วันอังคารที่ 5 มีนาคม พ.ศ. 2556

[rael-science] Digital Elite Flirt With Socialism (and Nixon) at TED‏

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The Raelian Movement
for those who are not afraid of the future : http://www.rael.org
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Source: http://www.wired.com/business/2013/02/socialist-memes-at-ted

Digital Elite Flirt With Socialism (and Nixon) at TED

02.28.13

But the self-styled troublemakers gathered in this blue-collar town weren’t striking longshoremen or unionizing factory workers; they were well-to-do digital mavens gathered for the annual TED conference (ticket price: $7,500).

Amid the usual talk of robots, architecture, education reform, corporate creativity, and 3-D printing, wealth redistribution and even some properly socialist memes have emerged as popular topics of conversation at TED 2013. The interest seems to be driven by concerns over grinding unemployment and widening inequality in the nation at large, plus a confluence of more recent trends in tech, including the spread of open source software, the proliferation of robot workers, and, probably most pointedly, a revived discussion among economists about how the rise of robots and other labor-replacing technologies has shifted more power from workers to those who hold capital (rich people).

“In an economy heavy on technology and light on labor, we have to consider radical interventions, like the guaranteed minimum income.”

Leftist economic ideas were mentioned at least three times yesterday alone. First designer Alastair Parvin cited the theories of Karl Marx in explaining his techniques for liberating construction from corporations and architecture from “the 1 percent;” Parvin said a combination of modern technologies and a renewed interest in community cooperation mean that ordinary people can take for themselves some of what Parvin expressly referred to as “the means of production.”

Then computer scientist Danny Hillis quoted another idea from Marx, which he said was key in allowing the internet to survive and flourish in its early decades: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” was the communist credo that allowed techies to effectively route traffic on a straining computer network designed and funded to win a war against communists, he said.

Finally there was Andrew McAfee, an MIT “management theorist” who detailed the declining fortunes of the working class in an economy that’s full of increasingly sophisticated machines. The middle class aren’t doing so well either: Median incomes have declined over the past 15 years.

“The robots are not going to take all our jobs in the next year or two,” McAfee said. “But over the longer term, if we’re moving into an economy that’s heavy on technology and light on labor, and we are, then we have to consider some more radical interventions. For example, something like the guaranteed minimum income,” McAfee said. “That idea is probably making some people in this room uncomfortable because it’s associated with the extreme left wing.”

McAfee then flashed pictures of Marc, Lenin, and Castro, before assuring the audience that the idea was also associated with right-wing icons Friedrich Hayek, Richard Nixon, and Milton Friedman. Above-it-all nonpartisan centrism has a strong constituency in rich techies, and there’s certainly been some of that at this year’s TED as well, and McAfee, who has been outspoken about his distaste for Marx, was smartly placating that strain of attendee.

But even if no speakers have singled out a particular political party for ridicule or praise, it’s hard not to notice how many of the political ideas at this year’s TED have come from the left. For example, an on-stage debate on the social impact of innovation between an economist and a business school professor detoured into this back and forth on how to combat rising U.S economic inequality: The business professor said “we are going to need to reinvent our organizations and even our whole economic system… so we can share our prosperity more broadly,” while the economist argued that we need to open the borders and legalize drugs. Not exactly right-wing talking points.

The discussion at this year’s TED’s offers hints that the political orientation of the digerati has moved left of “cyber-libertarianism” and that the tech sector might even act as a counterbalance to more traditional and right-leaning industries on the politics of economic intervention. But of course talk is cheap even when it’s expensive: It’s one thing to pay $7,500 to laugh at Marx quotations between almond-milk shots and yellowtail nachos and quite another to put real personal force behind those ideas – particularly when you’re the one who’s going to have to fund them, on top of all that money you spent on cool robots.

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"Ethics" is simply a last-gasp attempt by deist conservatives and
orthodox dogmatics to keep humanity in ignorance and obscurantism,
through the well tried fermentation of fear, the fear of science and
new technologies.

There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history,
it is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.

On the contrary, let us embrace Science and the new technologies
unfettered, for it is these which will liberate mankind from the
myth of god, and free us from our age old fears, from disease,
death and the sweat of labour.

Rael
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[rael-science] Brian Greene: Is our universe the only universe?‏

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The Raelian Movement
for those who are not afraid of the future : http://www.rael.org
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Contributed by Etienne Didoult
Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_greene_why_is_our_universe_fine_tuned_for_life.html

Brian Greene: Is our universe the only universe?

Filmed Feb 2012 • Posted Apr 2012 • TED2012

Is there more than one universe? In this visually rich, action-packed talk, Brian Greene shows how the unanswered questions of physics (starting with a big one: What caused the Big Bang?) have led to the theory that our own universe is just one of many in the "multiverse."

Brian Greene is perhaps the best-known proponent of superstring theory, the idea that minuscule strands of energy vibrating in a higher dimensional space-time create every particle and force in the universe. Full bio

Watch video: http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_greene_why_is_our_universe_fine_tuned_for_life.html

[rael-science] Rats Communicate Through Brain Chips‏

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The Raelian Movement
for those who are not afraid of the future : http://www.rael.org
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Contributed by Willie Girald
Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511721/rats-communicate-through-brain-chips/

Rats Communicate Through Brain Chips

Researchers show that animals can collaborate via a brain-to-brain interface.

February 28, 2013

Pairs of rats can communicate through brain chips and collaborate to perform a task, reportresearchers in today’s Scientific Reports. Brain activity recorded in one rat was translated into a pattern of electrical pulses that were then transmitted to another rat that had been trained to push a particular lever in response to one of two patterns of electrical stimulation in its brain. The rats also worked together, say the researchers. If the second rat chose the wrong lever, then the first rat would change its brain function and behavior in the next trial so that the receiving rodent was more likely to get it right, claim the scientists.

The research was led by Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University Medical Center, who has previously described a brain-computer interface through which a monkey could control a walking robot (see “The Power of Thought”) and another setup in which a virtual sense of touch was fed into a monkey’s brain through an electrical stimulating array (see “Giving Prosthetics a Sense of Touch”). A handful of labs have been making impressive progress in reading and writing to the brain in recent years with the aim of helping paralyzed people regain mobility via thought-controlled robotics. Last year, two research teams reported that quadriplegic patients could use brain implants to control robot limbs (see “Brain Chip Helps Quadriplegics Move Robotic Arms with Their Thoughts” and “Patient Shows New Dexterity with a Mind-Controlled Robot Arm”).

But today’s study, says Nicolelis, was not about improving brain-computer interface technology for patients but rather exploring new frontiers. “We observed the emergence of physiological properties that we could not predict before we did this,” he says, pointing to what he calls collaboration between the two animals’ brains.

In the experiment, Nicolelis and his team trained a rat to choose between a right-side or left-side lever to push depending on which of two LEDs lit up. If the rat pushed the correct lever, it got a rewarding sip of water. The researchers recorded the electrical activity of the rat’s motor cortex, the region of the brain that controls movements, and translated the activity involved in pushing the right-side lever into many pulses and pushing the left-side lever into fewer pulses. These pulses were then sent to the implant in the brain of another rat in a separate chamber. That rat had been trained to respond to pulse patterns in a similar way—more pulses meant push the right-side lever.

With no cue from the LEDs in its cage, the second rat was able to choose the correct lever 64 percent of the time, at which point both rats would get a water reward (the information-sending rat would thus get two; the information receiving rat would get only one). When the second rat got it wrong, the first rat noticed, says Nicolelis, because it did not get a second reward. So in the next trial, the first rat would respond more quickly to the LED cue and produce a greater amount of task-related neuron firing compared to background brain noise, he says, which made the second rat more likely to choose the correct lever. This is what Nicolelis refers to as collaboration.

The researchers also demonstrated the brain-to-brain communication with whisker stimulation in the first rat. Like a cat, rats use their whiskers to determine how wide an opening is, and the rodents can be trained to turn their head to the left or right depending on whether a hole in their cage is narrow. Similar to the first experiment, the brain activity of the first rat was translated into a particular pattern of pulses sent to the second rat, which had been trained to poke its head left in response to electrical pulses, and right in the absence of pulses. With these tests, the second rat chose the correct side about 62 percent of the time.

With the whisker test, the team demonstrated that the rats need not be in the same building—or even on the same continent—to collaborate. A rat in Brazil at the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal sent brain signals to a rat on the Duke campus in Durham, North Carolina.

However, the binary decisions made in the rat tests are not up-to-speed with what brain-computer interfaces can do these days, wrote University of Pittsburgh’s Andrew Schwartz, a pioneer in patient brain-computer interfaces, in an e-mail to MIT Technology Review. “It may sound like ‘mental telepathy’ and therefore seem exciting, but when looked at more carefully, it is very simplistic,” he wrote. “As a communication channel, you could think of a locked-in patient trying to communicate by blinking, where a blink means yes and no blink mean no. This kind of information could be conveyed by recording from a single neuron in one rat and buzzing electrical current in the receiver rat. If the rat feels the buzz, it means yes, no buzz means no.”

But Nicolelis sees this demonstration as the beginning of a new line of research that could lead to a new form of computing. He says his lab is working on “swarms” of rats that could share motor and sensory information via brain-to-brain interfaces. “If you put brains together, you could create a more powerful non-Turing machine, an organic computer that computes by experience, by heuristic,” he says. “That could be a very interesting architecture to explore.”

[rael-science] Liquid storage could make hydrogen a feasible fuel‏

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The Raelian Movement
for those who are not afraid of the future : http://www.rael.org
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Source: http://www.nature.com/news/liquid-storage-could-make-hydrogen-a-feasible-fuel-1.12518

Liquid storage could make hydrogen a feasible fuel

Catalyst efficiently recovers the gas from easily stored methanol.

27 February 2013

A process for extracting hydrogen from a liquid fuel could remove one of the biggest hurdles to a 'hydrogen economy', its discoverers say. They have developed a catalyst that harvests the gas from methanol, a liquid fuel that — unlike hydrogen itself — can be easily transported and stored.

Matthias Beller, a chemical engineer at the University of Rostock in Germany, and his colleagues hope that methanol might one day be sluiced through pipelines and poured into tankers, before chemical reactions convert the liquid back to hydrogen where it is needed — for example to provide power to off-grid villages, or run cars or mobile devices.

Hydrogen has a high energy density and is completely clean, burning to leave behind only water vapour as waste. It cannot be mined in large amounts, but proponents of a hydrogen economy say that it could be produced in vast quantities from water using excess electricity from wind turbines and solar plants. Unfortunately, because hydrogen is a gas it is difficult to store and transport safely unless compressed or liquefied, which is cumbersome and takes a lot of energy. Many chemists have spent decades studying how best to trap hydrogen for use as a fuel.

Liquid storage

Locking the gas up in the form of solid or liquid chemicals is one answer. Many materials proposed for hydrogen storage, however, either don’t trap much, or hold onto the hydrogen so tightly that it takes an unfeasible amount of energy to retrieve.

That was the problem with methanol. It is straightforward to turn hydrogen into the liquid fuel: a well-known reaction combines hydrogen and carbon monoxide gases using commercial catalysts. Methanol also traps a lot of hydrogen (12.5% by weight). Yet to release the gas, chemists have previously had to heat liquid methanol to 200 °C at 25–50 times atmospheric pressure.

But Beller and his colleagues report today in Nature¹ that they have discovered a soluble ruthenium-based catalyst that can efficiently turn methanol into hydrogen at a mere 65–95 °C, and at ambient pressure.

"It is difficult to estimate how much energy will be saved," says Beller. The process is still at an early stage, years away from commercialization. But he thinks that it could be enough to make methanol a viable energy carrier, potentially delivering hydrogen for fuel cells in mobile phones, computers or even cars.

Edman Tsang, a chemist at the University of Oxford, UK, who also works on storing hydrogen in liquids including methanol², says that the work is a "major discovery". In particular, he says, the low temperature of the reaction is attractive because it is about the same temperature as the waste heat from an operating hydrogen fuel cell. That means that it may be possible to combine a methanol–hydrogen reaction with a fuel cell that guzzles up the gas to produce electricity.

Technical hurdles

There are technical hurdles to overcome, however — not least of which is scaling up the reaction. To produce enough power to run a car, for example, the reaction would have to yield some 24 litres of hydrogen a second; in the lab, Beller has demonstrated only millilitres of flow per minute. The catalyst would also need to be stable for months or years, whereas Beller has so far shown only that it is stable for at least three weeks.

Furthermore, the reaction uses both the catalyst and a strong alkali to rip apart methanol and water, turning them into three parts hydrogen and one part carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide would have to be trapped to prevent it either escaping into the atmosphere or reacting with the alkali and slowing down the methanol–hydrogen conversion. If it can be trapped, however, it might be possible to recycle the carbon dioxide by using it to convert more hydrogen to methanol, keeping carbon emissions from the process low.

Despite the drawbacks, says Tsang, the conversion from methanol to hydrogen is worth pursuing: hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as fuel cells that directly run on methanol, for instance.

Alternative energy

Not everyone agrees with Beller and Tsang. George Olah, a Nobel prizewinning chemist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, thinks the science is solid, but says that there is no need for it. Olah argues that a future economy could use methanol directly as a liquid fuel, so the world should work on ways to produce it — perhaps by capturing carbon dioxide.

Peter Hall, who studies energy storage at the University of Sheffield, UK, says that people who hope to use methanol, or methanol–hydrogen systems, in cars or mobile phones are “seriously underestimating the engineering complexity of first developing a practical system and then miniaturizing it”. Instead, he says, batteries will be key to energy transport and to small-scale storage of electricity from solar panels. Long-term, large-scale storage of wind energy could best be achieved by simply storing compressed hydrogen underground.

Where methanol–hydrogen systems might have a role, says Hall, is in communities that are isolated from the electricity grid but rely on harvesting renewable energy and storing it as hydrogen, and want to move the gas around. “Methanol would be ideal for this application, since it could be easily transported by road,” he says.

Nature

doi:10.1038/nature.2013.12518

References

Nielsen, M. et al. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11891 (2013).
Yu, K. M. K. et al. Nature Commun. 3, 1230 (2012).
- Article
- PubMed

Liquid storage could make hydrogen a feasible fuel

Catalyst efficiently recovers the gas from easily stored methanol.

27 February 2013

Liquid storage

Technical hurdles

Despite the drawbacks, says Tsang, the conversion from methanol to hydrogen is worth pursuing: hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as fuel cells that directly run on methanol, for instance.

Alternative energy

Nature

doi:10.1038/nature.2013.12518

References

Nielsen, M. et al. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11891 (2013).
Yu, K. M. K. et al. Nature Commun. 3, 1230 (2012).
- Article
- PubMed

[rael-science] Billionaire Dennis Tito announces Mars mission plans‏

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The Raelian Movement
for those who are not afraid of the future : http://www.rael.org
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9898862/Billionaire-Dennis-Tito-announces-Mars-mission-plans.html

Billionaire Dennis Tito announces Mars mission plans

Dennis Tito, a billionaire financier who in 2001 became the first space tourist, has launched a project to send two civilians on “an historic journey” to the Red Planet in January 2018.

9:39PM GMT 27 Feb 2013

Dennis Tito, a billionaire financier who in 2001 became the first space tourist, has launched a projectto send two civilians on “an historic journey” to the Red Planet in January 2018.

“We have not sent humans beyond the moon in more than 40 years,” Mr Tito said at a press conference in Washington on Wednesday. “I’ve been waiting, and a lot of people my age, have been waiting. And I think it’s time to put an end to that lapse”.

The mission, a “return fly-by”, in which the spacecraft would fly around Mars rather than land, would last for 500 days. It is expected to cost between $1 billion and $2 billion, which Mr Tito is hoping to fund partly through television rights and by selling data to Nasa.

His organisation, Inspiration Mars, is planning to select a middle-aged couple who may have already had children and would be willing to risk the potential risk to their fertility of being exposed to radiation for a prolonged period.

They would be forced to spend a year and a half together in a 14ft x 12 ft Dragon space craft, accompanied by supplies ranging from more than a tonne of dehydrated food to 28kg of lavatory paper.

The mission has been scheduled for 5 January, 2018, in order to take advantage of an alignment in the planets that occurs once every 15 years.

[rael-science] This Could Be The World’s First 3D-Printed Car‏

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RedEye, a business unit of Stratasys, unveiled the world's first full scale custom motorcycle, created entirely from using rapid prototype parts, at Autodesk University 2008. Using FDM 3D rapid…

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The Raelian Movement
for those who are not afraid of the future : http://www.rael.org
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Contributed by Joseph Kollar
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/27/this-could-be-the-worlds-first-3d-printed-car/

This Could Be The World’s First 3D-Printed Car

With 3D printing on the verge of going mainstream, you can manufacture almost anything.

You can now add a 3D-printed car to that list.

The Urbee 2 is a three-wheeled hybrid assembled entirely from parts spat out of 3D printers, reportsWired. Just as Makerbot and Form 1 have changed the way we perceive manufacturing, Urbee is seeking to change the way we build cars.

Urbee is the brainchild of Jim Kor and his team at Kor Ecologic, a company solely dedicated to the future of 3D vehicle manufacturing. Their website expands upon their grand vision for the future of the automobile.

“Use the least amount of energy possible for every kilometer travelled.
Cause as little pollution as possible during manufacturing, operation, and recycling of the car.
Use materials available as close as possible to where the car is built.”

Kor’s aim is to make the cars of the future light, energy-efficient and easy to manufacture.

The manufacturing process of the Urbee takes place entirely inside RedEye, a 3D-printing facility that was also used to produce the world’s first 3D-printed motorcycle. Kor says one of the virtues of 3D printing is the added flexibility that’s impossible to produce with sheet metal. Instead of producing a multitude of parts that would be assembled later, the 3D printers can spit out a single, unibody part that makes manufacturing simpler. Kor simply uploads the models for each part into the printers, and 2,500 hours later, Kor has all the plastic parts he needs to assemble his car.

Kor has assurances that the Urbee will be perfectly safe to drive out on in the road. “We’re calling it race car safety,” Kor tells Wired. “We want the car to pass the tech inspection required at Le Mans.” And the car isn’t entirely made of plastic. The engine and the base chassis, of course, will be made of steel.

Good luck, Urbee. You may look like an oversized computer mouse, but you’ve come a long way from the days when you looked like this.

MAELOHIMY

The Elohim Sound

วันอังคารที่ 5 มีนาคม พ.ศ. 2556

[rael-science] Digital Elite Flirt With Socialism (and Nixon) at TED‏

Digital Elite Flirt With Socialism (and Nixon) at TED

[rael-science] Brian Greene: Is our universe the only universe?‏

Brian Greene: Is our universe the only universe?

[rael-science] Rats Communicate Through Brain Chips‏

Rats Communicate Through Brain Chips

[rael-science] Liquid storage could make hydrogen a feasible fuel‏

Liquid storage could make hydrogen a feasible fuel

Liquid storage

Technical hurdles

Alternative energy

References

Liquid storage could make hydrogen a feasible fuel

Liquid storage

Technical hurdles

Alternative energy

References

[rael-science] Billionaire Dennis Tito announces Mars mission plans‏

Billionaire Dennis Tito announces Mars mission plans

Dennis Tito, a billionaire financier who in 2001 became the first space tourist, has launched a project to send two civilians on “an historic journey” to the Red Planet in January 2018.

[rael-science] This Could Be The World’s First 3D-Printed Car‏

This Could Be The World’s First 3D-Printed Car