The controversial chairperson of the science committee in the U.S. House of Representatives announced today that he will not seek re-election to Congress next fall. The pending departure of Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX) could give the U.S. scientific community a chance to recalibrate a rocky 5-year relationship with a key congressional committee.
Representative Lamar Smith’s tenure marked by bitter clashes with science community.
Transmedics, une machine qui permet de « réanimer » un coeur ayant cessé de battre. Une belle avancée pour augmenter considérablement le nombre de greffons disponibles pour les transplantations!
Via Explore Science
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUOu9RpzwJI
Has mobilized a team of the most experienced, connected and passionately curious minds from the US intelligence community, including the CIA and Department of Defense, that have been operating under the shadows of top-secrecy for decades.
Tom Delonge and the team members all share a common thread of frustration and determination to disrupt the status quo and want to use their expertise and credibility to bring transformative science and engineering out of the shadows and collaborate with global citizens to apply that knowledge in a way that benefits humanity.
ToTheStarsAcademy.com
Watch and hear about how we plan to bring transformative science and engineering to global citizens and support breakthrough research, discovery and innovation that can benefit humanity.
Including:
Chris Mellon: FMR Deputy Asst Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
Jim Semivan: FMR Sr. Intelligence Service, CIA’s Directorate of Operations.
Dr. Hal Puthoff: Director of DOD/CIA/DIA Scientific Research Programs
Steve Justice: FMR Advanced Systems Director for Lockheed Martin’s “Skunk Works”
Luis Elizondo: FMR Director of Programs to Investigate Unidentified Aerial Threats, USG
Get more info at www.ToTheStarsAcademy.com and read the Offering Circular at https://dpo.tothestarsacademy.com/#offering-circular
Do you remember all the hoopla last year when the Higgs Boson was confirmed by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider? That’s the one called the ‘God particle’, because it was touted as helping to resolve the forces of nature into one elegant theory. Well—Not so fast, bucko!…
First, some credit where credit is due: The LHC is a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets interspersed by accelerators that boost the energy of the particles as they whip around and smash into each other. For physicists—and anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of what goes into everything—it certainly inspires awe.
Existence of the Higgs Boson (aka, The God Particle) was predicted. Physicists were fairly certain that it would be observed. But its discovery is a ‘worst case’ scenario for the Standard Model of particle physics. It points to shortcomings in our ability to model and predict things. Chemists have long had a master blueprint of atoms in the Periodic Table. It charts all the elements in their basic states. But, physicists are a long way from building something analogous. That’s because we know a lot more about atomic elements than the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy. [continue below image]
So, what do we know about fundamental particles the forces that bind them? HINT: There are 61 that we know of or have predicted and at least two about which we don’t yet have any clue: The pull of Gravity and dark matter / dark energy.
This video produced by the BBC Earth project is an actors’ portrayal of a news interviewer and a particle physicist. If we were to simply watch these two guys talk in front of a camera, it would be pretty boring (unless, of course, the physicist has charm and panache, like the late Richard Feynman or my own Cornell professor, Carl Sagan). So, to spice it up a bit, BBC has added a corny animation of two guys talking with an anthropomorphic illustration of cartoon particles. Corny? Yes! But it helps to keep a viewer captivated. And, for any armchair physicist, the story is really exciting!
See the video here. It takes a moment to load—but for me, the wait is worthwhile.
Science Fiction becomes Science Fact?
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For much of human history, living up to a ripe old age was seen as a gift from the gods, an aberration, or just the product of sheer luck. Given that up to the beginning of the twentieth century many of us succumbed to disease at an early age, being extremely fortunate to live anywhere past the age of forty, it should be no surprise that living a long life is still beatified today as something akin to winning the lottery.
Even when confronted with the galloping pace of scientific advances in human longevity, our historical sensibilities have led us to take a defeatist stance towards the subject: “Even if longevity interventions become available during my lifetime, I am already too late to take advantage of them, so why bother?”
Indeed, this hesitation to see human life extension as a real possibility in our lifetime, dismissing it as a dream belonging to the realms of science fiction[1] and futuristic utopias[2] is not an uncommon one, and as long as tangible rejuvenation therapies do not become available, we will feel validated in our pragmatism.
Posted in robotics/AI, science | Leave a Comment on In 2015, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) ran its first Allen AI Science Challenge, which tested machines on an ostensibly difficult task—answering eighth-grade science questions
Doing well on such a challenge would appear to require significant advances in AI technology, making it a potentially powerful way to advance the field. In this video, Carissa Schoenick discusses “Moving Beyond the Turing Test with the Allen AI Science Challenge,” in the September 2017 CACM.
Posted in policy, science | Leave a Comment on Keith Comito on the SCIQ on TYT show talking about why policy needs science to make wise and accurate decisions regarding how society is managed
