AI researchers have been speculating for decades that it might be possible one day to create substrate independent minds. In 1999 Ray Kurzweil published The Age of Spiritual Machines in which he predicted that minds would be uploaded to computers in the latter part of the 21st century. The subject of Artificial General Intelligence has …
Ridley Scott is set to helm a follow up to his own ground-breaking 1982 science fiction classic “Blade Runner” for Warner Bros-based financing and production company Alcon Entertainment (“The Blind Side,” “The Book of Eli”). Alcon has not revealed whether the new Blade Runner will be a sequel or prequel to the original, and all …
66th Carnival of Nuclear Energy is up at the ANS Nuclear Cafe If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News …
SiNW and apparatus. a, Scanning electron micrograph of a SiNW substrate showing several SiNWs representative of the type used in this study. Scale bar is 5 μm. b, The tip of the SiNW used in this study with the polystyrene coating. The dashed lines indicate the outer diameter of the SiNW. Scale bar is 100 …
Arxiv – In 1974, Ralph Merkle proposed the first unclassified scheme for secure communications over insecure channels. When legitimate communicating parties are willing to spend an amount of computational effort proportional to some parameter N, an eavesdropper cannot break into their communication without spending a time proportional to N^2, which is quadratically more than the …
The Sukhoi T-50 fifth-generation stealth fighter, which Russia is jointly developing with India, made its public debut at a Moscow airshow on Wednesday. The T-50 resembles Russia’s best-selling Su-30 fighter jet but will have all its weapons hidden inside its body and wings to avoid radar detection and will fly at supersonic cruising speeds. The …
The SpaceX company has gotten approval to launch its Dragon spacecraft this fall. If all goes well, the ‘craft will dock at the International Space Station nine days later, making it the first private spacecraft to do so. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk discusses plans for the launch. Elon – Falcon 9 is – it’s a …
EETimes – Tensilica described a new integer DSP core for next-generation cellular applications that when made in a 28nm process can compute 100 GMACs/second at less than a Watt. The BBE64 core is a new instruction set architecture based on the companies’ current Xtensa LX4 core. The BBE64 combines SIMD and VLIW concepts and lets …
Caption: A schematic of the proposed power transfer system for a running automobile. This system transmits electric power thorough a capacitor composed of a steel belt and a metal plate attached to the road, and the power feed in differential mode. Notably, the leakage electromagnetic field is small, and the infrastructure can be set up …
Tennessee Valley Authority has decided to complete a nuclear reactor at Bellefonte Bellefonte 1 is a Babcock & Wilcox pressurized water reactor currently considered 55% complete. A $4.9 billion project should see it begin operation by 2020 to generate 1260 MWe. Completing Bellefonte 1 will be cheaper on a per-MW basis than the cost of …
Office bot: This telepresence robot, from Anybots, costs $15,000. Known as the QB, it has built-in obstacle avoidance that automatically prevents it from striking objects such as doorways. Credit: Anybots Technology Review – New telepresence robots are being commercialized Building on the trend toward remote work, two companies started shipping wheeled telepresence robots to customers …