No-A is a short student film directed by Liam Murphy. In it, a hulking robot risks everything to save its creator from an army of faceless soldiers. It’s a really neat CGI film with some really outstanding designs in it.
Overall, this feels like a bit of a sliver from a much larger story, and I hope that the creators and production team will add onto the story and continue it in another short film or maybe a longer feature. It seems like there’s a lot more story to uncover.
One Apple analyst says that it’s “very likely” the company is working on a head-up display (HUD) for car windshields. The technology, which is currently used in jets, would project icons and information onto the windshield, according to the Washington Post.
Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry said that the launch of the device is “not imminent,” and he seems to be the only analyst predicting Apple’s entry into the head-up display space. Plus, Chowdhry has frequently read Apple’s tea leaves inaccurately.
Disclaimers aside, it’s not entirely unlikely that Apple is developing a high-tech answer to the distracting nature of a car dashboard. Apple does seem to be developing an all-electric minivan that may be self-driving under the codename “Project Titan,” according to reports by the Wall Street Journal. And since HUDs on windshields are already being touted by the auto industry as the next big thing, it’s reasonable Apple would want the technology in its potential car.
By altering the quantum interactions of the electrons in the atoms of a metal’s atoms, scientists from the University of Leeds have generated magnetism in metals that aren’t normally magnetic. This move could one day reduce our reliance on rare or toxic metals in a range of fields.
For those who missed this.
By all counts, Earth is on a one way trip to oblivion. Our aging Sun will see to that. Within 500 to 900 million years from now, photosynthesis and plant life on Earth will reach a death-spiral tipping point as the Sun continues its normal expansion and increases in luminosity over time.
Trouble is, researchers are still unsure about all the grisly endgame details, and their models of such slow motion horrors are hard to test. But a team of researchers now say that finding and observing nearby aging Earth-analogues, undergoing the ravages of their own expanding sun-like stars, will help Earth scientists understand how the stellar evolution of our own sun will affect life here on Earth.
“[Within] 500 million years figure most plants become extinct, although some could potentially last up to 900 million years from now by employing more carbon-efficient photosynthetic pathways,” Jack O’Malley-James, an astrobiologist at the University of St. Andrews in the U.K. told Forbes. “At this point the biosphere as we know it on Earth will be dramatically different, but not necessarily completely dead.”.
The human being — especially in so-called “advanced civilizations” — is the animal that molds itself into its own pet.
Peter Sloterdijk is Germany’s most controversial thinker and media theorist. He has dared to challenge long-established divisions in traditional philosophy of body and soul, subject and object, culture and nature. His 1999 lecture on “Regulations for the Human Park,” in which he argued that genetic engineering was a continuation of human striving for self-creation, stirred up a tempest in a country known for Nazi eugenics. At the same time, he himself has concluded that “the taming of man has failed” as civilization’s potential for barbarism has grown ever greater. His seminal books include “Critique of Cynical Reason” and his trilogy, “Spheres.”
At a recent Berggruen Center on Philosophy and Culture symposium on humans and technology at Cambridge University’s St. John’s School of Divinity, The WorldPost discussed with Sloterdijk the end of borders between humans and technology, the cloud, singularity and identity in the age of globalization.
For years now, you have been arguing that a new type of being was coming into existence, as the human species fuses with its technological prosthetics — “anthropo-technology.” In this new being, man and machine are becoming one integrated, operative system linked by information.
1. Silicon technology has taken humanity a long way forward from 1947 when the first transistor was invented by the Nobel prize winners Shockley, Bardeen & Brattain.
2. From smart mobile telephones we rely on to the sophisticated satellite navigation systems guiding our cars, a lot of techno-magic we see around us is a result of our ability to scale silicon-tech that turns hitherto science fiction into everyday reality at affordable prices.
3. All the Nobel laureates, scientists and engineers we liaise with at Quantum Innovation Labs http://QiLabs.net collectively realise the end of the silicon-scaling era is coming to end as the Moore’s Law era for Silicon-based computers finally concludes.
1. Google Search.
2. Facebook’s News Feed.
3. OKCupid Date Matching.
4. NSA Data Collection, Interpretation, and Encryption.
5. “You May Also Enjoy…”
6. Google AdWords.
7. High Frequency Stock Trading.
8. MP3 Compression.
9. IBM’s CRUSH (Criminal Reduction Utilizing Statistical History)
10. Auto-Tune
The importance of algorithms in our lives today cannot be overstated. They are used virtually everywhere, from financial institutions to dating sites. But some algorithms shape and control our world more than others — and these ten are the most significant.
Just a quick refresher before we get started. Though there’s no formal definition, computer scientists describe algorithms as a set of rules that define a sequence of operations. They’re a series of instructions that tell a computer how it’s supposed to solve a problem or achieve a certain goal. A good way to think of algorithms is by visualizing a flowchart.
Today, Toyota announced that it has hired Gill Pratt to drive its autonomous car research. Pratt is best known in this field for his work at DARPA and MIT, including starting the Robotics Challenge. The company is also investing $50 million in the research over the next five years as well as partnering with MIT and Stanford.
Pratt has spent the past five years with DARPA, and laid out what’s important for Toyota at an event in Palo Alto today: “Our long-term goal is to make a car that is never responsible for a crash.”
Pratt will serve as Toyota’s “Executive Technical Advisor” on the research.
