Science & Technology

5G, AI and graphene: Three developments that will drive us into a technocracy

Patrick Wood
Activist Post
Sun, 26 Mar 2017 16:28 UTC

The latest technological revolution will make existing technology look like the Stone Age, yet few people outside of academia and industry are even aware of it. Many, if not most, of the people who are driving these technologies are Technocrats who intend to connect the world into a single global entity. Think, 'hive mind', 'global city' and 2030 Agenda.

Three particular technologies were prominently featured at the prestigious 2017 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain from February 27 through March 2.

The first disruptive technology is 5G, or Fifth Generation, cell phone communication protocol. The first keynote speaker was Mats Granryd (Director-General of the Groupe Spéciale Mobile Association, or GSMA). His bio on the Mobile World website states,

Mats is a strong proponent of sustainability and led the mobile industry in becoming the first sector to broadly commit to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2016. He is now spearheading initiatives to amplify and accelerate the mobile industry's impact on all 17 of the SDGs, across both developed and developing markets.

5G is widely expected to power the Internet of Everything (IoE), which includes all citizens of the world as well as all devices in the Internet of Things (IoT). This new standard will be common by 2020 and ubiquitous by 2025. It improves current 4G performance by orders of magnitude.

Tissue engineering: Scientists turn spinach leaf into working heart tissue

Helena Horton
The Telegraph
Sat, 25 Mar 2017 15:38 UTC

Researchers have managed to turn a spinach leaf into working heart tissue and are on the way to solving the problem of recreating the tiny, branching networks of blood vessels in human tissue.

Until now, scientists have unsuccessfully tried to use 3D printing to recreate these intricate networks.

Now, with this breakthrough, it seems turning plants with their delicate veins into human tissue could be the key to delivering blood via a vascular system into the new tissue.

Scientists have managed in the past to create small-scale artificial samples of human tissue, but they have struggled to create it on a large scale, which is what would be needed to treat injury.

Researchers have suggested that eventually this technique could be used to grow layers of healthy heart muscle to treat patients who have suffered a heart attack.

New Mars photo shows countless worm-like dunes on red planet

RT
Sun, 26 Mar 2017 15:50 UTC

A newly released image from the surface of Mars has revealed an abundance of odd, squiggly worm-shaped dunes around the red planet's southern hemisphere.

Dunes are scattered across Mars' sandy surface, and the newly-released NASA photo shows just how odd the formations look when snapped from above.

The picture, taken by the space agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows a huge collection of dunes just west of the Hellas impact basin, one of the red planet's largest and most recognizable impact basins.

"The Hellespontus region features numerous collections of dark, dune formations that collect both within depressions such as craters, and among 'extra-crater' plains areas," NASA said in a statement.

NASA's Curiosity spots clouds possibly shaped by gravity waves

Paul Voosen
Science
Wed, 22 Mar 2017 18:00 UTC

© NASA/JPL-Caltech/York University
While driving across the Naukluft plateau, a gnarly terrain riven with rock shards, last summer, Curiosity captured these early morning clouds.

NASA's Curiosity rover usually keeps its instruments firmly focused on Mars's ground, zapping grit with its laser or drilling cores in bedrock. But every few days, the SUV-sized robot, like any good dreamer, shifts its sights upward to the clouds.

Well into its fifth year, the rover has now shot more than 500 movies of the clouds above it, including the first ground-based view of martian clouds shaped by gravity waves, researchers reported here this week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. (Gravity waves, common atmospheric ripples on Earth that result from air trying to regain its vertical balance, should not be confused with gravitational waves, cosmological ripples in spacetime.) The shots are the best record made so far of a mysterious recurring belt of equatorial clouds known to influence the martian climate.

Understanding these clouds will help inform estimates of ground ice depth and perhaps recurring slope lineae, potential flows of salty water on the surface, says John Moores, a planetary scientist at York University in Toronto, Canada, who led the study with his graduate student, Jake Kloos. "If we wish to understand the water story of Mars's past," Moores says, "we first need to [separate out] contributions from the present-day water cycle."

The observations seem likely to constrain fine-grained models of martian clouds, which have been built in the past with limited information, says Nicholas Heavens, a planetary scientist at Hampton University in Virginia, who is unaffiliated with the study. "These cloud videos are not just pretty pictures."

DARPA: The imagineers of war by any means

Sally Adlee
New Scientist
Wed, 22 Mar 2017 00:00 UTC

Shortly after arriving at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in April 1958, the new chief scientist presented a plan to the agency's director. Four months later, nine ships set off for the (mostly) uninhabited Gough Island deep in the South Atlantic, carrying 4500 personnel and three small nuclear weapons to launch into the magnetosphere.

This was Project Argus. The idea had germinated in the panic after the launch of the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite. In light of these surprising new capabilities, the US had a problem: how could it protect the country from an incoming nuclear warhead?

Armed with some wild physics, Nicholas Christofilos hatched an equally wild plan: turn the upper atmosphere into a force field across the US that would fry the electronics of incoming missiles. How? Explode nuclear weapons in Earth's magnetosphere to create a long-lived radiation belt that would degrade the missiles.

The first atomic detonation set off a luminous fireball, triggering a staggering blue-green aurora that captivated its audience. But beyond the pretty lights, it was a failure. The bombs did indeed produce many high-energy electrons, but it turned out that Earth's magnetic field wasn't strong enough to keep the electron shield from decaying.

Comment: DARPA's dirty deeds

In many ways, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the engine of the military-industrial complex, the heart at the center of the Pentagon that keeps America in constant state of weapons innovation and defense spending. Even before the attacks of September 11, 2001, DARPA kept defense contractors lining their pockets; in our post 9/11 surveillance state, DARPA sits at the nexus of corporate war profits, national security, and military innovation.

Cloaked in clandestine secrecy, DARPA has been called the "Oh God Why" branch of the Department of Defense. In the fiscal year of 2015, their requested budget was $2.91 billion, which doesn't include classified and black budgets.

'Galaxy of swirling storms': Juno snaps stunning turbulence over Jupiter

RT
Sat, 25 Mar 2017 18:55 UTC

Jupiter's storms, as photographed by Juno

NASA has released a fresh photograph of an intense storm swirling across Jupiter as space probe Juno prepares for its fifth flyby of the Solar System's largest planet.

The picture was taken on February 2 as Juno flew 9,000 miles (14,500 kilometers) above the giant planet's clouds. It was given the title "dark spot" due to the unusual black mark in the middle ground of the photo.

Researchers were initially unable to fully explain the spot, but after enhancing the image it became clear that it was a dark and swirling storm. Just below it sits a bright oval-shaped storm with white clouds.

Researchers have trained dogs to detect breast cancer from bandages

Mariëtte Le Roux
Yahoo News
Fri, 24 Mar 2017 00:00 UTC

© AFP / PASCAL LACHENAUD
Assistant cynophilist Patrick Mairet, pictured in October 2016, and his dog Thor are part of the Kdog project, which aims to train dogs to detect breast cancer

Dogs can sniff out cancer from a piece of cloth which had touched the breast of a woman with a tumour, researchers said Friday, announcing the results of an unusual, but promising, diagnostic trial.

With just six months of training, a pair of German Shepherds became 100-percent accurate in their new role as breast cancer spotters, the team said.

The technique is simple, non-invasive and cheap, and may revolutionise cancer detection in countries where mammograms are hard to come by.

"In these countries, there are oncologists, there are surgeons, but in rural areas often there is limited access to diagnostics," Isabelle Fromantin, who leads project Kdog, told journalists in Paris.

This means that "people arrive too late," to receive life-saving treatment, she added. "If this works, we can roll it out rapidly."

The weird world of cyborg bugs and animals

Edd Gent
Singularity Hub
Fri, 24 Mar 2017 05:00 UTC

Roboticists frequently turn to nature for inspiration for their inventions, reverse engineering the traits that evolution has developed over millennia. Others are taking a shortcut by simply integrating modern technology with living animals.

The idea may seem crazy, but animals and machines are not so different. Just as a network of wires carry electrical signals between a robot's sensors, processing units and motors, the flow of action potentials around our nervous system connects our sensory organs, brain and muscles.

But while there are similarities, the natural world has come up with some intricate solutions to problems that engineers are nowhere near replicating in silicon. That has prompted some scientists to try and piggyback on evolution's innovations by building part-animal, part-machine cyborgs. Here's a rundown of some of the most eye-catching examples.

Windows 10 has been logging everything you type — here's how to stop it

Claire Bernish
The Free Thought project
Thu, 23 Mar 2017 21:31 UTC

According to a startling new report, if you use Windows 10, every, single keystroke you've ever entered on your computer has been logged.

If that weren't alarming enough to the privacy-minded among us, all of that information is being sent directly to Microsoft.

All of which begs the question, is this why Microsoft was so insistent its users download Windows 10 as soon as it became available?

Does a portal, link standard model to dark physics?

Fiona MacDonald
Science Alert
Fri, 24 Mar 2017 20:57 UTC

Theoretical physicists have put forward a new hypothesis that aims to connect the world of visible physics to the hidden forces of our Universe: what if there's a portal that bridges the gap between the standard model to dark matter and dark energy?

The idea is that the reason we struggle to understand things such as dark matter and dark energy isn't because they don't exist - it's because we've been oblivious to a portal through which regular particles and these 'dark particles' interact. And it's something that could be tested experimentally.

The idea of portals in the Universe might sound pretty crazy, but let's be clear for a second: we're talking portals on the quantum, teeny-tiny scale here - nothing that you could drive a spacecraft through.

And it's not the first time these kinds of portals have been explored in the world of theoretical physicists.

The concept exists because there's a big gap in physics between what can be referred to as 'visible physics' - stuff we can measure and directly detect, such as electromagnetism and photons - and 'dark physics', which is made up of things we can feel the effects of but can't actually interact with, such as dark matter and dark energy.

Portals are our attempt to explain how these two seemingly separate worlds interact to form the Universe we live in.

The visible side of physics hinges on 17 catalogued types of particles that make up the standard model - including electrons, photons, and the Higgs boson.

But unfortunately, the standard model can't explain everything we see happening in the Universe. Crucially, it can't explain gravity or the rate of expansion of the Universe.

It was interesting when the brothers (their family owns the dealerships/service center that were vandalized - something of like 130+ cars burned...

Scoot Over

I ain't going to watch any more than I didn't watch the OJ trial, which ended exactly as I predicted. The thing is that the state should have...

Rowan Cocoan

.. .. today's' atta bot' awards nominee: [Link]

Jibrish

The vaccine mandates are absurd, and they are going to cause enormous problems all over the country. Only a small minority of people understand...

dom38

.. .. Laughing, as Katz owns Court TV, replete no less than scripted, staged events, societal conditioning, always Johnny on the spot, no...

Jibrish

Science & Technology

5G, AI and graphene: Three developments that will drive us into a technocracy

Tissue engineering: Scientists turn spinach leaf into working heart tissue

New Mars photo shows countless worm-like dunes on red planet

NASA's Curiosity spots clouds possibly shaped by gravity waves

DARPA: The imagineers of war by any means

'Galaxy of swirling storms': Juno snaps stunning turbulence over Jupiter

Researchers have trained dogs to detect breast cancer from bandages

The weird world of cyborg bugs and animals

Windows 10 has been logging everything you type — here's how to stop it

Does a portal, link standard model to dark physics?

Latest News

Picture of the Day

Quote of the Day

Recent Comments

Quantum Quirk

Contact Us