through security at one hand and another two hours to collect your baggage at the other, then it’s faster to drive.

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The tech-industry is led by sci-fi nerds who want to create the things they read about, or saw on screen.

We all stand to benefit, provided that is, they can avoid the ethical pitfalls depicted in science fiction.

Steven Spielberg’s new film “Ready Player One” imagines a future where people live much of their lives in virtual reality. Do science fiction’s predictions of the future ever come true? Yes. And it’s no surprise, given that the tech industry is led by sci-fi fans turning their visions into reality.

If you’re watching this on your phone it is partly thanks to Captain Kirk.

In Star Trek, first broadcast in 1966 he used a pocket-sized device to communicate with his crew.

Martin Cooper, the man who invented the mobile phone says the show was the inspiration for his idea, which launched seven years later.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos based Alexa, the voice activated speaker on Star Trek’s talking computer.

Sci-fi fan, Elon Musk, is building rockets that he hopes will one day carry people to Mars.

Submarines, helicopters, rockets and touchscreens all appeared in science fiction before becoming science fact.

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Fiber-optic cables package everything from financial data to cat videos into light, but when the signal arrives at your local data center, it runs into a silicon bottleneck. Instead of light, computers run on electrons moving through silicon-based chips, which are less efficient than photonics. To break through, scientists have been developing lasers that work on silicon. Researchers now write that the future of silicon-based lasers may be in quantum dots.

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Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are conducting fundamental physics research that will lead to more control over mercurial quantum systems and materials. Their studies will enable advancements in quantum computing, sensing, simulation, and materials development.

The researchers’ experimental results were recently published in Physical Review B Rapid Communication and Optics Letters.

Quantum information is considered fragile because it can be lost when the system in which it is encoded interacts with its environment, a process called dissipation. Scientists with ORNL’s Computing and Computational Sciences and Physical Sciences directorates and Vanderbilt University have collaborated to develop methods that will help them control—or drive—the “leaky,” dissipative behavior inherent in .

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