The Prospect of Immortality is a six-year study by UK photographer Murray Ballard, who has traveled the world pulling back the curtain on the amateurs, optimists, businesses, and apparatuses of cryonics, the preservation of deceased humans in liquid nitrogen, Wired reports.
“It’s not a large industry,” says Ballard, who visited the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Phoenix, Arizona; the Cryonics Institute… read more
Around the world, countries are investing time and millions of dollars into the technology, which uses satellites to beam bits of quantum information down from the sky and and could profoundly change worldwide communication, Wired Science reports.
In the past year, a team from China and another in Austria set new records for quantum teleportation, using a laser to beam photons through the open… read more
University of Oklahoma researchers have, demonstrated a novel technique for cryptography that offers the potential of unconditional security.
As increasing volumes of data become accessible, transferable and, therefore actionable, information is the treasure companies want to amass.
To protect this wealth, organizations use cryptography, or coded messages, to secure information from “technology robbers.” This group of hackers and malware creators increasingly is becoming more sophisticated at… read more
This summer Google set a new landmark in the field of artificial intelligence with software that learned how to recognize cats, people, and other things simply by watching YouTube videos (see “Self-Taught Software“).
That technology, modeled on how brain cells operate, is now being put to work making Google’s products smarter, with speech recognition being the first service to benefit, Technology Review reports.… read more
The most efficient machines remember what has happened to them, and use that memory to predict what the future holds.
That is the conclusion of a theoretical study by Susanne Still, a computer scientist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and her colleagues, and it should apply equally to “machines” ranging from molecular enzymes to computers, Nature News reports. The finding could help to improve scientific… read more
After producing normal mouse pups last year using sperm derived from stem cells, a Kyoto University team of researchers has now accomplished the same feat using eggs created the same way, Science Now reports. The study may eventually lead to new ways of helping infertile couples conceive.
The stem cells in both cases are embryonic stem (ES) cells and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The former are taken… read more
Also see the three related posts today (below). — Ed.
Higher education is at a crossroads not seen since the introduction of the printing press, said MIT president L. Rafael Reif* in The Wall Street Journal.
“Residential education’s long-simmering financial problem is reaching a crisis point,” he said. “At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other campuses, the upheaval today is coming from the technological change posed by… read more
Also see the three related posts today (below). — Ed.
According to venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, technology will “disrupt” education as we know it, and maybe create a few billion-dollar companies along the way (see “The Crisis in Higher Education”), says Technology Review.
According to Dow Jones VentureSource, VCs invested $217 million in digital education companies during the first half of 2012 — more than… read more
The National Archives has recently published never-before-seen schematics and details of a 1950s military venture, called Project 1794, which aimed to build a supersonic flying saucer, Wired Danger Room reports.
In a memo dating from 1956, the results from pre-prototype testing are summarized and reveal exactly what the developers had hoped to create.
The saucer was supposed to reach a top speed of “between Mach 3… read more
Christopher Voigt, an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT,.and his students have developed circuit components that don’t interfere with one another, allowing them to produce the most complex synthetic circuit ever built.
The circuit integrates four sensors for different molecules. Such circuits could be used in cells to precisely monitor their environments and respond appropriately.
Background: the big burrito
Using genes as interchangeable parts,… read more
UCLA researchers have discovered that the activity of a brain region known to be involved in learning, memory and Alzheimer’s disease behaves as if it’s remembering something during sleep, even under anesthesia — a finding that counters conventional theories about memory consolidation during sleep.
The research team simultaneously measured the activity of single neurons from multiple parts of the brain involved in memory formation. The technique allowed them to… read more
How effective are systems that warn a driver about an impending front collision, then slam on the brakes if the driver doesn’t act quickly enough?
A lot, says a paper recently published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Spectrum Tech Talk reports.
Researchers at Virginia Tech’s Center for Injury Biomechanics studied systems that rely on radar to tell the car when it is coming… read more
With funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the CIA’s investment arm, the Canadian company D-Wave Systems is gaining momentum for its revolutionary approach to computing, Technology Review reports.
D-Wave’s supercooled processor is designed to handle what software engineers call “optimization” problems, the core of conundrums such as figuring out the most efficient delivery route, or how the atoms in a protein will move around when it meets… read more
A metal object can be made invisible to to electromagnetic radiation at microwave frequencies by approximately 70 per cent with the help of ordinary plastic, Aalto University researchers have shown.
In practical terms, this means that electromagnetic waves travelling, for example, between two antennas, do not detect an object located in their path, allowing the waves to travel the distance between them despite the obstacle, without any disruption… read more