Update on the leading edge of brain implant research and Kurzweils predictions for brain implants in twenty years

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, says that in the 2030s we will have brain implants that will help us connect to the cloud, allowing us to pull information from the internet. Information will also be able to sent up over those networks, letting us back up our own brains. As the cloud that …

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Satellite tracking of quadrupling of Beijing size from 2000 to 2009 and the physical merger of Shanghai with nearby cities

Beijing quadrupled in size during from 2000 to 2009. Satellite maps show the growth. Beijing now has about 20 million people. Shanghai (greater area) is at 29 million and greater Guangzhou is 32 million. Ring Road growth Rings The fourth ring road was completed in 2001. The Fifth ring road was completed between 2003-2005. The …

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Cold Wall Chemical Vapor Deposition produces graphene at 100 times the speed and 100 times lower cost

A pioneering new technique to produce high-quality, low cost graphene could pave the way for the development of the first truly flexible ‘electronic skin’, that could be used in robots. Researchers from the University of Exeter have discovered an innovative new method to produce the wonder material Graphene significantly cheaper, and easier, than previously possible. …

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Sandia use Z Machine to squeeze Deuterium into Metal

Scientists in the US (Sandia Labs) and Germany (Max Planck Institute for Chemistry) have successfully transformed liquid deuterium into a metal at pressures rivalling those at the center of our own planet. The discovery is another step along the long road to obtaining solid metallic hydrogen, a phase of matter that has eluded scientists for …

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Spacex talks about how and why they want to land rockets

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is scheduled to resupply the International Space Station on Sunday. Previously resupply missions with an Orbital Antares rocket and Russia’s Progress 59 spacecraft failed. SpaceX has quickly grown into one of the world’s premier space flight companies. And as Orbital ATK recovers from its failed launch, SpaceX is now the United States’ …

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Life in GoogleVille

Google is changing your urban world. * Self driving cars * Helper robots * Augmented reality * Universal wifi * high resolution surveillance video cameras with infrared imaging and other home gadgets from Nest The latest models of Google’s self-driving cars are now cruising the streets near the Internet company’s Silicon Valley headquarters as an …

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Finally we will get free gigabit Wi-Fi everywhere and of course it will come from Google

Larry Page had announced last month that Sidewalk Labs (a new Google company) would focus on improving city life for everyone by developing and incubating urban technologies to address issues like cost of living, efficient transportation and energy usage. Sidewalk Labs announced it would be leading the acquisition of two companies behind New York City’s …

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Closing in on 50 years of being wrong – Paul Ehrlich says again environmental collapse is coming

Paul Ehrlich says we are entering the sixth great mass extinction. Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction There have been papers which show that species and area relationships always overestimate extinctions. Ehrlich became well known for his controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, which asserted that the world’s human population would …

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DARPA wants to engineer from millions of organisms and not just yeast and ecoli

Alicia Jackson of DARPA wants to take any of the 30 million to 30 billion organisms on Earth and leverage any properties they have. She wants to quickly map it and quickly engineer them. If you look at genome annotation software today, it’s not built to quickly find engineer able systems [and genes]. It’s built …

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Clusters of bright spots on Ceres and pyramid shaped mountain

The closer we get to Ceres, the more intriguing the distant dwarf planet becomes. New images of Ceres from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft provide more clues about its mysterious bright spots, and also reveal a pyramid-shaped peak towering over a relatively flat landscape. “The surface of Ceres has revealed many interesting and unique features. For example, …

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Spintronics advance brings wafer-scale quantum devices closer to reality

An electronics technology that uses the “spin”—or magnetization—of atomic nuclei to store and process information promises huge gains in performance over today’s electron-based devices. But getting there is proving challenging. Now, researchers at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering have made a crucial step toward nuclear spintronic technologies. They have gotten nuclear spins …

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