Elon Musk spoke with journalist Kara Swisher at the Code Conference on September 27 2021 for a wide-ranging conversation. In typical style, Musk made a number of predictions about the future, many of them having to do with his own portfolio of technology companies.
Impressions from the first scientific meeting since a long time that I attended and which was held both face-to-face and virtually, with most people attending the German Astrobiological Society (DAbG) meeting in person.
The first major face-to-face get-together in almost two years.
Based on D-ID’s reenactment technology, Speaking Portraits enables the transformation of text or audio into videos of real people talking.
D-ID’s facial reenactment technology can generate highly realistic talking heads based just on simple inputs such as an existing audio file or even a just a text-based script.
More than eighty people have reported seeing a blazing visitor from space streak across the night sky over the United States.
Isaac Asimov won the Hugo award for Best All-Time Series for his Foundation books, which follow a future human civilization through an apparently inevitable upheaval. The story begins amid a vast galactic empire in decline. Hari Seldon, a mathematician, develops the practice of psychohistory, a method of predicting future events using statistics.
Seldon predicts the fall of the galactic empire lasting 300,000 years. By his calculations, there’s no preventing the oncoming storm, but they can shift its trajectory. With a few small changes, humanity can reduce the period of recovery to just 1,000 years. Seldon is confident enough in his predictions that he convinces the authorities to let him create two gatherings of minds. Collections of scientists who will preserve humanity’s collected knowledge and lift future generations out of the looming dark age, known as the Foundations.
These stories have enjoyed enduring popularity among sci-fi readers, enough that they were recently adapted for television by Apple TV+, but the question remains: Can statistics really predict future events?
Light beads microscopy is a two-photon microscopy approach that allows high-speed volumetric imaging of neuronal activity at the mesoscale.
Scientists have been excavating the ruins of Tikal, an ancient Maya city in modern-day Guatemala, since the 1950s—and thanks to those many decades spent documenting details of every structure and cataloguing each excavated item, Tikal has become one of the best understood and most thoroughly studied archaeological sites in the world.
But a startling recent discovery by the Pacunam Lidar Initiative, a research consortium involving a Brown University anthropologist, has ancient Mesoamerican scholars across the globe wondering whether they know Tikal as well as they think.
Using light detection and ranging software, or lidar, Stephen Houston, a professor of anthropology at Brown University, and Thomas Garrison, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered that what was long assumed to be an area of natural hills a short walk away from Tikal’s center was actually a neighborhood of ruined buildings that had been designed to look like those in Teotihuacan, the largest and most powerful city in the ancient Americas.
