The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
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Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
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UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
02-09-2019
How Putting Googly Eyes on Robots Makes Them Fundamentally Less Threatening (Video)
How Putting Googly Eyes on Robots Makes Them Fundamentally Less Threatening (Video)
At the beginning of 2019, the supermarket chain Giant Food Stores announced it would begin operating customer-assisting robots — collectively dubbed Marty — in 172 East Coast locations. These autonomous machines may navigate their respective store using a laser-based detection system, but they’re also outfitted with a pair of oversized googly eyes. This is to, “[make] it a bit more fun,” Giant President Nick Bertram told Adweek in January, and “celebrate the fact that there’s a robot.”
“As we approach the completion of the rollout, we continue to be pleased by the addition of Marty in our stores,” a Giant Food rep told Engadget via email. “Our associates are appreciative of the assistance Marty provides them, freeing them up to do other tasks and interact more with customers. Speaking of our customers, they, too, are big fans of Marty, with kids and adults alike looking for Marty in-store and taking selfies.”
But Marty’s googly eyes don’t just give customers something to chuckle at as they pass one another in the cereal aisle. Research shows that slapping peepers on inanimate objects puts the humans around them at ease and encourages them to be more generous and pro-social (as opposed to anti-social) than they normally would.
“People pay attention to the presence of eyes,” Dr. Amrisha Vaish, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s department of psychology, told Engadget. “Humans are very sensitive to the presence of other people, and we behave more socially in the presence of other people.” It’s called the “watching-eye paradigm” and exploits the deep-seated human trait of needing to be valued within society: managing our reputations and being seen by those around us as team players.
“In the course of our evolution, it’s been really important for us to be to cooperate with others,” Vaish points out. Interpersonal cooperation has proved “so important to the evolution of the human species that we’ve become really sensitive to even sort of minimal cues of eyes,” she continued.
Dr. Pawan Sinha, professor of vision and computational neuroscience at MIT, concurs. “If one were to find an ecological reason why we are so attuned to see faces it’s because the ability to detect faces is crucial for our social well being and, when we are young, it’s crucial to our survival to be able to detect a specific human and be able to orient towards them,” he told Engadget. “It’s very important for us to be able to live our lives as social beings.”
Vaish’s own research in this field, specifically the 2018 study Eyes, More Than Other Facial Features, Enhance Real-World Donation Behavior, bears out this effect. Vaish and her team alternated photographs of a chair, a nose, a mouth and a pair of human eyes above the donation jar at a local children’s museum over 28 weeks.
The weeks during which the eyes were displayed saw an average total donation of $27 — around $12 more than when the other images were shown.
“What we found is that the eyes — compared to the chairs — did, in fact, increase people’s donations,” Vaish said.
“The numbers weren’t huge but there was a statistically significant increase.”
This effect extends beyond actions like donations, the watching-eye paradigm can also reduce antisocial behavior like littering and bike theft. It also affects people of all ages. “As young as 5 years of age, children become sensitive to being watched.” Vaish said. “When a peer is watching them, they show more prosocial behavior and less antisocial, less stealing behavior.”
The effect does not last forever, however. Vaish notes that in her previous research position, she found that putting a picture of eyes near the communal supply of milk drastically reduced the rate at which people would help themselves to it. At least to start.
“Initially, they’re very striking when you put them up, and then you sort of start to monitor your behavior more,” she said. However, over time, people became accustomed to the presence of these watching eyes before eventually sliding back into complacency with regard to their milk intake.
This intra-office phenomenon illustrates an unusual aspect of humanity’s evolution: We can see faces (and assign agency) to almost anything. “People look for certain specific cues, physical features or behaviors, to determine whether something is alive,” Dr. Erin Horowitz, a lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s department of psychological and brain science, told Engadget. “So something that appears to move on its own, people tend to process it as alive.”
This is an ancient prey response in humans, instilled over countless generations before we arrived at the top of the food chain. It’s better to see the leopard that isn’t there, Horowitz said, than to not see the leopard that is. As such, even highly abstracted and stylized depictions of eyes can trigger this response. “You could have two dots next to each other, and those would be considered eyes,” Horowitz said, “if there’s, say, a line underneath that looks like a mouth.”
And it’s “not just identifying predators,” she said, “but also identifying potential people that we can cooperate and interact with.” These hardwired evolutionary responses and visceral need for social bonds have led to the development of the “theory of mind.”
“You can think of it as a broad term for research on the human capacity for social engagement,” Dr. Tamsin German, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s department of psychological and brain science, told Engadget. “Specifically, those ones that talk about the concepts we have of people’s internal, hidden mental states.
“People believe things, people want things, people hope things. And those internal states predict the behaviors that they will engage in,” said. By piecing together a person’s behavior and explaining it in terms of those hidden states, one can glimpse at the motivations and underlying beliefs of that person. “it’s a critically important skill for humans being such a social species,” German said.
As it turns out, slapping googly eyes on a roving robotic monolith like Marty can elicit the same response from humans even when we know the object is not actually alive. But there are limits to this effect, and surprisingly, the Uncanny Valley exists for robot eyes as well.
German notes that a wide variety of prey species have evolved agency-granting responses similar to humans’, “there is lots of work suggesting that they have a sensitivity to two eyes looking directly at them.”But in rhesus macaques, how those eyes are presented makes all the difference.
She points to a recent study from Princeton University, which placed various photographs and stylized, abstracted depictions of macaque faces in front of real macaques. “The rhesus macaque will look a lot at highly stylized, cartoony pictures of other faces of rhesus monkeys. And they look a lot at actual photographs of rhesus monkeys, But if you have very, very close, but not quite, images, they don’t like them at all.”As with humans, being almost there — but not quite — is interpreted as a negative signal.
A similar effect can be seen when humans observe the movements of robots, androids, and other people. German references a recent multinational study in which subjects were shown static images of clearly mechanical robots, natural humans and androids like you’d see at the Disney World Hall of Presidents.
“You put them in an fMRI scanner and just essentially allow the brain to acclimate to what it’s seeing,” she said. Then, “using a technique called predictive coding, you look at which parts of the brain are excited when [the object in the image] starts moving. Essentially, asking the brain to tell you what it didn’t expect.”
When the robot starts clunking around in a very mechanical fashion and the human moves smoothly, researchers noted only slight electrical responses from the brain.“But the Android looks like a human and moves like a robot in various areas of the brain kind of a more active compared to a baseline, suggesting that the brain didn’t see what it predicts,” German explained.
This is what elicits the uneasiness and trepidation in people when they interact with a machine in the Uncanny Valley. It’s 200,000 years of evolution going, “Hey, stupid, this thing is moving when it shouldn’t be (at least not moving or looking like it should be). You need to scram before you get eaten.”
But adding eyes, even the googly variety, appears to help mitigate this effect by exploiting our social nature to artificially instill a sense of agency toward these inanimate objects.
“It’s just a signal that this is an animate thing, it’s going to have mental states and — provided you’re not trying to you make it look so realistic, where the movement that it engages in looks wrong — you’re not going to get an Uncanny valley effect,” German concluded.
We learn from our personal interaction with the world, and our memories of those experiences help guide our behaviors. Experience and memory are inexorably linked, or at least they seemed to be before a recent reporton the formation of completely artificial memories. Using laboratory animals, investigators reverse engineered a specific natural memory by mapped the brain circuits underlying its formation. They then “trained” another animal by stimulating brain cells in the pattern of the natural memory. Doing so created an artificial memory that was retained and recalled in a manner indistinguishable from a natural one.
Memories are essential to the sense of identity that emerges from the narrative of personal experience. This study is remarkable because it demonstrates that by manipulating specific circuits in the brain, memories can be separated from that narrative and formed in the complete absence of real experience. The work shows that brain circuits that normally respond to specific experiences can be artificially stimulated and linked together in an artificial memory. That memory can be elicited by the appropriate sensory cues in the real environment. The research provides some fundamental understanding of how memories are formed in the brain and is part of a burgeoning science of memory manipulation that includes the transfer, prosthetic enhancement and erasure of memory. These efforts could have a tremendous impact on a wide range of individuals, from those struggling with memory impairments to those enduring traumatic memories, and they also have broad social and ethical implications.
In the recent study, the natural memory was formed by training mice to associate a specific odor (cherry blossoms) with a foot shock, which they learned to avoid by passing down a rectangular test chamber to another end that was infused with a different odor (caraway).The caraway scent came from a chemical called carvone, while the cherry blossom scent came from another chemical, acetophenone.The researchers found that acetophenone activates a specific type of receptor on a discrete type of olfactory sensory nerve cell.
They then turned to a sophisticated technique, optogenetics, to activate those olfactory nerve cells. With optogenetics, light-sensitive proteins are used to stimulate specific neurons in response to light delivered to the brain through surgically implanted optic fibers. In their first experiments, the researchers used transgenic animals that only made the protein in acetophenone-sensitive olfactory nerves. By pairing the electrical foot shock with optogenetic light stimulation of the acetophenone-sensitive olfactory nerves, the researchers taught the animals to associate the shock with activity of these specific acetophenone-sensitive sensory nerves. By pairing the electrical foot shock with optogenetic light stimulation of the acetophenone-sensitive olfactory nerves, the researchers taught the animals to associate the two. When theylater tested the mice, they avoided the cherry blossom odor.
These first steps showed that the animals did not need to actually experience the odor to remember a connection between that smell and a noxious foot shock. But this was not a completely artificial memory, because the shock was still quite real. In order to construct an entirely artificial memory, the scientists needed to stimulate the brain in such a way as to mimic the nerve activity caused by the foot shock as well.
Earlier studies had shown that specific nerve pathways leading to a structure known as the ventral tegmental area (VTA) were important for the aversive nature of the foot shock. To create a truly artificial memory, the researchers needed to stimulate the VTA in the same way as they stimulated the olfactory sensory nerves, but the transgenic animals only made the light-sensitive proteins in those nerves. In order to use optogenetic stimulation, they stimulated the olfactory nerves in the same genetically engineered mice , and they employed a virus to place light-sensitive proteins in the VTA as well. They stimulated the olfactory receptors with light to simulate the odor of cherry blossoms, then stimulated the VTA to mimic the aversive foot shock. The animals recalled the artificial memory, responding to an odor they had never encountered by avoiding a shock they had never received.
For a long time, it has been a mystery how memories are formed in the brain—and what physical changes in the brain accompany their formation. In this study, the electrical stimulation of specific brain regions that led to a new memory also activated other brain regions known to be involved in memory formation, including an area called the basolateral amygdala. Because nerve cells communicate with one another through junctions called synapses, it has been assumed that changes in synaptic activity account for the formation of memories. In simple animals, such as the sea slugAplysia, memories can be transferred from one individual to another using RNA extracted from the one who experienced them. The RNA contains the codes for proteins made in the nerves of the animal associated with the memory. Memories have been partially transferred in rodents by using recordings of electrical activity of a trained animal’s memory center (the hippocampus) to stimulate similar patterns of nerve activity in a recipient animal. This process is similar to the new report described here, in that stimulating the electrical activity of specific neural circuits is used to elicit a memory. In the case of memory transfer, that pattern came from trained animals, whereas in the optogenetics study, the pattern of electrical activity associated with the memory was built de novo within brain of the mouse. This is the first report of a completely artificial memory, and it helps establish some fundamental understanding of how memories may be manipulated.
Research into memory and efforts to manipulate it have progressed at a rapid pace. A “memory prosthetic” designed to enhance its formation and recall by electrical stimulation of the memory center in the human brain has been developed with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In contrast, memory erasure using what has been nicknamed the Eternal Sunshine drug (zeta inhibitory peptide, or ZIP)—after Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a Hollywood movie with a mnemonic theme—is being developed to treat recollections of chronic pain.
There are legitimate motives underlying these efforts. Memory has been called “the scribe of the soul,” and it is the source of one’s personal history. Some people may seek to recover lost or partially lost memories. Others, such as those afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder or chronic pain, might seek relief from traumatic memories by trying to erase them.
The methods used here to create artificial memories will not be employed in humans anytime soon: none of us are transgenic like the animals used in the experiment, nor are we likely to accept multiple implanted fiber-optic cables and viral injections. Nevertheless, as technologies and strategies evolve, the possibility of manipulating human memories becomes all the more real. And the involvement of military agencies such as DARPA invariably renders the motivations behind these efforts suspect. Are there things we all need to be afraid of or that we must or must not do? The dystopian possibilities are obvious.
Creating artificial memories brings us closer to learning how memories form and could ultimately help us understand and treat dreadful diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Memories, however, cut to the core of our humanity, and we need to be vigilant that any manipulations are approached ethically.
Well, pack it in kids, we’ve finally gone and done it. We reached grade A, genuine sci-fi dystopia. Scientists have now successfully created and implanted an artificial memory. That is, a memory of an event that never happened created from the ground up and implanted into an animal. They’ve only done it to a mouse so far, so we’ve still got a bit of time before this whole thing starts feeling like a David Lynch movie. But boy, oh boy, this definitely feels like one of those “so focused on if we could, we never stopped to think if we should” type of deals.
According to a recent article in the journal Naturetitled Memory formation in the absence of experience, scientists reverse engineered a memory to map the brain circuits involved in creating it—in this case the association of the smell of cherry blossoms with an electrical shock to the foot—then artificially implanted that memory in a mouse. Tests showed that the mouse behaved as if it actually remembered being shocked in the foot whenever it smelled cherry blossoms, despite the mouse never having been shocked nor been exposed to the scent of cherry blossoms.
Even ones that never happened!
Previous research had shown that it was possible to partially transfer memories from one rodent to another via reproducing the electrical activity associated with a specific memory in one mouse and jolting it into the brain of another mouse. This new experiment is different. This time the memory was created completely artificially from the ground up. This consisted of a few parts.
First, they used a technique called optogenetics. This involves fiber optic cables surgically implanted into the olfactory region of the mice’s brain so that light can be used to turn on proteins associated with specific smells. To do that, the mice had to be genetically engineered to only produce the light-sensitive protein in the region associated with acetophenone—AKA the scent of cherry blossoms. Now they could artificially create the scent of cherry blossoms in the brain of a mouse.
So we’re already into some wacky stuff, but don’t worry. It gets wackier.
The scientists identified the region of the brain responsible for creating an aversion to being shocked in the foot, an area called the ventral tegmental area (VTA). To link the two regions together, scientists then used a virus (yes, that’s correct) to implant those same light-sensitive proteins into the VTA. This way, they could use light to stimulate both regions at once. Fake memories at the speed of light.
And it worked. The mice were then placed in a rectangular chamber, one end of which smelled like cherry blossoms, while the other smelled like caraway. The mice avoided the end that smelled like cherry blossoms, because they remembered being shocked by it. In an article for Scientific American, Robert Marcone puts it this way:
The animals recalled the artificial memory, responding to an odor they had never encountered by avoiding a shock they had never received.
A little poke here, a little twist there, and you’ll remember that time you were the king of France.
Now, this is still a long ways off from being used in humans. But it is an active area of research. Of course it is important to study memory. Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are nothing but tragedies, and the memory of trauma can take hold over a person’s life and never let go. It’s a very important area of study, but we must be careful. If there was a way to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind away painful events, would you do it? Maybe not, but someone would. Would you implant a fake memory of a trip around the world, or how about a fake memory of hitting a walk-off home run, just to boost your confidence and self image? How many companies— companies that already specialize in creating false narratives and self images built like houses of cards—are already working to sell you that walk-off home run?
Research like this is like playing with fire. That’s a neutral statement; playing with fire brought us down from the trees and allowed us to build a civilization, overcome the bounds of gravity, and put people on the moon. But it can also burn your house to the ground.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
11-08-2019
NASA Figured Out How To Make Food Out Of CO2 - It Could Feed Billions
NASA Figured Out How To Make Food Out Of CO2 - It Could Feed Billions
A company from Finland, Solar Foods, are planning to sell food created from carbon dioxide (CO2). They are, quite literally, creating food out of thin air! The company has plans to bring a new protein powder, Solein, to market. It's made out three simple, cheap, and readily available ingredients - CO2, water, and electricity. While this may not sound appealing at first, it's actually incredibly nutritious. Essentially, its a high-protein, ingredient, resembling flour, that contains 50 percent protein content, 5–10 percent fat, and 20–25 percent carbohydrates.
There are a massive number of potential uses for an ingredient such as Solein and it is expected to be the main component of a lot of foods when it hits the shelves in 2021. It's most likely to first appear in protein shakes and yogurt, both of which are simple foods to add it to. This may be a very exciting development as the creation of Solein is carbon neutral but it also helps remove CO2 from the atmosphere, being beneficial in two respects!
Beginning in 2018, Solein has come so far since it was created. NASA actually came up with the idea first and Solar Foods has since taken it to a commercial level. With plans to release the product as soon as 2021 and produce 2 million meals every year, it won't be long before Solein is in everything. By 2050, the company has high hopes to be providing sustenance for up to 9 billion people as part of a $500 billion protein market. At the rate things have taken place so far, there's no doubt that Solar Foods will achieve their targets.
To create Solein, Solar Foods extracts CO2 from the air using carbon-capture technology. Then, they combine the carbon dioxide with water, nutrients, and vitamins, using 100 percent renewable solar energy from their partner, Fortum, to promote a naturalfermentation process similar to the one that produces yeast and lactic acid bacteria. This is such a natural process, needing no man-made products, that it could single-handedly solve the world's food crisis.
Furthermore, Solar Foods has claimed that their product is completely free from agricultural limitations, and they aren't lying! Solein can be grown indoors so there's no need for arable land, and it's not dependent on favorable weather either. In fact, this seems so promising that the European Space Agency has already started working with the company in an attempt to develop foods for off-planet production and consumption. This could be the answer that they have been looking for.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
02-08-2019
Japan Approves Groundbreaking Experiment Bringing Human-Animal Hybrids To Term
Japan Approves Groundbreaking Experiment Bringing Human-Animal Hybrids To Term
Stem cell biologist Hiromitsu Nakauchi has been waiting for this moment for more than a decade.
After years of planning, the persistent researcher has at last received approval from a government willing to pursue one of the most controversial scientific studies there is: human-animal embryo experiments.
While many countries around the world have restricted, defunded or outright banned these ethically-fraught practices, Japan has now officially lifted the lid on this proverbial Pandora's box. Earlier this year, the country made it legal to not only transplant hybrid embryos into surrogate animals, but also to bring them to term.
As a lead stem cell researcher at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University, Nakauchi has gone from country to country, chasing his dream of one day growing customised human organs in animals like sheep or pigs.
With more than 116,000 patients on the transplant waiting list in the United States alone, Nakauchi hopes his idea can transform lives.
That ultimate goal is still a long way off, but the next step in his research has at last been given the green light by ministry officials in Japan. As the first researcher to receive government approval since the 2014 ban, Nakauchi plans on taking things slowly so that public understanding and trust can catch up.
"We don't expect to create human organs immediately, but this allows us to advance our research based upon the know-how we have gained up to this point," Nakauchi told The Asahi Shimbun.
The experiments will start by injecting human induced pluripotent stem cells into rat and mice embryos, all of which have been genetically manipulated so that they cannot make pancreases.
The goal is for the rodent embryo to use the human cells to build itself a pancreas, and for two years, the team plans on watching these rodents develop and grow, carefully monitoring their organs and brains in the process. Only then will the researchers ask for approval to do the same with pigs.
While human-animal embryos have been created in the past - such as pig-human embryos and sheep-human embryos - they've never been allowed to develop to term before.
One of the biggest fears with this type of research centers on exactly where these human stem cells actually go in an animal, and what type of cells they could develop into, once they are injected.
While Nakauchi and his team are trying to target this treatment to just the pancreas, if they detect more than 30 percent of the rodent brains are human, they will suspend the experiment. These are part of the government's conditions to prevent a "humanised" animal from ever coming into existence.
Nakauchi, however, doesn't think this is going to happen. Last year, he and his colleagues at Stanford successfully made the first human-sheep embryo, and although it was destroyed after just 28 days, the hybrid contained no organs and very few human cells - only about one in 10,000 or less.
"We are trying to ensure that the human cells contribute only to the generation of certain organs," Nakauchi explained the winter edition of Stanford Medicine's Out There.
"With our new, targeted organ generation, we don't need to worry about human cells integrating where we don't want them, so there should be many fewer ethical concerns."
Traveling by airplane is fast and convenient but it can take a largetoll on the environment. For this reason, the Hempearth Group is developing the world’s first plane made from and powered by hemp. The innovation is made almost entirely from the sustainable crop — from the plane walls and seats to the wings and pillows.
The hemp airplane was developed by Hempearth, a Canadian cannabis company and thought leader in hemp-related inventions. The company was founded in 2012 and sells a variety of organic hemp products. Their inventory includes hemp surfboards, paddle boards, oils, cannabis, and even a hemp fiber body phone.
This innovation is a first in the aviation world. When completed, the hemp plane will be able to transport four lucky passengers and a pilot. It has a 36-foot wingspan and runs on Hempearth Hemp Jet A Bio Fuel.
Why Hemp?
First of all, hemp is one of the healthiest and most versatile plants on the planet. Not only is it, pound for pound, 10 times stronger than steel but it can also bend much farther than metal. As a result, hemp is ideal for aviation technology.
Furthermore, hemp is less toxic than traditional aerospace materials, such as aluminum and fiberglass. The crop is also incredibly eco-friendly. It requires less water to grow than cotton and even puts nutrients back into the soil through a process called phytoremeditation.
Finally, hemp is lighter than traditional aviation materials. As a result, it requires less fuel (in this case, hemp biofuel) to reach a high altitude. Hemp also requires no mining, or carbon fiber. Therefore, it has almost no environmental impact.
In addition to developing the world’s first hemp plane, Hempearth is in the process of developing hemp composites in Montreal. Reportedly, they could replace all fiberglass in aviation and other industries — such as construction.
One of Hempearth’s more notable promises is to never sign or work “with fascist companies that are associated with military, The Rockefellers, The Rothchilds and or the Military Industrial Complex.” This statement alone is applaud-worthy.
Derek Kesek, the founder of Hempearth, is passionate about sustainable hemp production and its seemingly endless applications. “This is the kind of future we all want here on Earth,” he said. When the first hemp plane is completed, its first flight will take place at the Wright Brothers memorial in Kitty Hawk North Carolina. The location is the birthplace of aviation and will soon witness history once again.
What are your thoughts?Please comment below and share this news!
A 'time machine' that moves tiny particles a fraction of a second into the past was built in Russia, scientists have claimed.
It may not rival Dr Who's Tardis but researchers have described it as being able to move the smaller-than-atom sized objects in the opposite direction of 'time's arrow'.
The experiments involved electrons - negatively charged particles that make up an atom - found in the realm of quantum mechanics, the study of sub-atomic particles.
They gave the analogy of a break for a game of pool, in which the balls are substitutes for the electrons.
After the break the 'balls' are scattered in what should be a haphazard way, according to the laws of physics.
But researchers managed to make them reform in their original triangle 'break' order - appearing as if they were turning back time - using a special quantum computer.
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A 'time machine' that moves tiny particles a fraction of a second into the past has built in Russia, scientists have claimed. The team gave the analogy of a break for a game of pool. The 'balls' scattered and should have appeared to split in a haphazard way. But researchers managed to make them reform in their original order in the snooker triangle (pictured)
WHAT IS THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS?
The Second Law of Thermodynamics deals with transition of energy within a system from usable to unusable.
It is the reason our phones and laptops need to be charged, and that our sun will one day die out.
It states that energy cannot repeat in an infinite loop within a closed system, and so we must replenish what is lost.
The Second Law profoundly sets the limits for what is possible in our universe, defining why everything within it must one day decay.
Researchers, from the Laboratory of the Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology (MIPT), say that they have effectively defied the second law of thermodynamics with the experiment.
This is a rule within physics that governs the direction of events from the past to the future, stating that everything in our universe tends towards decay.
The 'time machine' is built from a basic quantum computer, which is made up of 'qubits'.
These are units of information described by a 'one', a 'zero', or a mixed 'superposition' of both, that can be stored on an electron.
In the experiment an 'evolution program' was launched which caused the qubits to become an increasingly complex changing pattern of zeros and ones.
During this process, order was lost - just as it is when the pool balls are struck and scattered with a cue. Another program then modified the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it evolved 'backwards', from chaos to order.
The state of the qubits was rewound back to its original starting point.
To an outside observer, it looks as if time is running backwards, said lead researcher Dr Gordey Lesovik, who heads the laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information.
'We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time.'
The 'time machine', described in the journal Scientific Reports consists of a rudimentary quantum computer made up of electron 'qubits'.
In the experiment an 'evolution program' was launched which caused the qubits to become an increasingly complex changing pattern of zeros and ones.
During this process, order was lost - just as it is when the pool balls are struck and scattered with a cue.
Another program then modified the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it evolved 'backwards', from chaos to order.
It may not be the Tardis, a fictional time machine that appears in Doctor Who, pictured here, but physicists have loosely described as moving in the direction of 'time's arrow'. The team worked with electrons in the realm of quantum mechanics
The state of the qubits was rewound back to its original starting point.
The scientists found that, working with just two qubits, 'time reversal' was achieved with a success rate of 85 per cent.
When three qubits were involved more errors occurred, resulting in a 50 per cent success rate.
The experiment could have a practical application in the development of quantum computers, the scientists said.
'Our algorithm could be updated and used to test programs written for quantum computers and eliminate noise and errors,' said Dr Lesovik.
WHAT IS A QUANTUM COMPUTER AND HOW DOES IT WORK?
The key to a quantum computer is its ability to operate on the basis of a circuit not only being 'on' or 'off', but occupying a state that is both 'on' and 'off' at the same time.
While this may seem strange, it's down to the laws of quantum mechanics, which govern the behaviour of the particles which make up an atom.
At this micro scale, matter acts in ways that would be impossible at the macro scale of the universe we live in.
Quantum mechanics allows these extremely small particles to exist in multiple states, known as 'superposition', until they are either seen or interfered with.
A scanning tunneling microscope shows a quantum bit from a phosphorus atom precisely positioned in silicon. Scientists have discovered how to make the qubits 'talk to one another
A good analogy is that of a coin spinning in the air. It cannot be said to be either a 'heads' or 'tails' until it lands.
The heart of modern computing is binary code, which has served computers for decades.
While a classical computer has 'bits' made up of zeros and ones, a quantum computer has 'qubits' which can take on the value of zero or one, or even both simultaneously.
One of the major stumbling blocks for the development of quantum computers has been demonstrating they can beat classical computers.
Google, IBM, and Intel are among companies competing to achieve this.
Neuralink, Elon Musk’s ambitious project to wire up the brain to computers, stepped out of the shadows Tuesday evening.
In a detail-laden presentation at the California Academy of Sciences’ Morrison Planetarium, the tech entrepreneur explained how his foray into brain-machine interfaces could pave the way for a symbiotic relationship with artificial intelligence.
Clinical trials could start as early as next year: “We hope to have this, aspirationally, in a human patient, before the end of next year. So this is not far,” Musk said.
Pricing wasn’t announced in the presentation, the primary purpose of which was recruiting. Neuralink is hiring in the areas of robotics, materials, electrochemistry, micro-fabrication, histology, mixed-signal chip design, optics, and more. The company’s job board on its website lists eight engineering openings and a talent acquisition position.
Little was known about Neuralink prior to the presentation, bar a multi-page explainer published on WaitButWhy in April 2017. At that time, it seemed the company was exploring a variety of methods for linking up brains and machines, and it would initially focus on healthcare benefits as a way of funding further research.
“I feel like I’m in Transcendence,” Musk joked, in an otherwise science-focused event that lacked the party vibe of some Tesla events. “Actually, I was in Transcendence!”
Over two years later, and that vision has come into sharper focus. Neuralink has a product, a means of wiring to the brain, and even an iPhone app to plug into the existing world of hyper-connected technology. Company employees noted the rate of advancement versus existing solutions.
“Elon has this incredible optimism where he’ll pierce through these imagined constraints,” Max Hodak, president of Neuralink, told the audience. “You have to be very careful telling him that something’s impossible.”
Musk on stage.
Here’s what we learned:
6. Neuralink Has a Product
First, a quick primer. Scientists have developed a number of ways to interface with the brain, which reads the electrical firing of neurons in different ways. Some are non-invasive, like EEG scans that use a helmet, but they can be rather imprecise. Others are invasive like ones used in surgery, but the probes can be large and cause issues. Neuralink has opted for an invasive approach that uses a small chip to read the brain, with minuscule probes weaving their way through.
The product is called the N1. It’s a chip that sits in a hermetic package, which fits into a cylinder measuring eight millimeters in diameter by one-fourth of a millimeter tall. Each chip measures four millimeters by four and uses 1,024 electrodes. By comparison, designs used for Parkinson’s today can use just 10 electrodes.
N1 sensor.
All electrodes have read and write functionality. The probes are five microns thick, three microns thinner than a red blood cell and 95 microns thinner than a human hair. The design enables the probes to get close to neurons to detect spikes, and the team believes that the probes can rest 60 microns away from a neuron to detect the spikes.
N1 sensor.
In initial setups, Neuralink places four N1 chips in a patient, three in motor areas and one by the somatic sensory cortex. They’re then wired to an inductive coil near the ear that connects to a link that sits on the outside of the skin. The link contains the battery and Bluetooth to power the system, making it possible to remove and upgrade the firmware without actually touching the sensors again.
The N1 array in action.
Neuralink went through a variety of prototype designs, including ones with a USB-C port. As the goal is to make it as safe as possible for surgery, the team had to compromise on more ambitious designs with triple the probes:
Prototype models, from left to right in chronological order.
5. It Could Reach Patients Very Soon
As mentioned before, the first trials will focus on healthcare. The company aims to host the first-in-human clinical study trial before the end of next year, focusing on patients with quadriplegia due to C1-C4 spinal cord injury.
This will use the four-chip setup to enable patients to control their smartphone using their brain. Through that, they can control a mouse and keyboard on a computer through a Bluetooth connection.
Timescales will vary depending on regulatory approval. Musk previously stated in April 2017 that it may be around eight to 10 years before it’s available to people without disabilities.
And yes, as previous evidence suggested, the company has been using animals in its testing. President of Neuralink Max Hodak said that “we wish that we didn’t have to work with animals,” explaining how the firm takes careful consideration over its approach to tests. Musk noted that the team enabled a monkey to control a computer with his brain.
4. Surgery Will Be Like Lasik
These probes are incredibly fine, and far too small to insert by human hand. Neuralink has developed a robot that can stitch the probes in through an incision. It’s initially cut to two millimeters, then dilated to eight millimeters, placed in and then glued shut. The surgery can take less than an hour.
On the far right next to the arrow, the robot needle used to thread the probes.
The goal is to make the insertion about as complex as Lasik eye surgery, making it easy to link up with machines.
3. It Has an App to Bring It All Together
It uses an iPhone app to interface with the neural link, using a simple interface to train people how to use the link.
The iPhone app.
“You have no wires poking out of your heard; very important. It basically bluetooths to your phone,” Musk said. “We’ll have to watch the app store updates for that one, make sure we don’t have a driver issue.”
No word on an Android version yet.
2. A Brain App Store? It’s Possible
One of the most intriguing comments came during the question-and-answer session, where an audience member asked about third-party software running on the pod. With read-and-write abilities, it’s potentially a tricky area of development.
“Conceivably there could be some kind of app store thing in the future,” Musk said.
Hodak noted that any creations couldn’t use an ad-supported model. While ads on phones are mildly annoying, ads in the brain could be a disaster waiting to happen.
The brain: is there an app for that?
1. A Symbiotic Relationship Is Still the Goal
Neuralink may be initially focused on healthcare benefits, but Musk noted his goal is still to link up humans with A.I. Musk compared it to using a smartphone, except making it a more direct link instead of telling the brain to move fingers to interact.
“This is going to sound pretty weird, but [we want to] achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence,” Musk said. “This is not a mandatory thing! This is a thing that you can choose to have if you want. I think this is going to be something really important at a civilization-scale level. I’ve said a lot about A.I. over the years, but I think even in a benign A.I. scenario we will be left behind.”
Details around the economics of the setup are still sketchy, but Musk joked that “if you want to be symbiotic with A.I., I think it’s safe to say you could repay the loan with superhuman intelligence.” Perhaps a funny suggestion, but research suggests that intelligence does not always predict financial wellbeing.
Far from wiring up and worrying about the details later, the really smart move may be to wait and see how Neuralink develops further over the coming years. Based on Tuesday’s presentation, it could be a fascinating ride.
“I do not like the idea of being a domestic cat, but what’s the solution? I think one of the solutions that seems to be the best option is to add an AI layer. This is something that I think will really be important on a civilization level scale.”
Who said anything about being a domestic cat? And why is it so bad? Garfield seems to be doing well and most house cats seem to rule the homes they live in while doing nothing to earn it other than the occasional purr. And yet, that’s what seems to be worrying billionaire and man-you-don’t-want-licking-your-face Elon Musk, whose solution to not being a house cat (you would think he has enough money to get plastic surgery) is to implant wires into brains and download all of their data into massive computers. Not HIS brain, mind you – but probably his computers and his wires. Do you trust him with your mind? Do you trust him with your milk or tuna?
“Even in a benign AI scenario we will be left behind,” he said. “With a high-bandwidth brain-machine interface, we can actually go along for the ride. We can have the option of merging with AI.”
At a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences this week, Musk explained that artificial intelligence is leaving our puny human brains behind, but his company Neuralink has a way for us to at least keep pace with it. Neuralink’s product is a computer chip attached to ultrafine, electrode-studded wires that will be inserted into a brain (yours?) by a surgical robot, which first drilled the hole. The robot will then connect the chip to a computer that will read brain “spikes,” interpret them and then store them faster than you can say “this sounds a lot scarier than that Russian face-aging app.” That’s because it is, although Neuralink’s president Max Hodak assured The New York Times that they’re not trying to hide anything – well, not anymore … this is the first announcement since Musk founded and financed the company two years ago.
“We want this burden of stealth mode off of us so that we can keep building and do things like normal people, such as publish papers.”
Publish papers? Does Elon I-can’t-get-to-Mars-soon-enough Musk know that this guy just wants to write papers about his brain-data-sucking device?
“All this will occur I think quite slowly. It’s not as if Neuralink will suddenly have this incredible neural lace and take over people’s brains. It will take a long time.”
That comment sounds like Musk is smoking pot again. In reality, Neuralink has made considerable progress. It showed the Times a lab rat with 1,500 electrodes in its brain connected to a computer that is reading and interpreting them – a system they say is already advanced enough for scientific research or medical applications. They’re also upgrading the robot to use a laser drill because the mechanical ones cause too much brain vibrations. Could that be why Musk feels like he’s becoming a cat?
Neuralink says it plans to conduct testing on humans by 2020. It already has a jump on its competition because it uses ultra-thin wires and the robot can insert them at different depths inside a brain. It still needs to find a better material for the wires, since the salt in brains causes them to deteriorate and Musk wants them to stay in your head permanently so he knows when you change your mind about buying a Tesla. Musk may be anxious to get some return on his $100 million investment, especially since Neuralink is hiring more people without a product to sell. Then again, isn’t that the Muskian way?
Someone who didn’t go with Neuralink
“[If two people both had Neuralinks, they’d] effectively have a really high-bandwidth telepathy … potentially a new kind of communication, a conceptual telepathy. It would also be consensual.”
Consensual? Did Musk throw that last word in about brain-to-brain communications because he was worried about privacy … or does he know the first thoughts most people would send across the wires?
A lot of people have already trusted Elon Musk with their money. How many will trust him with their thoughts?
Musk and several of the top scientists from the company covered a lot of ground during the event, going into great detail about the system it hopes to one day implant into your brain. It also shared how it hopes to reach your brain in the first place: by shooting holes in your skull with lasers.
The first step to getting data out of the brain is finding a way to capture all the signals zipping around in a person’s skull and transmit them to a device outside of it.
To accomplish that, Neuralink is developing flexible threads of electrodes — implant these threads into the brain near neurons, and they can pick up and wirelessly transmit signals from those neurons to a computer.
Right now, Neuralink uses thin needles, guided by a computer-vision system, to precisely place bundles of these treads into the brain.
But rather than drilling holes into the skulls of humans to access their brains, Neuralink President Max Hodak told The New York Times the company eventually wants to use laser beams to create a series of tiny holes in the skull.
“One of the big bottlenecks is that a mechanical drill couples vibration through the skull, which is unpleasant,” Hodak said, “whereas a laser drill, you wouldn’t feel.”
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11-07-2019
Robot-Ants Jump, Communicate And Work Together in a Swarm
Robot-Ants Jump, Communicate And Work Together in a Swarm
Robot ants
Credit: EPFL
A team of EPFL researchers has developed tiny 10-gram robots that are inspired by ants: they can communicate with each other, assign roles among themselves and complete complex tasks together. These reconfigurable robots are simple in structure, yet they can jump and crawl to explore uneven surfaces. The researchers have just published their work in Nature.
Individually, ants have only so much strength and intelligence. However, as a colony, they can use complex strategies to complete sophisticated tasks and evade larger predators.
At EPFL, robotics researchers in Professor Jamie Paik’s Laboratory have reproduced this phenomenon, developing tiny robots that display minimal physical intelligence on an individual level but that are able to communicate and act collectively. Despite being simple in design and weighing only 10 grams, each robot has multiple locomotion modes to navigate any type of surface. Collectively, they can quickly detect and overcome obstacles and move objects much larger and heavier than themselves. The related research has been published in Nature.
Credit: Marc Delachaux / EPFL
Robots inspired by trap-jaw ants
These three-legged, T-shaped origami robots are called Tribots. They can be assembled in only a few minutes by folding a stack of thin, multi-material sheets, making them suitable for mass production. Completely autonomous and untethered, Tribots are equipped with infrared and proximity sensors for detection and communication purposes. They could accommodate even more sensors depending on the application.
“Their movements are modeled on those of Odontomachus ants. These insects normally crawl, but to escape a predator, they snap their powerful jaws together to jump from leaf to leaf,” says Zhenishbek Zhakypov, the first author. The Tribots replicate this catapult mechanism through an elegant origami design that combines multiple shape-memory alloy actuators. As a result, a single robot can produce five distinct locomotion gaits: vertical jumping, horizontal jumping, somersaulting to clear obstacles, walking on textured terrain and crawling on flat surfaces – just like these creatively resilient ants.
Roles: leader, worker and explorer
Despite having the same anatomy, each robot is assigned a specific role depending on the situation. ‘Explorers’ detect physical obstacles in their path, such as objects, valleys and mountains. After detecting an obstacle, they inform the rest of the group. Then, the ‘leader’ gives the instructions. The ‘workers,’ meanwhile, pool their strength to move objects. “Each Tribot, just like Odontomachus ants, can have different roles. However, they can also take on new roles instantaneously when faced with a new mission or an unknown environment, or even when other members get lost. This goes beyond what the real ants can do,” says Paik.
Zhenishbek Zhakypov and Jamie Paik. (Photo : Mac Delachaux / EPFL)
Future applications
In practical situations, such as an emergency search mission, Tribots could be deployed en masse. And thanks to their multi-locomotive and multi-agent communication capabilities, they could locate a target quickly over a large surface without relying on GPS or visual feedback. “Since they can be manufactured and deployed in large numbers, having some ‘casualties’ would not affect the success of the mission,” adds Paik.““With their unique collective intelligence, our tiny robots can demonstrate better adaptability to unknown environments; therefore, for certain missions, they would outperform larger, more powerful robots.”
This work is the result of a joint collaboration between EPFL and Osaka University
In April, Jamie Paik has presented her reconfigurable robots at the TED2019 conference in Vancouver. Her talk will be available July 10th here https://go.ted.com/jamiepaik at 11 a.m. EST.
Photo: Bret Hartman / TED
On July 10th, Jamie Paik and several eminent scientists joined famous writer Professor Harari on stage at a special event to help mark EPFL’s 50th anniversary year.
Contacts and sources: Laure-Anne Pessina Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Citation: Zhenishbek Zhakypov, Kazuaki Mori, Koh Hosoda and Jamie Paik, Designing Minimal and Scalable Insect-Inspired Multi-Locomotion Millirobots, Nature, 10 July 2019. DOI 10.1038/s41586-019-1388-
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20-06-2019
Robotic fighter jets could soon join military pilots on combat missions. Here's why.
Robotic fighter jets could soon join military pilots on combat missions. Here's why.
The fast-flying drones would scout enemy locations and draw fire that otherwise would be directed at human pilots.
The Boeing Airpower Teaming System is the company's first unmanned system developed in Australia and designed for global defense customers.Boeing
By Jeremy Hsu
Military pilots may soon have a new kind of wingman to depend upon: not flesh-and-blood pilots but fast-flying, sensor-studded aerial drones that fly into combat to scout enemy targets and draw enemy fire that otherwise would be directed at human-piloted aircraft.
War planners see these robotic wingmen as a way to amplify air power while sparing pilots' lives and preventing the loss of sophisticated fighter jets, which can cost more than $100 million apiece.
"These drone aircraft are a way to get at that in a more cost-effective manner, which I think is really a game-changer for the Air Force," says Paul Scharre, director of the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
Unlike slow-moving drones such as the Reaper and the Global Hawk, which are flown remotely by pilots on the ground, the new combat drones would be able to operate with minimal input from human pilots. To do that, they'd be equipped with artificial intelligence systems that give them the ability not only to fly but also to learn from and respond to the needs of the pilots they fly alongside.
"The term we use in the Air Force is quarterbacking," says Will Roper, assistant secretary of the U.S. Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics and one of the experts working to develop the AI wingmen. "So the pilot is calling a play and knows how the systems will respond, but doesn't have to run the play for them."
Training a robotic wingman
Earlier this year, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory took an important step in the development of the AI wingmen by announcing its Skyborg program focused on developing the AI necessary to control the drones. As part of the program, Air Force pilots are already flying simulated missions alongside the drones. Roper says drones like the XQ-58A Valkyrie, a 652-mph drone built by Sacramento-based Kratos Unmanned Aerial Systems with a projected manufacturing cost of $2 million apiece, could be AI-enabled and ready to fly within the next three years.
The XQ-58A Valkyrie demonstrator, a long-range unmanned air vehicle, completed its inaugural flight on March 5, 2019 at Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona.Senior Airman Joshua Hoskins / US Air Force
"I wouldn't be surprised if the AI becomes tailored to individual pilots," Roper says. "They're actually training their own AI that augments their strengths and weaknesses."
The U.S. military isn't alone in working to develop fighter drones. The Future Combat Air System is a $74-million, two-year deal between Germany and France aimed at building a next-generation fighter that would act as a flying command center for swarms of the fighter drones.
The latter program plans for the first test flight to take place in 2020, with the goal of eventually selling the system worldwide.
Partners or replacements?
Given the rise of drones and AI, some experts question whether it makes sense to continue sending human pilots into harm's way. Why not have people on the ground or in an airborne command center give orders to swarms of combat drones — and let them carry out the mission on their own?
"If you just make the human go fly in combat and their wingman is a drone, it doesn't change their risk profile at all — it only adds to their workload," says Missy Cummings, director of the humans and autonomy laboratory at Duke University and a former fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy.
Scharre says the military still needs humans "forward in the fight" to guide combat drones. But he too sees a coming shift in the role of combat pilots — from flying a fighter jet and controlling its weapons systems to acting as a "battle manager" who decides what actions need to be taken by piloted and drone aircraft. That will likely include deciding when drones should use deadly force and selecting specific targets — decisions that the U.S. military is hesitant to hand over entirely to AI in part because research suggests AI is less skilled than humans at adapting to changing or uncertain situations.
"A country that does not have pilots trained as good as we do might see appeal in shifting more and more of their mission to autonomous systems," Roper says. "Well, if they do that, I think we will have the advantage, because those autonomous systems acting alone will never be able to do what people teamed with machines are able to do."
In 2017, Harvard University geneticist George Church predicted that gene-edited pig organs would be transplanted into humanswithin two years. Well, it’s 2019. Is it time to stop putting pork in baked beans and start putting it in human bein’s? (Sorry, but you knew it was coming.)
“I was wrong.”
When life gives you lemons, or pesky regulations that stop you from testing gene-edited pig organs on humans, you make lemonade by putting the pig organs in the next best thing to humans. No, not zombies … although that’s a great idea for a movie. George Church and his eGenesis company has convinced a major US hospital to allow them to transplant gene-edited pig organs into monkeys. You know the next question: What could possibly go wrong?
“What we’re doing is a necessary step. We’d be hard pressed to put a modified organ into a human until it’s been tested in a large animal.”
Dr. James Markmann, the chief of transplant surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, is working with eGenesis to prove to skeptics that the shortage of human donor organs can be solved by using modified pig organs which are closer to human organs than those of any other animals. Close — but not close enough to light up a Cohiba Behike … yet. In fact, the only thing you may want to light up at the moment is a warning flare. In an interview in the MIT Technology Review, Markmann declines to identify which pig organs are being tested (heart, kidney and liver would be the most popular and useful) nor what kind of monkeys are receiving them. Baboons and chimps would be the obvious choices for their size but it’s difficult both physically and ethically to obtain them for medical experiments, which is why those plentiful, pesky and sometimes murderous Rhesus monkeys are probably the recipients.
On the other hand, there’s millions of pigs and the non-organ parts won’t go to waste, but animal rights groups are fighting for them as well – Markmann avoids conflicts by refering to both donors and recipients as merely “large animals.” Pigs are also becoming more controversial as other researchers believe it’s better to perform the gene edits (the purpose is to eliminate recipient rejection) in such a way that they remove the rejection gene from most of the pig’s organs – creating a veritable buffet of transplantable offal. Markmann prefers to edit one organ at a time and points out that pig hearts have survived in baboons for up to two years. Is it time to test them on humans? What could possibly go wrong?
Doctor, ever since I got that transplant I have this overwhelming urge to burn down a sausage plant.
“We’ve got a Chevy. We may even have a BMW now. Do we wait for a Ferrari? There’s a point where you just want to give it a test drive.”
By far, the best quote on the subject comes from Devin Eckhoff, director of the medical school transplantation division at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who seems to liken his own field to auto mechanics and organ transplants to putting a big new Ford engine in an old Model T. As with so many other experiments that end up being plots for horror movies, what could possibly go wrong is that the marketing and accounting departments overrule research and development and make decisions based on fame, money and beating the competition.
A new innovative airplane design known as the Flying-V embraces an entirely different approach to aircraft design. Named after the iconic Gibson Flying-V electric guitar, this plane is designed by researchers from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. Dutch airline KLM is funding this revolutionary aeronautical project.
Professor Henri Werij, dean of the university’s faculty of aerospace engineering, said, “New and energy-efficient aircraft designs such as the Flying-V are important, as are new forms of propulsion. Our ultimate aim is emission-free flight.”
Here are some of its salient features:
Aerodynamic shape and reduced weight of this highly energy-efficient plane allow it to use 20% less fuel than the most efficient plane.
The wings of this pioneering aircraft would host the passenger space, cargo hold, fuel tanks and all other infrastructure.
Total width of ‘Flying-V’ is 215ft (65m) and its length will be slightly shorter, at 180 ft (55m).
Having the same wingspan as existing planes, it will be able to carry up to 314 passengers.
If all goes well, we won’t have to wait for long, as a prototype model is expected to take flight later this year.
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05-06-2019
NEW “FLYING-V” PLANE PUTS PASSENGER SEATS IN THE WINGS
NEW “FLYING-V” PLANE PUTS PASSENGER SEATS IN THE WINGS
KLM/TU DELFT
KRISTIN HOUSER
Fuel For Thought
Airlines are testing all sorts of ways to make planes less of a drag on the environment. Virgin Atlantic recently used recycled waste to power a commercial flight, while Boeing and JetBlue have backed an effort to create hybrid electric planes.
The Netherland’s KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is taking a different approach.
It just partnered with a university to develop the “Flying-V,” a radical new airplane design that puts passenger seats inside the plane’s wings — and it could decrease the amount of fuel needed for flights by a substantial 20 percent.
Radical Redesign
On Monday, KLM announced plans to collaborate with Delft University of Technology on the school’s in-development Flying-V airplane design. And it doesn’t just put passengers in the plane’s wings — the fuel tanks and cargo hold will also find a new home there.
Based on the researchers’ calculations, the new design should allow the Flying-V to transport approximately the same number of passengers as an Airbus A350 using 20 percent less fuel.
“We’ve been flying these tube and wing airplanes for decades now, but it seems like the configuration is reaching a plateau in terms of energy efficiency,” TU Delft project leader Roelof Vos told CNN. “The new configuration that we propose realizes some synergy between the fuselage and the wing. The fuselage actively contributes to the lift of the airplane, and creates less aerodynamic drag.”
In the wings: Dutch airline KLM has agreed to find development of V-shaped aircraft known as the Flying-V, which incorporates the passenger cabin, fuel tanks and cargo hold into the wings.
KLM
Aerial efficiency: It's claimed the plane will use 20% less fuel than the Airbus A350-900 while carrying a similar number of passengers -- just over 300.
Edwin Wallet, OSO Studio
Better by design: The plane's increased fuel efficiency is largely a result of its aerodynamic design, its creators say, although its reduced weight also contributes.
Edwin Wallet, OSO Studio
Testing times: Researchers hope to fly a scale model of the airplane in September and say it could be ready to enter service between 2040 and 2050.
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30-05-2019
US Navy orders laser cannon to be mounted on active warship within a year
US Navy orders laser cannon to be mounted on active warship within a year
A fully operational laser cannon is about to be fitted to a US destroyer. It will be the first time such a weapon will be carried by an active warship.
Jamie Seidel
It’s big. It’s bright. It’s dangerous. And it will go to sea on a front-line warship for the first time before 2021. The US Navy has announced it has ordered Lockheed Martin to fit a High Energy Laser Integrated Optical weapon with Surveillance (HELIOS) aboard a destroyer in its Pacific fleet.
The 60-kilowatt laser cannon is capable of burning holes in boats and melting vital components on drones. Ultimately, it’s hoped the defensive weapon will be able to sear incoming hypersonic missiles out of the sky.
The US Navy has placed a $US150 million order for two of the devices.
But Russia is already rolling out a similar system to defend its ground-based installations.
Artist’s rendering of Lockheed Martin’s HELIOS system.
Picture: Lockheed MartinSource:Supplied
ALL ABOARD
“We are going to burn the boats if you will and move forward with this technology,” Rear Admiral Ron Boxall told the 2019 Directed Energy Summit.
One laser cannon will be installed at the White Sands Missile Range for testing, Lockheed Martin says. The other will be installed upon a modern Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer.
“The HELIOS program is the first of its kind, and brings together laser weapon, long-range ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) and counter-UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) capabilities, dramatically increasing the situational awareness and layered defence options available to the US Navy,” says Lockheed Martin spokesman Michele Evans.
The challenge will be getting it to work in harmony with all the other sensors and weapons systems attached to the destroyer’s complex AEGIS computer network.
“The problem I have today is the integration of that system into my existing combat system. If I’m going to burn the boats, I’m going to replace something I have today with that system doing that mission with these weapons,” Admiral Boxall said.
“If I have this system that can kill and I have a system that can actually sense, then I have to make sure it integrates with the other things I have on my ship that can sense and kill, namely the Aegis weapon system.”
It’s not the first time the US Navy has sent a laser weapon to sea.
It did so with the USS Ponce, amphibious transport ship converted to test new technologies, in 2014. Named LaWS (Laser Weapon System), that experimental cannon had only one third the strength of the new device.
HELIOS, however, is hoped to meet a new generation of threats.
A group of Arleigh Burke Class Destroyers fire missiles during a training exercise. One of these ships will soon be fitted with the world's first operational laser cannon to go to sea.
Picture: US Navy Source:Supplied
BABY STEPS
It’s hoped HELIOS will be fast enough and strong enough to cripple swarms of armed speedboats, such as those used by Iran in the Persian Gulf.
It’s also hoped it will be accurate enough to counter swarms of cheap drones — whether through the raw power of its laser or its ability to ‘dazzle’ some sensors.
These capabilities are nothing new. Current generation automatic Phalanx gattling-guns and Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) systems do the same thing.
It’s just that it takes time to reload these defensive weapons, and only limited stocks of ammunition can be carried. A Phalanx can only fire for a total of 20 seconds before it is emptied. And RAM launchers only come with 21 missiles each.
What both RAM and Phalanx can do that the HELIOS can’t is shoot down attacking cruise missiles.
Nevertheless, facing a threat potentially involving hundreds of cheap drones and dozens of small attack boats, the US Navy finds the ability for HELIOS to be recharged any number of times by the ship’s own engines appealing.
And it hopes ongoing development of the laser will soon give it an antimissile capability.
A third, less defined, feature of HELIOS is an ability to provide long-range surveillance. This may involve the weapon’s new targeting system, or a digital scan mode for the laser itself.
Russia's Peresvet laser cannon unfolds from the back of a truck. It is believed to be an area-defence weapon, similar to the US Navy's HELIOS system.
Picture: Russian Ministry of Defence Source:Supplied
RUSSIA’S LASER CANNON
One of President Vladimir Putin’s six new ‘superweapons’ announced a year ago is now rolling out into active service.
It’s called Peresvet. It’s a truck-mounted laser cannon probably intended to defend an area from hostile drones and missiles.
Exactly what it is capable of is unknown.
But Moscow is hyping its new weapon, releasing a series of videos and reports on the advanced technology.
“Peresvet laser systems, based on new physical principles, entered combat service in [a] testing regime with the Russian armed forces,” the Russian Defence Ministry’s news service said in December.
In 2021, the USS Preble, a destroyer operating out of the Pearl Harbor naval base, will be equipped with the HELIOS, according to The Honolulu Star-Advertiser — and the weapon will become the Navy’s go-to system for disabling any inbound cruise missiles launched by China and Russia.
Infinite Ammo
Right now, the Navy uses a Gatling gun called the Phalanx to shoot down missiles or drones, per The Honolulu. With a new laser system, the Navy hopes to improve its anti-drone and anti-missile capabilities.
“We are making the decision to put the laser on our [destroyers],” Ronald Buxall, the Navy’s director of surface warfare, told Defense News. “It’s going to start with Preble in 2021, and when we do that, that will now be her close-in weapon that we now continue to upgrade.”
Room For Improvement
Lockheed Martin, the company that developed the laser weapon, demonstrated that a 10-kilowatt laser can destroy drones and 30 kilowatts is enough to disable a truck, according to the newspaper.
The HELIOS system that will be attached to the USS Preble can fire at 60 kilowatts, according to The Honolulu, and the Navy expects to upgrade it to 150 kilowatts of power.
Three different source videos bring da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to life.
Credit: Samsung.
Researchers used machine learning to create an amazing AI that can create eerie videos of people talking starting from a single frame — a picture or even a painting. The ‘talking head’ in the videos follows the motions of a source face (a real person), whose facial landmarks are applied to the facial data of the target face. As you can see in the presentation video below, the target face mimics the facial expressions and verbal cues of the source. This is how the authors brought Einstein, Salvador Dalí, and even Mona Lisa to life using only a photograph.
This sort of application of machine learning isn’t new. For some years, researchers have been working on algorithms that generate videos which swap faces. However, this kind of software required a lot of training data in video form (at least a couple of minutes of content) in order to generate a realistic moving face for the source. Other efforts rendered 3D faces from a single picture, but could not generate motion pictures.
Credit: Samsung
Computer engineers at Samsung’s AI Center in Moscow took it to the next level. Their artificial neural network is capable of generating a face that turns, speaks, and can make expressions starting from only a single image of a person’s face. The researchers call this technique “single-shot learning”. Of course, the end result looks plainly doctored, but the life-like quality increases dramatically when the algorithm is trained with more images or frames.
Credit: Samsung.
The authors also employed Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) — deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other. Basically, each model tries to outsmart the other by creating the appearance of something “real”. This competition promotes a higher level of realism.
If you pay close attention to the outputted faces, you’ll notice that they’re not perfect. There are artifacts and weird bugs that call out the fakeness. That being said this is surely some very impressive work. The next obvious step is making Mona Lisa move her lower body as well. In the future, she might dance for the first time in hundreds of years — or her weird AI avatar, at least.
The work was documented in the preprint server Arxiv.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
11-05-2019
Futuristic Sci-Fi Weapons That Actually Exist!
Futuristic Sci-Fi Weapons That Actually Exist!
Check out these Futuristic SCIFI Weapons That Actually EXIST! From amazing guns from the future like rail guns and laser guns to other futuristic sci-fi technology, this top 10 list of real scifi weapons will amaze you!
9. HEAT RAY
Developed by the U.S. military, the Active Denial System, informally known as the Heat Ray, is a non-lethal, directed-energy weapon designed for area denial, perimeter security, and crowd control. It’s called the ADS for short and works by heating the surface of targets, including human skin.
8. WEAPONIZED HYPERSONIC PLANES
Besides heat rays of the future, this might also remind you of something straight out of a science fiction movie. A ‘scramjet’ powered aircraft called the X-51A WaveRider has been successfully tested by the American military. During testing, it reached a hypersonic speed of Mach (mawk) 5.1, or 3,913 miles per hour (4,828 km/hr) – that’s over five times the speed of sound!
7. AN/SEQ-3 LASER WEAPON SYSTEM
In 2014, the US Navy deployed its first anti-drone laser for active duty in the Persian Gulf aboard the USS Ponce. Known as the An/Seq-3 Laser Weapon System, it’s intended for use against a variety of targets, from drones to small attack boats, and the commander of the USS Ponce is authorized to use it as he deems necessary.
6. ROBOT SOLDIERS
The MAARS, or Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System, is a small robot tank that was developed by QinetiQ North America. The fully-loaded system weighs 369 pounds and is equipped with sensors, weapons, and ammunition, along with a battery that can last three to 12 hours, as well as a sleep mode that lasts up to a week.
5. SELF-AIMING RIFLE
This terrifying, $17,000 piece of technology, known as the TrackingPoint XS1 scope, essentially equips sniper rifles with an automatic aiming system. Using advanced technology, the firearm tags targets; then, it factors in variables like wind speed and movement to calculate the perfect shot before firing.
4.RAILGUN
Before the railgun actually existed, it was a mythical weapon that made frequent appearances in video games and, occasionally, in movies, such as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The railgun hurls metal slugs at hypersonic speeds using electromagnets and is considered the future of artillery and small arms.
3. PLASMA FORCE FIELDS
Researchers are attempting to keep up with the ever-advancing pace of weapons technology. A patent has been issued to aerospace and defense giant Boeing to develop a force field-like system that could protect military vehicles from shockwaves following explosions from missiles or IED’s, or improvised explosive devices.
2. CornerShot Rifle and Grenade Launcher
Despite the seemingly space-age nature of up-and-coming military technology, combat soldiers struggle with the ages-old problem of being able to see and fire weapons around corners. This is an especially prevalent issue when it comes to modern warfare in urban settings.
1. DIGITAL REVOLVER
Once again, the Armatix Digital Revolver resembles something out of a science fiction film, and something like it was actually featured in a James Bond movie. It’s a futuristic pistol designed with safety in mind – it’s equipped with a digital safety mechanism that can only be disabled by a special wristwatch worn by the operator, which sends an unlock signal to the gun once a password is put in and if it is within a certain distance.
Origins Explained is the place to be to find all the answers to your questions, from mysterious events and unsolved mysteries to everything there is to know about the world and its amazing animals!
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
01-05-2019
Futuristic Sci-Fi Weapons That Actually Exist!
Futuristic Sci-Fi Weapons That Actually Exist!
Check out these Futuristic SCIFI Weapons That Actually EXIST! From amazing guns from the future like rail guns and laser guns to other futuristic sci-fi technology, this top 10 list of real scifi weapons will amaze you!
9. HEAT RAY
Developed by the U.S. military, the Active Denial System, informally known as the Heat Ray, is a non-lethal, directed-energy weapon designed for area denial, perimeter security, and crowd control. It’s called the ADS for short and works by heating the surface of targets, including human skin.
8. WEAPONIZED HYPERSONIC PLANES
Besides heat rays of the future, this might also remind you of something straight out of a science fiction movie. A ‘scramjet’ powered aircraft called the X-51A WaveRider has been successfully tested by the American military. During testing, it reached a hypersonic speed of Mach (mawk) 5.1, or 3,913 miles per hour (4,828 km/hr) – that’s over five times the speed of sound!
7. AN/SEQ-3 LASER WEAPON SYSTEM
In 2014, the US Navy deployed its first anti-drone laser for active duty in the Persian Gulf aboard the USS Ponce. Known as the An/Seq-3 Laser Weapon System, it’s intended for use against a variety of targets, from drones to small attack boats, and the commander of the USS Ponce is authorized to use it as he deems necessary.
6. ROBOT SOLDIERS
The MAARS, or Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System, is a small robot tank that was developed by QinetiQ North America. The fully-loaded system weighs 369 pounds and is equipped with sensors, weapons, and ammunition, along with a battery that can last three to 12 hours, as well as a sleep mode that lasts up to a week.
5. SELF-AIMING RIFLE
This terrifying, $17,000 piece of technology, known as the TrackingPoint XS1 scope, essentially equips sniper rifles with an automatic aiming system. Using advanced technology, the firearm tags targets; then, it factors in variables like wind speed and movement to calculate the perfect shot before firing.
4. RAILGUN
Before the railgun actually existed, it was a mythical weapon that made frequent appearances in video games and, occasionally, in movies, such as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The railgun hurls metal slugs at hypersonic speeds using electromagnets and is considered the future of artillery and small arms.
3. PLASMA FORCE FIELDS
Researchers are attempting to keep up with the ever-advancing pace of weapons technology. A patent has been issued to aerospace and defense giant Boeing to develop a force field-like system that could protect military vehicles from shockwaves following explosions from missiles or IED’s, or improvised explosive devices.
2. CornerShot Rifle and Grenade Launcher
Despite the seemingly space-age nature of up-and-coming military technology, combat soldiers struggle with the ages-old problem of being able to see and fire weapons around corners. This is an especially prevalent issue when it comes to modern warfare in urban settings.
1. DIGITAL REVOLVER
Once again, the Armatix Digital Revolver resembles something out of a science fiction film, and something like it was actually featured in a James Bond movie. It’s a futuristic pistol designed with safety in mind – it’s equipped with a digital safety mechanism that can only be disabled by a special wristwatch worn by the operator, which sends an unlock signal to the gun once a password is put in and if it is within a certain distance.
Origins Explained is the place to be to find all the answers to your questions, from mysterious events and unsolved mysteries to everything there is to know about the world and its amazing animals!
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
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