Momentum Machines says it’s created a new robot that can make about 360 burgers an hour in a 24-square foot area and that they plan to use it in “the first restaurant chain that profitably sells gourmet hamburgers at fast food prices.”
Why robots? Besides efficiency, Momentum Machines says they will offer custom meat grinds for every single customer. “Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground after… read more
Are animals conscious? Yes, says the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, publicly proclaimed by three eminent neuroscientists, David Edelman of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, Philip Low of Stanford University and Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology, Marc Bekoff writes in New Scientist.
“Non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious… read more
IBM researchers are working on incorporating Watson capabilities in smart phones, Bloomberg Business Week reports.
Bernie Meyerson, IBM’s vice president of innovation, envisions a voice-activated Watson that answers questions, like a supercharged version of Apple’s Siri personal assistant. A farmer could stand in a field and ask his phone, “When should I plant my corn?” He would get a reply in seconds, based on location data, historical… read more
As the U.S. launched what’s expected to be the world’s fastest supercomputer at 20 petaflops (peak performance), China announced it is building a machine intended to be five times faster when it is deployed in 2015, IT World reports.
China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer will run at 100 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second) peak performance, designed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, according to the Guangzhou… read more
IBM Research – Almaden presented at Supercomputing 2012 last week the next milestone toward fulfilling the ultimate vision of the DARPA’s cognitive computing program, called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE), according to Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha, Manager, Cognitive Computing, IBM Research – Almaden.
Announced in 2008, DARPA’s SyNAPSE program calls for developing electronic neuromorphic (brain-simulation) machine technology that scales… read more
Singularity University (SU) announced today that it has acquired the Singularity Summit annual conference and the Singularity Institute brand, including the singularity.org domain.
According to an SU statement, the acquisition furthers SU’s founding goal to provide the tools and thinking necessary to solve humanity’s greatest challenges, while SI transitions to a more research-focused organization. It also enables SU to… read more
Dmitry Itskov, a Russian entrepreneur, wants the world’s billionaires to fund a project called the 2045 Initiative to find the key to immortality, IEEE Spectrum notes.
Itskov expects the first fruits in about a dozen years, when a human brain is to be transplanted into a robot body. The resulting “avatar,” as he calls it, will “save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged.”
The… read more
Neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth believes that he can live forever, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. But first he has to die.
“The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body,” he says.
He wants that brain to be his brain. He wants his 100 billion… read more
A new study from the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice finds that America’s public schools saw a 96 percent increase in students but increased administrators and other non-teaching staff a staggering 702 percent since 1950. Teaching staff, in comparison, increased 252 percent, Reason reports.
If non-teaching personnel had grown at the same rate as student population, American public schools would have an additional $24.3… read more
When asteroid 2012 DA14 flies by Earth today, we could be watching a fortune fly over our heads and disappear into the void.
DA14 could be worth up to $195 billion in metals and propellant, Deep Space Industries (DSI) said in a statement — if it were in a different orbit … and if we had a space-based asteroid mining operation.
Which we don’t. Problem is, explains… read more
Gun enthusiast “HaveBlue” has documented in a blog post (via the AR15 forums) the process of what appears to be the first test firing of a firearm made with a 3D printer, The Next Web reports.
Actually,. the only printed part of the gun was the lower receiver. But, according to the American Gun Control Act, the receiver is what counts as the firearm.
HaveBlue reportedly… read more
UPDATE 8/31/2012 10:15 a.m. EDT:
This just in from Shannon Vyff: “We have raised $27,000.00 in just a week, we were at $17,000.00 Thursday when a generous $10,000.00 donation from Life Extension Foundation come in. Our minimum goal is $35,000.00 to cover transportation and cryopreservation costs — if additional funds are raised Kim is hoping to be able to cover standby as well. I’m very thankful to our… read more
Imagine a single camera that can fuse (integrate) images across a wide spectrum on light, from visible light to near-infrared and far-infrared (thermal) images (for night vision), replacing multiple cameras.
It would be part of a head-up display (HUD) that is helmet-mounted. It would be lightweight, low-cost, easy to use, and draw minimal power. And it would interface wirelessly with an Android-based smart phone for fusing images and networking… read more
The concept that we could possibly be living in a computer simulation has been suggested by science writers and others, and was formalized in a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford.
With current limitations and trends in computing, it will be decades before researchers will be able to run even primitive simulations of the universe. But… read more
Advocates of “cliodynamics” say that they can use scientific methods to illuminate the past. But historians are not so sure, Nature News reports.
To Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the appearance of three peaks of political instability at roughly 50-year intervals starting with the U.S. Civil War is not a coincidence. For the past 15 years, Turchin has been taking the… read more