March 2011
12 posts
5 tags
Designer Babies Will Be Godless Achievement... →
Are designer babies a danger to the middle class?
Should we, as a society, specially breed children for submission to the Achievatron to defeat Chinese mothers and live up to the genetic “Sputnik Moment” in which we find ourselves? Will designer babies be atheists? Peter Lawler, ostensible smart person, seems to think so!
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Transhumanism: A Secular Sandbox for Exploring the... →
I am a scientist and academic by day, but by night I’m increasingly called upon to talk about transhumanism and the Singularity. Last year, I was science advisor to Caprica, a show that explored relationships between uploaded digital selves and real selves. Some months ago I participated in a public panel on “Mutants, Androids, and Cyborgs: The science of pop culture films” for Chicago’s NPR...
February 2011
19 posts
4 tags
Drone Aircraft: How the Drones Got Their Stingers →
Cruising silently overhead, an unmanned Predator aircraft uses its infrared camera to pinpoint the telltale muzzle flashes from a sniper’s rifle. The plane’s operators, located half a world away, then unleash a Hellfire missile from under its wing, using a laser mounted beneath the craft’s nose to guide the munition into the very window the sniper had been shooting from.
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Artificial Intelligence Pioneer Marvin Minsky →
Marvin Minsky has long been one of the great human intelligences working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). A professor at MIT, where he has worked since 1957 and cofounded the AI laboratory in 1959, Minsky is also an inventor, philosopher, and author. In recent years, Minsky has focused his formidable talents on trying to impart the human capacity for commonsense reasoning to machines....
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Will Watson Win on Jeopardy!? →
A computer taking on the best human contestants on Jeopardy!?—the prospect is perhaps even more astonishing than when IBM’s Deep Blue computer challenged the world’s top chess player in 1997 (and won). NOVA recently asked three experts on artificial intelligence about Watson, its capabilities, and its implications beyond the game show. They include David Ferrucci, head of the IBM team...
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IBM's Watson In Jeopardy Deadlock →
Man and machine were tied after round one of a Jeopardy face off that is pitting IBM’s Watson supercomputer against past champions from the popular TV game show. Watson was tied with all-time Jeopardy champ Brad Rutter after the first round, which aired Monday. Watson and Rutter both tallied $5,000 in winnings, while Ken Jennings, whose streak of 74 consecutive wins is a Jeopardy record, was...
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Partnership of genes affects the brain's... →
The human brain consists of approximately one hundred billion nerve cells. Each of these cells needs to connect to specific other cells during the brain’s development in order to form a fully functional organism. Yet how does a nerve cell know where it should grow and which cells to contact? Scientists of the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried have now shown that growing...
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WatchIs it possible for antimatter to form complex structures such as molecules or even entire life forms?
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Pre-Ordering & Book Tour for Physics of the... →
Based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists, who are already inventing the future in their labs, Kaku—in a lucid and engaging fashion—presents the revolutionary developments in medicine, computers, quantum physics, and space travel that will forever change our way of life and alter the course of civilization itself.
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A new view of the galaxy: Exclusive Kepler data... →
Important data trends prominently emerge from this visualization. The abundance of smaller candidates and relative sparsity of larger ones clearly indicates that there are many tiny, meek worlds for every giant planet. But curiously there is a relatively stark drop-off in the frequency of Kepler candidates at or below approximately Earth-size. My gut says this is probably an observational bias...
Alex Saint Croix: A Glimpse Into the Hive Mind →
alexsaintx:
PART I - INTRODUCTION
This article is a brief introduction to Swarm Intelligence, aimed at the novice programmer or aspiring game developer. There are references at the end of the article that provide advanced programmers who are unfamiliar with swarm mechanics a foothold in this fascinating and…
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WatchLast IP address going, going, gone
The international organization that issues Internet Protocol (IP) addresses is expected to announce Feb. 3 that there are no more free addresses available.
Read more…
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Internet for Robots Lets Bots Share Instructions... →
Well, we’ve seen this movie before (literally speaking). A group of robotics engineers at the University of Technology in Eindhoven are developing an Internet for robots; a kind of online database from which robots can download instructions and to which they can upload “experience.” According to its creators, their RoboEarth system will allow robots to share information and learn from each other,...
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Google lets you explore the world of fractals →
Google has previously mapped the Earth, Moon and Mars, but it’s now turned its cartography skills to the mathematical world of fractals. Julia Map allows fractalnauts to explore the infinite beauty of the famous Mandelbrot set and the more general Julia sets.
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Human genome's breaking points: Genetic sequence... →
A detailed analysis of data from 185 human genomes sequenced in the course of the 1000 Genomes Project, by scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, in collaboration with researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, as well as the University of Washington and Harvard Medical School, both in the USA, has identified the genetic...
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Migraine surgery offers good long-term outcomes →
urgery to “deactivate” migraine headaches produces lasting good results, with nearly 90 percent of patients having at least partial relief at five years’ follow-up, reports a study in the February issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). In about 30 percent of patients, migraine headaches were...
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Experiment reaches biology milestone with hard... →
Unraveling the molecular basis of life is an age-old quest of humanity. A breakthrough towards this goal was reported in a pair of studies published Feb. 3 in the scientific journal Nature, detailing a new method developed to determine structures of biomolecules based on diffraction from protein nanocrystals that are so small that they are not even visible under the microscope. A tiny aerojet...
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Google Museum Virtual Environments →
Take a stroll through the famous museums of the world with Google.
