Science & TechnologyS


Laptop

The singularity is near: Mind uploading by 2045?

Mind Uploading
© BrainGate 2, www.braingate2.orgSome futurists predict humans will be able to upload their consciousness to computers in the near future.
New York - By 2045, humans will achieve digital immortality by uploading their minds to computers - or at least that's what some futurists believe. This notion formed the basis for the Global Futures 2045 International Congress, a futuristic conference held here June 14-15.

The conference, which is the brainchild of Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov, fell somewhere between hardcore science and science fiction. It featured a diverse cast of speakers, from scientific luminaries like Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis and Marvin Minsky, to Swamis and other spiritual leaders.

In the year 2045

Kurzweil - an inventor, futurist and now director of engineering at Google - predicts that by 2045, technology will have surpassed human brainpower to create a kind of superintelligence - an event known as the singularity. Other scientists have said that robots will overtake humans by 2100.

According to Moore's law, computing power doubles approximately every two years. Several technologies are undergoing similar exponential advances, from genetic sequencing to 3D printing, Kurzweil told conference attendees. He illustrated the point with a series of graphs showing the inexorable upward climb of various technologies.

By 2045, "based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold," Kurzweil said.

Itskov and other so-called "transhumanists" interpret this impending singularity as digital immortality. Specifically, they believe that in a few decades, humans will be able to upload their minds to a computer, transcending the need for a biological body. The idea sounds like sci-fi, and it is - at least for now. The reality, however, is that neural engineering is making significant strides toward modeling the brain and developing technologies to restore or replace some of its biological functions.

Comet 2

New Comet: C/2013 J2 (McNaught)

Discovery Date: May 8, 2013

Magnitude: 18.2 mag

Discoverer: Robert H. McNaught (Siding Spring)

C/2013 J2
© Aerith NetMagnitudes Graph
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2013-K38.

Laptop

Google launches giant balloon powered internet in New Zealand


Google launches giant balloons over New Zealand's south Island, carrying computer equipment that can create a high-speed internet infrastructure. Codenamed 'project loon', the helium filled balloons carry antennae, computers, batteries and navigational equipment, collecting power from solar panels that dangle below. Each can provide internet coverage over an area of 1200 square kilometres. The project intends to help remote areas across the world access internet coverage

Fireball

Huge earth-passing asteroid an 'entirely new beast'

Image
© Arecibo Observatory/NASA/Ellen HowellRadar image of asteroid 1998 QE2 and its moon taken on June 7, 2013, by the Arecibo Observatory. Several craters are visible on the asteroid, and the moon appears as a bright streak. Each pixel is 7.5 meters (25 feet).
A big asteroid that flew past Earth last month belongs to a new category of space rock, scientists say.

Asteroid 1998 QE2 and its moon sailed within 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers) of Earth on May 31, making their closest approach to our planet for at least the next two centuries. New radar images captured by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico are revealing just how unique this binary asteroid is, researchers say.

"Asteroid QE2 is dark, red, and primitive - that is, it hasn't been heated or melted as much as other asteroids," Arecibo's Ellen Howell said in a statement. "QE2 is nothing like any asteroid we've visited with a spacecraft, or plan to, or that we have meteorites from. It's an entirely new beast in the menagerie of asteroids near Earth."

The 1000-foot-wide (305 meters) Arecibo dish and NASA's 230-foot (70 m) Deep Space Network antenna in Goldstone, Calif., tracked 1998 QE2 as it approached Earth last month, then kept following the near-Earth asteroid as it receded into the depths of space.

The resulting radar images have helped researchers take 1998 QE2's measure. The dark, cratered main asteroid is 1.9 miles (3 km) wide, and it has a 2,500-foot (750 m) moon that orbits it once every 32 hours.

Network

Ramping up the fear: FDA sends warning over potential for medical device hacking

Image
© Reuters / Bernadett Szabo

The FDA is warning that implanted medical devices, such as pacemakers and defibrillators, are often connected to networks that are vulnerable to cyber attacks that could shut down or manipulate the machinery.

Hackers with malicious intentions could introduce malware into the equipment, thereby gaining access to configure settings in medical devices or hospital networks, the Food and Drug Administration said in a warning sent to hospitals, medical device manufacturers, user facilities, and biomedical engineers.

"Over the past year, we've become increasingly aware of cyber security vulnerabilities in incidents that have been reported to us," William Maisel, deputy director for science at the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, told Reuters. "Hundreds of medical devices have been affected, involving dozens of manufacturers."

Top Secret

Thousands of firms trade confidential data with the US government in exchange for classified intelligence

nsa prism
© n/a
The rabbit hole just got deeper. A whole lot deeper.

On Sunday we predicated that "there's one reason why the administration, James Clapper and the NSA should just keep their mouths shut as the PRISM-gate fallout escalates: with every incremental attempt to refute some previously unknown facet of the US Big Brother state, a new piece of previously unleaked information from the same intelligence organization now scrambling for damage control, emerges and exposes the brand new narrative as yet another lie, forcing even more lies, more retribution against sources, more journalist persecution and so on."

And like a hole that just gets deeper the more you dug and exposes ever more dirt, tonight's installment revealing one more facet of the conversion of a once great republic into a great fascist, "big brother" state, comes from Bloomberg which reports that "thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the process said."

Info

Atomic weights tweaked for 5 elements

Periodic Table
© T. B. Coplen (U.S. Geological Survey)This is how carbon looks on a revised periodic table that uses intervals for the standard atomic weights of some elements.
Standard atomic weights, those numbers emblazoned under the elements on the periodic table, were once thought of as unchanging constants of nature.

But researchers have tweaked the atomic weights of five elements - magnesium, bromine, germanium, indium and mercury - in a new table published by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).

To calculate standard atomic weight, scientists have traditionally averaged the weights of the stable variations of an element known as isotopes.

All atoms of an element have the same atomic number, or number of protons in their nuclei, but the number of neutrons in the nuclei can vary, leading some isotopes to be lighter or heavier. Carbon-12, for example, the most abundant carbon isotope, has six protons and six neutrons. Its slightly heavier cousin, carbon-13, has six protons and seven neutrons.

Standard atomic weight also depends on how common an element's stable isotopes are. In other words, the more plentiful an isotope, the more it will influence the average. But the abundance of an isotope can also vary from place to place on Earth, leading to differences in an element's atomic weight depending on its context.

For that reason, the atomic weights of magnesium and bromine will now be expressed as intervals with upper and lower bounds instead of single values. The atomic weight of bromine, for instance, is commonly thought to be 79.904, but it can actually range between 79.901 and 79.907, depending on where the element is found.

Sun

Nearby flare star gives off explosive burst of light

Flare Star
© Casey Reed/NASA
Within a span of three minutes, a star in the Usra Major constellation less than 16 light-years from Earth gave off a massive flare, making the object 15 times brighter than normal, according to a new report in the journal Astrophysics.

The star, known as WX UMa, is a so-called flare star, a class of stars which can become 100 times or more brighter within a few seconds or minutes. These flares appear to be randomly occurring, and the stars return to their normal state tens of minutes after the event.

"We recorded a strong flare of the star WX UMa, which became almost 15 times brighter in a matter of 160 seconds," said report co-author Vakhtang Tamazian, an astrophysicist at the University of Santiago de Compostela.

WX UMa is part of a binary system with a companion star that shines almost 100 times brighter, except during WX UMa flare events. The event described in the report was observed from the Byurakan Observatory in Armenia.

"During this period of less than three minutes the star underwent an abrupt change ... from a temperature of 2,800 kelvin to six or seven times more than that," Tamazian noted.

While scientists currently do not know how to predict these flares, they do know how they develop.

Info

Leprosy remarkably unchanged from medieval times

Skull with Leprosy
© University of WinchesterLeprosy causes deformities of the skull, seen in this medieval skull from Winchester, UK.
Leprosy is much less common today than it was during the Middle Ages, but the bacterium that causes this debilitating disease has hardly changed since then, a new study finds.

Researchers sequenced the surprisingly well-preserved genome of the leprosy bacterium in skeletons exhumed from medieval graves in Europe. It's the first time an ancient genome has been sequenced "from scratch" (without a reference genome), and reveals that medieval leprosy strains were nearly identical to modern leprosy strains.

Leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease, is due to a chronic infection of the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae. The disease causes skin lesions that can permanently damage the skin, nerves, eyes and limbs.

While it doesn't cause body parts to fall off, those infected with leprosy can become deformed as a result of secondary infections. The disease often strikes during the peak reproductive years, but it develops very slowly, and can take 25 to 30 years for symptoms to appear.

The disease was extremely common in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, especially in southern Scandinavia. "It was a major public health problem," said study co-author Jesper Boldsen, a biological anthropologist at the University of Southern Denmark.

But leprosy declined precipitously during the 16th century. To understand why, Boldsen's colleagues sequenced DNA from five medieval skeletons, and from biopsies of living people with leprosy.

Fireball 4

City-destroying asteroid flashes Earth with just one day's notice

Asteroid 2013 LR6
© JPL Small Body DatabaseOrbit diagram of Asteroid 2013 LR6.
A truck-sized asteroid just discovered yesterday (Thursday, June 6) will give Earth a relatively close shave later today/early tomorrow, depending on your time zone. Asteroid 2013 LR6 is somewhere between 5- 16 meters (16 to 54 feet) in diameter and will be flying by at only about 111,000 kilometers (69,000 mi, 0.29x Lunar Distances) from Earth at 4:43UTC/12:43AM EDT on June 8, 2013.

This is similar in size to the space rock that exploded over Russia back in February of this year. The Russian asteroid was about 15 meters (50 feet) in diameter before it exploded in an airburst event about 20-25 km (12-15 miles) above Earth's surface.

Find out how you can watch the flyby live online, below.