Jason Padgett, 41, sees complex mathematical formulas everywhere he looks and turns them into stunning, intricate diagrams he can draw by hand with no math training.
Following a concussion, a scan of Padgett’s brain showed damage that was forcing his brain to overcompensate in certain areas that most people don’t have access to, Berit Brogaard, a neuroscientist and philosophy professor at the Center for Neurodynamics at the University of… read more
Scientists at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, have developed thin-film solar cells on flexible polymer foils with a new record efficiency of 20.4%.
The cells are based on CIGS (copper indium gallium (di)selenide) semiconducting material.
Thin-film, lightweight, flexible high-performance solar modules are attractive for solar farms, roofs and facades of buildings, automobiles, and portable electronics and can be produced using… read more
What It Means to Find ‘a Higgs’ — Scientific American
Physicists Find Elusive Particle Seen as Key to Universe — The New York Times
Howard Bloom, author of the forthcoming book, The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates, comments: “The god particle, the Higgs boson, is a bit of a red herring. It’s an… read more
An advanced computer called the BINA48 (Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture, 48 exaflops per second processing speed and 480 exabytes of memory; exa = 10 to the 18th power), and also known as “the Intelligent Computer,” became aware of certain plans by its owner, the Exabit Corporation, to permanently turn it off and reconfigure parts of it with new hardware and software into one or more new computers. … — From… read more
In New Model Army, a near-future science fiction novel by Adam Roberts, human intelligence evolves into a hivemind that makes people the violent cells of a collective being, says Alan Jacobs in The Atlantic.
New Model Army raises a set of discomfiting questions: Are our electronic technologies on the verge of enabling truly collective human intelligence? And if that happens, will we like the results?
Roberts… read more
After a skyscraper in Caracas was abandoned, it quickly became home to 750 families. As cities develop, will slums build up instead of out? Fast Company Co.EXIST explores.
The 45-story Torre David office tower in Caracas, Venezuela, was nearly complete in the early 1990s when a pair of events changed the building’s trajectory forever: First, the project’s developer, David Brillembourg, died in 1993.
Then, the next year,… read more
A miniature, massively parallel computer, powered by a million ARM processors, could produce the best brain simulations yet, Steve Furber suggests in IEEE Spectrum.
With traditional digital circuits, that would require a supercomputer that’s 1000 times as powerful as the best ones we have available today. And we’d need the output of an entire nuclear power plant to run it.
Fortunately, there are at… read more
South Korea’s Sooam Bioengineering Research Institute signed an agreement Tuesday with Russia’s North-Eastern Federal University to clone a mammoth, the giant elephant that went extinct several thousand years ago, Wall Street Journal Asia Korea Realtime reports.
According to the Sooam Institute, bioengineering scientists since 2002 have discovered what they believe to be the remains of a mammoth in the permafrost of Russia. Last August, it was reported that a… read more
NASA’s new Mars Rover has already returned scientific data in its first day on Mars, Science Now reports.
The uniform size of the small gravel at the surface suggests material carried from the crater rim by water rather than debris blown out of nearby smaller impact craters. The wheel’s failure to dent the surface on landing shows the surface to be relatively hard.
Lund University researchers have succeeded in rejuvenating the blood of mice by reversing, or reprogramming, the stem cells that produce blood.
Stem cells form the origin of all the cells in the body and can divide an unlimited number of times. When stem cells divide, one cell remains a stem cell and the other matures into the type of cell needed by the body, for example a blood… read more
Futurist Thomas Frey predicts that over 2 billion jobs will disappear by 2030, roughly 50% of all the jobs on the planet.
Industries that will go away (with some news jobs created):
Jarno Smeets, famous for his HumanBirdWings project, may just have made semi-self-propelled aeronautical history, flying over 100 meters on his self-built wings. His inspiration: the albatross.
UPDATE: The ‘birdman’ is FAKE
If this video doesn’t inspire you, nothing will. — Ed.
EPFL scientists have developed a tiny, portable personal blood testing laboratory: a minuscule device implanted just under the skin provides an immediate analysis of substances in the body, and a radio module transmits the results to a doctor over the cellular phone network.
This feat of miniaturization has many potential applications, including monitoring patients undergoing chemotherapy.
Humans are veritable chemical factories — we manufacture… read more
Russian experts are developing robots designed to minimize casualties in terrorist attacks and neutralize terrorists, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on May 17, RIA Novosti reports.
Robots could also help evacuate injured servicemen and civilians from the scene of a terrorist attack, said Rogozin, who oversees the defense industry.
Other anti-terror equipment Russia is developing includes systems that can see terrorists through obstacles and… read more
Stanford University recently explored offering online courses to a larger audience with a programming class for iPhone applications, first available in 2009, that has been downloaded more than one million times.
This past fall, more than 100 000 students around the world took three engineering classes — Machine Learning, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, and Introduction to Databases.
Stanford president John L. Hennessy says that’s just the beginning. In fact,… read more