In China’s three big population centres—the areas around Beijing in the north, Shanghai in the east and Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, in the south—life and work have started to follow the sinews of the high-speed rail system. Trains were previously too infrequent, too slow and too crowded to allow for daily commutes. Now, …
A guest article by Joseph Friedlander I recall a Poul Anderson science fiction novel with teleportation being one of its’ premises and one of the plot points was the main station was on the Moon because you could teleport millions of tons of radium into existence which might pose a huge danger to life on …
Xhaul aims at developing an adaptive, sharable,cost-efficient 5G transport network solution integrating the front haul and backhaul segments of the network. This transport network will flexibly interconnect distributed 5G radio access and core network functions, hosted on in-network cloud nodes,through the implementation of two novel building blocks: i) A control infrastructure using a unified, abstract …
1. Planetaria – New study helps answer mystery of what happened to Mars’ early atmosphere Mars used to have a thicker atmosphere and water on its surface, but what happened to that atmosphere has been a mystery. New research may finally help answer that question. Image Credit: M. Kornmesser/ESO A new analysis of the largest …
Google has acquired artificial-intelligence company DeepMind Technologies Ltd. The tech website Recode reported that Google paid $400 million for the startup based in London. DeepMind describes itself as a “cutting edge artificial intelligence company. They combine the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms. The company was founded …
In a Sunday evening “60 Minutes” program aired on CBS Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos unveiled the new service, dubbed Prime Air, to CBS anchor Charlie Rose. The company has been working on the “octocopter” project in a secret research and development lab at its Seattle, Wash.-based headquarters for months in efforts to ramp up …
Google is using Solve for X and major projects like self driving cars and Google Glass to attempt to leapfrog the competition to achieve radical improvement. Google’s latest effort is to legitimize efforts to achieve radical life extension with their new company Calico. This will force more aggressive target setting from biotech companies. Elon Musk …
The theory underlying Mach effects – fluctuations of the restmasses of accelerating objects in which internal energy changes take place – and their use for propulsion is briefly recapitulated. Experimental apparatus based on a very sensitive thrust balance is briefly described. The experimental protocol employed to search for expected Mach effects is laid out, and …
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 …
1. Techradar has an extensive and comprehensive review of the upgraded Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone. The Samsung Galaxy Nexus was the world’s first phone to run Android 4.0: Ice Cream Sandwich and now just under a year later it’s the first phone to run Android 4.1: Jelly Bean. It’s an upgrade that keeps it as …
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 …