Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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By Devin Powell — Washington Post

http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/imported/mind-in-motion_2.jpg

The first kick of the 2014 FIFA World Cup may be delivered in Sao Paulo next June by a Brazilian who is paralyzed from the waist down. If all goes according to plan, the teenager will walk onto the field, cock back a foot and swing at the soccer ball, using a mechanical exoskeleton controlled by the teen’s brain.The first kick of the 2014 FIFA World Cup may be delivered in Sao Paulo next June by a Brazilian who is paralyzed from the waist down. If all goes according to plan, the teenager will walk onto the field, cock back a foot and swing at the soccer ball, using a mechanical exoskeleton controlled by the teen’s brain.

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By — Geek

pasta head

3D printing is attractive to a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons, but in general its supporters talk about the economic and efficiency benefits; it can build things faster and easier than competing methods, bring down manufacturing costs and remove the need for large amounts of international shipping. That’s usually what you hear in defense of 3D printing — but now, Italian food corporation Barilla is looking to 3D print their art.

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Written By: — Singualrity Hub

Mars_One_Astronaut (1)

First, the private organization announced they would colonize the Red Planet by 2023 and fund the mission, in part, by making a television show about their space adventures. Then they took some 200,000 applications from would-be astronauts (with no required qualifications) for a one-way ticket to Mars.

If you’re disappointed that human beings haven’t flown beyond the Moon—then all this bold Mars talk is inspiring. But talk is cheap. Now, comes the costly part.

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The Internet has clearly demonstrated the power of networked computing. You don’t need me to tell you that effects of the Internet’s emergence have been overwhelmingly pervasive. But the Internet is also very new and still evolving. So what is the future of this medium? How will it continue to shape our lives in the 2020s? 2030s? 2040s?

Let me know what you think! @cadelllast

— Business Insider

stockman bitcoin

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) is the outsider’s outsider — what other Texan would spend a freezing New Year’s hundreds of miles away in New York City?

But there he was last night at the launch event for the NYC Bitcoin Center, located just up the street from the New York Stock Exchange.

Michele Wessel — Guardian Liberty Voice

robot

Apple Inc. and Google have invested heavily in robots over the past year, giving the impression that the tech giants see robotic technology as the way of the future.

Apple Inc. has been reported to be investing a significant portion of its $10.5 billion in capital expenditures for 2014 into a variety of robots. This response is likely as a result of a leveling off in sales of their devices as other companies like Samsung infringe upon their territory in the world of electronics innovation.

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NIGEL JAQUISS — Willamette Week

Cameron Smith, archaeologist and anthropology professor at Portland State University

lede_4009(smith)

By day, Cameron Smith teaches anthropology at Portland State University—digging fossils in Africa, launching solo voyages in the Arctic or sailing primitive vessels in the open ocean. By night, Smith, 46, is feverishly building a DIY space suit. Working in concert with a Danish nonprofit aerospace organization called Copenhagen Suborbitals, Smith wants to democratize space travel. He has turned his Pearl District apartment into a workshop where a homemade space suit nearly five years in the making lies on a folding table. Next year, he plans to balloon up to 63,000 feet to test the suit. The year after that, the Danes will send it up to 63 miles. And after that?

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Weightlessness in free fall, seen by Einstein in a flash in 1907, was “the happiest thought of my life” as he always said. It implies that gravity can be replaced by ordinary acceleration and hence can be understood from first principles using his then two years old theory of special relativity.

Twelve revolutionary implications follow. They all derive from the following simple abstract scenario described by Einstein: A light ray is ascending inside a constantly accelerating long rocketship in outer space, from the bottom to the tip. During this finite traveling time, the ship itself is picking up speed. That is all. The rest is implications:

# 1) When the ascending light with its intrinsic finite speed c arrives at the tip, the tip is receding at a constant velocity from the point of origin of the light. So a constant Doppler effect applies. Hence the temporal wavelength of a laser beam arriving upstairs is elongated. This is the famous GRAVITATIONAL REDSHIFT (Einstein).

# 2) The elongated wavelength of the photons emitted downstairs implies that their constant energy is lower there from the beginning since nothing happens to them on the way. This is the GRAVITATIONAL ENERGY REDUCTION OF LIGHT (Einstein).

# 3) The clocks downstairs do not only appear to be ticking slower when watched from above, they actually tick slower. The two ticking rates stand in a permanent ratio (there is a bijection between upper and lower time). Therefore when an upper clock is lowered and then hauled-up again, it is delayed. This is the GRAVITATIONAL TWIN PARADOX.

# 4) The spatial wavelength of a laser beam arriving upstairs is elongated in parallel with its temporal wavelength (# 1). This is the GRAVITATIONAL SIZE INCREASE.

# 5) The ratio “spatial wavelength over temporal wavelength” is preserved downstairs. This is the LOCAL CONSTANCY OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT c IN GRAVITY (Einstein).

# 6) The energy-reduced light downstairs (# 2) implies that particles that are created downstairs out of locally normal-appearing but energy-reduced photons, are – via quantum electrodynamics (imagine a time-inverted PET scan installed downstairs) – reduced in their rest mass. Hence all particles locally at rest downstairs are rest-mass reduced by the gravitational redshift factor. This is the GRAVITATIONAL REST-MASS REDUCTION.

# 7) Since the rest-mass-to-charge ratio is a universal constant for every particle class and corresponding type of charge, the gravitational rest mass reduction (# 6) possesses a corollary. This is the GRAVITATIONAL CHARGE REDUCTION.

# 8) The reduced rest mass of all objects located downstairs (# 6) implies – via quantum mechanics – that the gravitational size increase (# 4) which affects all lengths downstairs is as real as the gravitational time slowdown (# 3). Hence the ratio “spatial wavelength (# 4) over temporal wavelength (# 1)” is not only a local but also a global constant. This is the GLOBAL CONSTANCY OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT c IN GAVITY.

# 9) The transversal speed of light c APPEARS TO BE REDUCED by the redshift factor valid downstairs, when watched from upstairs (Einstein).

# 10) The transversal speed of light c APPEARS TO BE INCREASED by the blueshift factor valid upstairs, when watched from downstairs.

# 11) All ten effects are LOCALLY MASKED (as Einstein saw with his own points # 1, 2, 5, 9).

# 12) Of the six new “young-Einstein corollaries” (# 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10), one (# 8) is the most astounding. For it implies the EXISTENCE OF A GLOBAL–c TRANSFORM OF GENERAL RELATIVITY.

The latter equation has yet to be written down explicitly except for a special case (the re-written Schwarzschild metric). The implied new global constancy of c is responsible that all globally expanding solutions and all gravitational-wave solutions of the Einstein equation as written so far lose their physical status. Therefore, the seven added corollaries (# 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12) do, in conjunction with Einstein’s five original happy findings (# 1, 2, 5, 9, 11), change the face of gravitation theory while at the same time making it compatible with quantum mechanics. (For J.O.R.)

Overmanagement by Mr. Andres Agostini

NATGEO NASA
This is an excerpt from the conclusion section o, “…Overmanagement…,” that discusses some management strategies. To read the entire piece, just click the link at the end of article:

BEGINNING OF EXCERPT.

Question: What other contemporary issues particularly concern you? Do you find signs of
hope or resistance around these issues that, perhaps, you finding heartening?

Well, we can make a long list, including the things we’ve talked about, but it’s also worth
remembering that, hovering over the things we discussed, are two major problems. These
are issues that seriously threaten the possibility of decent human survival. One of them is
the growing threat of environmental catastrophe, which we are racing towards as if we
were determined to fall off a precipice, and the other is the threat of nuclear war, which
has not declined, in fact it’s very serious and in many respects is growing. The second one
we know, at least in principle, how to deal with it. There is a way of significantly reducing
that threat; the methods are not being pursued but we know what they are. In the case of
environmental catastrophe it’s not so clear that there will even be a way to control of
maybe reverse it. Maybe. But, the longer we wait, the more we defer taking measures, the
worse it’s going to be.

It’s quite striking to see that those in the lead of trying to do something about this
catastrophe are what we call “primitive” societies. The first nations in Canada, indigenous
societies in central America, aboriginals in Australia. They’ve been on the forefront of
trying to prevent the disaster that we’re rushing towards. It’s beyond irony that the richest
most powerful countries in the world are racing towards disaster while the so-called
primitive societies are the ones in the forefront of trying to avert it.

END OF EXCERPT.

Please see the full article at http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

By Kelsey D. Atherton — Popular Science

Consider it a rough Audubon guide to the mechanical fauna of battlefields. Created by Amsterdam-based designer Ruben Pater, the Drone Survival Guide is, on one side, a rough bird watcher’s guide to the modern robot at war. The other side is a short section of printed survival tips, and the guides are available in Pashto, Dutch, German, Italian, Indonesian, Arabic, and English.

The selection of drones included in the guide leads heavily towards those from NATO member countries, with the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, and the United States all represented, as well as NATO itself, for the other member countries that use these drones. Partly because those are the countries that have used drones, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the most, but partly because they are just the countries where it is easier to get information about the scale and wingspan of their flying robots.

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