Jan Scheuermann has been paralyzed since 2003 because of a neurodegenerative condition. In 2012, she agreed to be fitted with two probes on the surface of her brain in the motor cortex area responsible for right hand and arm movements. In the last two years, she has tolerated those probes better than expected; as a …
World Aluminum production is about 55 million tons per year. There has been a dip with the recent economic slowdown. There is growing global demand for aluminium, which is estimated to reach 70 million tonnes per year by 2020. The world produces about 6 million tons per year of magnesium. China produces about 66% of …
The Bank of Canada has said that it is not illegal to deface or mutilate banknotes. The announcement was made after actor Leonard Nimoy’s death last week set off a craze of marking-up banknotes. The drawings make the country’s former Prime Minister, Wilfrid Laurier, look like Spock, Nimoy’s famous Star Trek character. SOURCES – BBC …
The estimated number of people killed in eastern Ukraine since April 2014 has now passed the 6,000* mark, in spite of successive ceasefires, the UN Human Rights Office announced Monday, saying the escalation in fighting in recent weeks, particularly near Donetsk airport and in the Debaltseve area, resulted in hundreds of deaths, both civilian and …
There are detailed population projection scenarios for Japan out to 2060. They made the “medium-mortality” assumption (84.19 years for men and 90.93 years for women in 2060) based on the statistics of mortality from 1970 to 2010 and set the “high-mortality” assumption (83.22 years and 89.96 years for men and women, respectively) and the “low-mortality” …
China has reopened tenders for high-speed trains worth an estimated $8.2 billion, lifting a suspension imposed after a crash that killed dozens of passengers in 2011 and signalling a new phase of construction in the country’s vast railway network. State-owned giant China Railway Investment Corp (CRIC) said it had opened tenders for 91 bullet trains …
110 years ago, the Wrights took to the air on December 17, 1903, making two flights each from level ground into a freezing headwind gusting to 27 miles per hour (43 km/h). The first flight, by Orville, of 120 feet (37 m) in 12 seconds, at a speed of only 6.8 miles per hour (10.9 …
NASA and The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) of Pensacola, Fla., with the help of engineers from Oceaneering Space Systems of Houston, have jointly developed a robotic exoskeleton called X1. The 57-pound device is a robot that a human could wear over his or her body either to assist or inhibit movement …
There is a Less Wrong article about AI timeline predictions. I think far better sensors, cameras and motion detection will drive AI capabilities and bring robots effectively into the wild and out of the labs. Sensors and smart tattoo tagging will make the task of figuring out the environment easy for robots and less of …
1. In a major boost to India’s quest for energy security, a new uranium processing plant has recently been commissioned in Kadapa, Andhra Pradesh, which may have one of the largest reserves of uranium in the world. For a country that has been importing uranium to fuel its nuclear power plants from across the world, …
Jim Quinn makes the case that China has been inflating an economic bubble and that collapse is imminent within two years. The Chinese government has created a commercial and residential real estate bubble in an effort to keep peasants employed and not rioting in the streets. In the case of the US subprime mortgage bubble, …