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.
12-08-2017
Paralyzed Monkeys Able to Walk Again With Brain Implant. Human Trials Are Next
Paralyzed Monkeys Able to Walk Again With Brain Implant. Human Trials Are Next
Jemere Ruby
IN BRIEF
Using a system of electrodes, transmitters, receivers, scientists were able to restore leg function in a primate, completely bypassing damaged nerves.
While this remarkable feat may be decades away from human use, it is a promising development for the hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. with spinal cord injuries
INSTANT FUNCTION
Electrodes implanted in the brain and spine have helped paralyzed monkeys walk. The neurologists behind the study reported that the implants restored function in the primates’ legs almost instantaneously. The findings are detailed in Nature.
The spinal cord of the subject monkey was partially cut, so the legs had no way of communicating with the brain. To mend the brain-spine interface, electrodes were placed on key parts of the monkey’s body. Implants were placed inside the monkey’s brain at the part that controls leg movement, together with a wireless transmitter sitting outside the skull. Electrodes were also placed along the spinal cord, below the injury.
A computer program decoded brain signals indicative of leg movement and transmitted the signals to the electrodes in the spine. Within just a few seconds, the monkey was moving its leg. In a few days, it was walking on a treadmill.
Alain Herzog/Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
“The primate was able to walk immediately once the brain-spine interface was activated. No physiotherapy or training was necessary,” said Erwan Bezard, one of the authors of the study.
PRIMATE-TO-PRIMATE
This study is a massive breakthrough—it’s the first time implants have helped a primate walk. There has been much research to develop tech for paralyzed patients, but most lab trials were done on rodents. “It seems the principles learned in rats are now translating into primates,” said Jen Collinger, a University of Pittsburgh bioengineer.
The results were astoundingly positive, but the researchers say that it will take at least a decade to fine-tune the technology for use in humans. Still, our bodies are greatly similar to that of monkeys, and the researchers believe transition could be quick.
Exciting news about the study is that the components that the researchers used are legal for human use in Switzerland. The Swiss group of the study have started clinical trial with eight people with partial leg paralysis.
We’re all eager for further development in the study—an innovation that could greatly change the lives of approximately 282,000 people in the U.S. with spinal cord injuries.
To survive the 90-year-long journey between Earth and the far-off planet Homestead II, humans on the ship in the 2016 sci-fi bomb Passengers were cryogenically frozen, suspending them in the throes of youth. The assumption is that thawing will bring their bodies and minds back to their normal, living states, and then life will resume where it left off. It’s wishful thinking: While scientists have figured out how to thaw and unthaw individual cells, whether it’s possible to reanimate life has remained a mystery.
But a new discovery puts them well on their way to finding out.
In a recent article in the journal ACS Nano, researchers reported that they’d successfully frozen zebrafish embryos, thawed them, and brought them back to life. Reanimation efforts on the tiny tropical fish, prized among scientists because their translucent embryos are easy to study, have been ongoing for 60 years, but none have been successful because of issues during the thawing process. This time around, the American team tweaked their defrosting strategy in order to speed it up.
When scientists preserve an embryo using cryogenic freezing, they drain some of its regular fluids, replacing them with an antifreeze-like substance to prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals, which can puncture a cell from the inside out. For the most part, scientists have figured out this process of “vitrification” — making fluids ice-free and thus glass-like — using a cryoprotectant solution of various sugar and alcohol molecules, like glycerol and propylene glycol (the major ingredient in car antifreeze). Previous studies have shown that dropping cryoprotected zebrafish embryos into a liquid nitrogen tank that cools them at 90,000 degrees Celsius per minute to a final temperature of −196 degrees Celsius results in perfectly frozen embryos. The problem is what happens as they are thawing.
“[The] large size of the yolk still impedes rapid cooling and warming, thereby yielding lethal ice crystal formation during cryopreservation,” the researchers write. When the defrosting process is too gradual, sometimes an event called devitrification occurs, in which the liquid “[reverts] from glass to ice.” For these scientists, thawing frozen embryos involved shining a 1064-nm laser pulse on them, which raised their temperature to 1.4 × 107 degrees Celsius per minute, but even this was too slow to create the perfect thaw.
Once thawed, 10 percent of the sample zebrafish embryos survived for 24 hours.
But they finally managed to achieve it by adding a substance to the cryoprotectant solution that would heat up quickly and move the thawing process along faster — namely, tiny bits of metal. Adding gold nanorods, which conducted the laser’s heat efficiently, sped up the warming process so that there was no chance for damaging devitrification to take place.
In this way, zebrafish embryos that had been flash-frozen for a few minutes were rapidly unfrozen, and about 10 percent of those embryos stayed alive and developed for the next 24 hours.
These aren’t survival odds that any freezer-happy human would bank on, but they’re a start — and proof that a developing embryo’s mechanisms can continue after being briefly frozen, at least in a zebrafish. Future research will probably focus on figuring out how to extend the amount of time those embryos can stay frozen before they’re thawed, as well as pinpointing what causes them to die so soon after they’re unfrozen.
In theory, living cells can be unfrozen, but there's no guarantee that what's left will constitute life.
It’s too early to say how this research could be applied to long-term human hibernation, but the scientists behind the study are hoping it will lead to a way to freeze the embryos of endangered water-bound species so they can repopulate future lifeless seas. In a way, their objectives aren’t too different from those laid out in Passengers, in which the spacefaring ship was laden with libraries of frozen human embryos waiting for a new habitat to populate.
As cryogenics science hurtles forward, it’s likely that the film’s promise that bodies can be viably frozen and thawed will increasingly seem less like a fantasy and more of a possibility. Whether those defrosted bodies will constitute conscious life, however, will be up to future humans to decide.
Photos via Khosla et al./ACS Nano, Passengers
07-08-2017 om 23:09
geschreven door peter
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This 3D-Printed Human Heart Can Do Everything a Real One Can
This 3D-Printed Human Heart Can Do Everything a Real One Can
The artificial heart imitates a human heart as closely as possible
Photo: ETH Zurich
IN BRIEF
Soft robotics and 3D printing have allowed a team of researchers from Switzerland to develop an artificial heart that works like the real thing. This proof of concept design was successfully tested in the lab, but it may take a while before it will be ready.
Scientists have been developing artificial hearts for quite some time now. However, many of the current designs are unfortunately clunky, which presents difficulties in successfully integrating them into human tissue. To approach this issue, a team of researchers from ETH Zürich decided to take a cue from the biological human heart.
Instead of using separate parts, the Swiss team, led by Nicholas Cohrs, 3D-printed an artificial heart using a soft, flexible material. The material was molded into a single part (or a “monoblock”) which allowed the team to design a complex inner structure complete with pumping mechanisms able to be triggered by silicon ventricles. This method imitates a realistic human heartbeat.
“[O]ur goal is to develop an artificial heart that is roughly the same size as the patient’s own one and which imitates the human heart as closely as possible in form and function,” Cohrs said in a press release. The team successfully tested this artificial heart, pumping blood-like fluid at human body-like pressures. The team published their research in the journal Artificial Organs.
However, this design is still a proof of concept, which means it’s yet to be ready for actual implantation. The materials used are, as of right now, unable to last more than half an hour or some few thousand heartbeats, though that could vary a bit depending on a person’s heart rate. It’s a limitation the team will continue to work on, as new materials and design improvements advance. Once perfected, this design could potentially improve the lives and health of around 26 million people worldwide who suffer from various heart conditions.
A study published today in the journal Nature confirms earlier reports of the first-ever successful gene-editing of embryos in the U.S. Though controversial, the treatment could one day be used to address any of the 10,000 disorders linked to just a single genetic error.
CORRECTING MUTANT GENES
Last week, reports circulated that doctors had successfully edited a gene in a human embryo — the first time such a thing had been done in the United States. The remarkable achievement confirmed the powerful potential of CRISPR, the world’s most efficient and effective gene-editing tool. Now, details of the research have been published in Nature.
The procedure involved “correcting” the DNA of one-cell embryos using CRISPR to remove the MYBPC3 gene. That gene is known to cause hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a heart disease that affects 1 out of 500 people. HCM has no known cure or treatment as its symptoms don’t manifest until the disease causes sudden death through cardiac arrest.
The researchers started with human embryos created from 12 healthy female donors and sperm from a male volunteer who carried the MYBOC3 gene. The defective gene was cut out using CRISPR around the time the sperm was injected into the eggs.
As a result, as the embryos divided and grew, many repaired themselves using the non-edited genes from the genetic materials of the female donors, and in total, 72 percent of the cells that formed appeared to be corrected. The researchers didn’t notice any “off-target” effects on the DNA, either.
The researchers told The Washington Post that their work was fairly basic. “Really, we didn’t edit anything, neither did we modify anything,” explained Shoukhrat Mitalipov, lead author and a researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University. “Our program is toward correcting mutant genes.”
A [CONTROVERSIAL] NEW ERA?
Basic or not, the development is remarkable.“By using this technique, it’s possible to reduce the burden of this heritable disease on the family and eventually the human population,” Mitalipov said in an OHSU press release.
However, gene editing is a controversial area of study, and the researchers’ work included changes to the germ line, meaning the changes could be passed down to future generations. To be clear, though, the embryos were allowed to grow for only a few days and none were implanted into a womb (nor was that ever the researchers’ intention).
University of Wisconsin-Madison bioethicist Alta Charo thinks that the benefits of this potential treatment outweigh all concerns. “What this represents is a fascinating, important, and rather impressive incremental step toward learning how to edit embryos safely and precisely,” she told The Washington Post. “[N]o matter what anybody says, this is not the dawn of the era of the designer baby.”
Before the technique could be truly beneficial, regulations must be developed that provide clearer guidelines, according to Mitalipov. If not, “this technology will be shifted to unregulated areas, which shouldn’t be happening,” he explained.
More than 10,000 disorders have been linked to just a single genetic error, and as the researchers continue with their work, their next target is BRCA, a gene associated with breast cancer growth.
Mitalipov hopes that their technique could one day be used to treat a wide-range of genetic diseases and save the lives of millions of people. After all, treating a single gene at the embryonic stage is far more efficient that changing a host of them in adults.
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Diamond Batteries Made of Nuclear Waste Can Generate Power For Thousands of Years
Diamond Batteries Made of Nuclear Waste Can Generate Power For Thousands of Years
Getty
IN BRIEF
Scientist have developed an ingenious means of converting nuclear power plant waste (76,430 metric tons in the US alone) into sustainable diamond batteries.
These long-lasting batteries could be a clean and safe way to power spacecraft, satellites, and even medical devices.
NUCLEAR DIAMONDS
Scientists from the University of Bristol Cabot Institute are hitting two birds with one stone, thanks to their lab-made diamond that can generate electricity and is made from upcycled radioactive waste.
In nuclear power plants, radioactive uranium is split in a process called nuclear fission. When the atoms are split, heat is generated, and that heat then vaporizes water into steam that turns electricity-generating turbines.
A severe downside of this process is the creation of dangerous radioactive waste, which ultimately deposits in the graphite core that it is housed in. Today, this nuclear contamination is safely stored away until it stops being radioactive…and with a half-life of 5,730 years, that takes quite a while.
The scientists found a way to heat the radioactive graphite to release most of the radioactivity in a gaseous form. The gas is subjected to high temperature and low pressures that turn it into a man-made diamond.
When these diamonds are placed near a radioactive field, they generate a small electrical current. The developers enclosed the diamond battery in another non-radioactive diamond to absorb the harmful emissions, which in turn allowed for the generation of even more electricity, making the battery nearly 100 percent efficient.
POWERING THE FUTURE
The nuclear diamond battery has an incredible lifetime, and will only be half used up by the year 7746. This makes it an ideal power solution for “situations where it is not feasible to charge or replace conventional batteries,” said Tom Scott, a materials science professor at Cabot Institute.
Flight times of planes, satellites, or spacecraft could increase with such a lasting battery. Medical devices like pacemakers and the artificial pancreas could become more reliable, empowering users to live their lives more fully.
The development also presents an incredibly efficient way to treat radioactive waste. Within the past 40 years, the US has amassed 76,430 metric tons (84,250 tons) of this waste.
Supplying the Earth with electricity is a daunting task even without a focus on sustainability. Now, it looks like experts are on the right track with this nuclear-powered diamond battery. It’s almost like the holy grail of electricity generation, or as Scott puts it, “no emissions generated and no maintenance required, just direct electricity generation.”
The time for machines to take over most of humanity's work is rapidly approaching. The world is woefully unprepared to deal with the implications that automation will have over the coming decades. Universal basic income is just beginning to be discussed, and automation has the potential to displace much of the world's workforce. Many decisions have to be made, and quickly, if we hope to keep pace with innovation.
On December 2nd, 1942, a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi came back from lunch and watched as humanity created the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction inside a pile of bricks and wood underneath a football field at the University of Chicago. Known to history as Chicago Pile-1, it was celebrated in silence with a single bottle of Chianti, for those who were there understood exactly what it meant for humankind, without any need for words.
Now, something new has occurred that, again, quietly changed the world forever. Like a whispered word in a foreign language, it was quiet in that you may have heard it, but its full meaning may not have been comprehended. However, it’s vital we understand this new language, and what it’s increasingly telling us, for the ramifications are set to alter everything we take for granted about the way our globalized economy functions, and the ways in which we as humans exist within it.
What actually ended up happening when they faced off? Lee went on to lose all but one of their match’s five games. An AI named AlphaGo is now a better Go player than any human and has been granted the “divine” rank of 9 dan. In other words, its level of play borders on godlike. Go has officially fallen to machines, just as Jeopardy did before it to Watson, and chess before that to Deep Blue.
“AlphaGo’s historic victory is a clear signal that we’ve gone from linear to parabolic.”
So, what is Go? Very simply, think of Go as Super Ultra Mega Chess. This may still sound like a small accomplishment, another feather in the cap of machines as they continue to prove themselves superior in the fun games we play, but it is no small accomplishment, and what’s happening is no game.
AlphaGo’s historic victory is a clear signal that we’ve gone from linear to parabolic. Advances in technology are now so visibly exponential in nature that we can expect to see a lot more milestones being crossed long before we would otherwise expect. These exponential advances, most notably in forms of artificial intelligence limited to specific tasks, we are entirely unprepared for as long as we continue to insist upon employment as our primary source of income.
This may all sound like exaggeration, so let’s take a few decade steps back, and look at what computer technology has been actively doing to human employment so far:
Source: St. Louis Fed
Let the above chart sink in. Do not be fooled into thinking this conversation about the automation of labor is set in the future. It’s already here. Computer technology is already eating jobs and has been since 1990.
ROUTINE WORK
All work can be divided into four types: routine and nonroutine, cognitive and manual. Routine work is the same stuff day in and day out, while nonroutine work varies. Within these two varieties, is the work that requires mostly our brains (cognitive) and the work that requires mostly our bodies (manual). Where once all four types saw growth, the stuff that is routine stagnated back in 1990. This happened because routine labor is easiest for technology to shoulder. Rules can be written for work that doesn’t change, and that work can be better handled by machines.
Distressingly, it’s exactly routine work that once formed the basis of the American middle class. It’s routine manual work that Henry Ford transformed by paying people middle class wages to perform, and it’s routine cognitive work that once filled US office spaces. Such jobs are now increasingly unavailable, leaving only two kinds of jobs with rosy outlooks: jobs that require so little thought, we pay people little to do them, and jobs that require so much thought, we pay people well to do them.
If we can now imagine our economy as a plane with four engines, where it can still fly on only two of them as long as they both keep roaring, we can avoid concerning ourselves with crashing. But what happens when our two remaining engines also fail? That’s what the advancing fields of robotics and AI represent to those final two engines, because for the first time, we are successfully teaching machines to learn.
NEURAL NETWORKS
I’m a writer at heart, but my educational background happens to be in psychology and physics. I’m fascinated by both of them so my undergraduate focus ended up being in the physics of the human brain, otherwise known as cognitive neuroscience. I think once you start to look into how the human brain works, how our mass of interconnected neurons somehow results in what we describe as the mind, everything changes. At least it did for me.
As a quick primer in the way our brains function, they’re a giant network of interconnected cells. Some of these connections are short, and some are long. Some cells are only connected to one other, and some are connected to many. Electrical signals then pass through these connections, at various rates, and subsequent neural firings happen in turn. It’s all kind of like falling dominoes, but far faster, larger, and more complex. The result amazingly is us, and what we’ve been learning about how we work, we’ve now begun applying to the way machines work.
One of these applications is the creation of deep neural networks – kind of like pared-down virtual brains. They provide an avenue to machine learning that’s made incredible leaps that were previously thought to be much further down the road, if even possible at all. How? It’s not just the obvious growing capability of our computers and our expanding knowledge in the neurosciences, but the vastly growing expanse of our collective data, aka big data.
Imagine programming a computer to recognize a chair. You’d need to enter a ton of instructions, and the result would still be a program detecting chairs that aren’t, and not detecting chairs that are. So how did we learn to detect chairs? Our parents pointed at a chair and said, “chair.” Then we thought we had that whole chair thing all figured out, so we pointed at a table and said “chair”, which is when our parents told us that was “table.” This is called reinforcement learning. The label “chair” gets connected to every chair we see, such that certain neural pathways are weighted and others aren’t. For “chair” to fire in our brains, what we perceive has to be close enough to our previous chair encounters. Essentially, our lives are big data filtered through our brains.
DEEP LEARNING
The power of deep learning is that it’s a way of using massive amounts of data to get machines to operate more like we do without giving them explicit instructions. Instead of describing “chairness” to a computer, we instead just plug it into the Internet and feed it millions of pictures of chairs. It can then have a general idea of “chairness.” Next we test it with even more images. Where it’s wrong, we correct it, which further improves its “chairness” detection. Repetition of this process results in a computer that knows what a chair is when it sees it, for the most part as well as we can. The important difference though is that unlike us, it can then sort through millions of images within a matter of seconds.
Go is famously a more complex game than chess, with its larger board, longer games, and many more pieces. Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence team likes to say that there are more possible Go boards than atoms in the known universe, but that vastly understates the computational problem. There are about 10¹⁷⁰ board positions in Go, and only 10⁸⁰ atoms in the universe. That means that if there were as many parallel universes as there are atoms in our universe (!), then the total number of atoms in all those universes combined would be close to the possibilities on a single Go board.
Such confounding complexity makes impossible any brute-force approach to scan every possible move to determine the next best move. But deep neural networks get around that barrier in the same way our own minds do, by learning to estimate what feels like the best move. We do this through observation and practice, and so did AlphaGo, by analyzing millions of professional games and playing itself millions of times. So the answer to when the game of Go would fall to machines wasn’t even close to ten years. The correct answer ended up being, “Any time now.”
NONROUTINE AUTOMATION
Any time now. That’s the new go-to response in the 21st century for any question involving something new machines can do better than humans, and we need to try to wrap our heads around it.
We need to recognize what it means for exponential technological change to be entering the labor market space for nonroutine jobs for the first time ever. Machines that can learn mean nothing humans do as a job is uniquely safe anymore. From hamburgers to healthcare, machines can be created to successfully perform such tasks with no need or less need for humans, and at lower costs than humans.
Amelia is just one AI out there currently being beta-tested in companies right now. Created by IPsoft over the past 16 years, she’s learned how to perform the work of call center employees. She can learn in seconds what takes us months, and she can do it in 20 languages. Because she’s able to learn, she’s able to do more over time. In one company putting her through the paces, she successfully handled one of every ten calls in the first week, and by the end of the second month, she could resolve six of ten calls. Because of this, it’s been estimated that she can put 250 million people out of a job, worldwide.
Viv is an AI coming soon from the creators of Siri who’ll be our own personal assistant. She’ll perform tasks online for us, and even function as a Facebook News Feed on steroids by suggesting we consume the media she’ll know we’ll like best. In doing all of this for us, we’ll see far fewer ads, and that means the entire advertising industry — that industry the entire Internet is built upon — stands to be hugely disrupted.
Fortunately, people are beginning toaskthesequestions, and there’s an answer that’s building up momentum. The idea is to put machines to work for us, but empower ourselves to seek out the forms of remaining work we as humans find most valuable, by simply providing everyone a monthly paycheck independent of work. This paycheck would be granted to all citizens unconditionally, and its name is universal basic income. By adopting UBI, aside from immunizing against the negative effects of automation, we’d also be decreasing the risks inherent in entrepreneurship, and the sizes of bureaucracies necessary to boost incomes. It’s for these reasons, it has cross-partisan support, and is even now in the beginning stages of possible implementation in countries like Switzerland, Finland, the Netherlands, and Canada.
And now even the White House, in a stunning report to Congress, has put the probability at 83 percent that a worker making less than $20 an hour in 2010 will eventually lose their job to a machine. Even workers making as much as $40 an hour face odds of 31 percent. To ignore odds like these is tantamount to our now laughable “duck and cover” strategies for avoiding nuclear blasts during the Cold War.
All of this is why it’s those most knowledgeable in the AI field who are now actively sounding the alarm for basic income. During a panel discussion at the end of 2015 at Singularity University, prominent data scientist Jeremy Howard asked “Do you want half of people to starve because they literally can’t add economic value, or not?” before going on to suggest, ”If the answer is not, then the smartest way to distribute the wealth is by implementing a universal basic income.”
AI pioneer Chris Eliasmith, director of the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, warned about the immediate impacts of AI on society in an interview with Futurism, “AI is already having a big impact on our economies… My suspicion is that more countries will have to follow Finland’s lead in exploring basic income guarantees for people.”
Moshe Vardi expressed the same sentiment after speaking at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science about the emergence of intelligent machines, “we need to rethink the very basic structure of our economic system… we may have to consider instituting a basic income guarantee.”
Even Baidu’s chief scientist and founder of Google’s “Google Brain” deep learning project, Andrew Ng, during an onstage interview at this year’s Deep Learning Summit, expressed the shared notion that basic income must be “seriously considered” by governments, citing “a high chance that AI will create massive labor displacement.”
When those building the tools begin warning about the implications of their use, shouldn’t those wishing to use those tools listen with the utmost attention, especially when it’s the very livelihoods of millions of people at stake? If not then, what about when Nobel prize winning economists begin agreeing with them in increasing numbers?
No nation is yet ready for the changes ahead. High labor force non-participation leads to social instability, and a lack of consumers within consumer economies leads to economic instability. So let’s ask ourselves, what’s the purpose of the technologies we’re creating? What’s the purpose of a car that can drive for us, or artificial intelligence that can shoulder 60% of our workload? Is it to allow us to work more hours for even less pay? Or is it to enable us to choose how we work, and to decline any pay/hours we deem insufficient because we’re already earning the incomes that machines aren’t?
What’s the big lesson to learn, in a century when machines can learn?
I offer it’s that jobs are for machines, and life is for people.
A Finnish research team has taken a step towards the future of food by developing a method for producing food from electricity. If scaling it up proves to be successful, it could be a tool in the fight against world hunger and climate change.
THE ELECTRIC BIOREACTOR FARM
Finnish researchers have created a batch of single-cell protein that is nutritious enough to serve for dinner using a system powered by renewable energy. The entire process requires only electricity, water, carbon dioxide, and microbes. The synthetic food was created as part of the Food From Electricity project, which is a collaboration between Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) and the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.
After exposing the raw materials to electrolysis in a bioreactor, the process forms a powder that consists of more than 50 percent protein and 25 percent carbohydrates — the texture can also be changed by altering the microbes used in the production.
Image Credit: Laurie Nygren
The next stage, according to Juha-Pekka Pitkänen, principal scientist at VTT, is to optimize the system because, currently, a bioreactor the size of a coffee cup takes around two weeks to produce one gram of the protein. Pitkänen said in a LUT press release, “We are currently focusing on developing the technology: reactor concepts, technology, improving efficiency, and controlling the process.”
He predicted that it would take about a decade before a more efficient incarnation of the system would be widely available — “Maybe 10 years is a realistic timeframe for reaching commercial capacity, in terms of the necessary legislation and process technology.”
A WORLD WITHOUT HUNGER
The potential impact of food produced using electricity and other widely available raw materials is enormous. Currently, there are two main ways that it could be used.
First, as a means of feeding starving people and providing a source of food in areas that are not suited to agricultural production. Pitkänen said that, in the future, “the technology can be transported to, for instance, deserts and other areas facing famine,” providing a source of cheap and nutritious food to those who need it most.
The machine also works independently of environmental factors, meaning that it could feed people consistently — Jero Ahola, a Professor at LUT, said in the press release that it “does not require a location with the conditions for agriculture, such as the right temperature, humidity or a certain soil type.”
Second, as a means of decreasing global emissions by reducing the demand for food livestock and the crops necessary to feed them. Currently, the meat industry accounts for between 14 and 18 percent of global emissions of greenhouse gases, as well as taking up swarths of land that could be applied for other ends.
The food from electricity project could decrease the amount of unsustainable farming needed to fill our bellies as it provides us with a smaller, cheaper, and renewable method of getting our nutrients. Other solutions to this problem include lab-grown meat or turning to insect farming, which produces less waste and requires less energy.
Your flying car might finally be on the way as the all-electric, two-seater Lilium Jet took its first test flight this week. Lilium Aviation's prototype consumes around 90 percent less energy than drone-style aircraft and could be the transportation mode of the future.
THE LILIUM JET
If you’ve been begging the universe for a flying car for your entire life, you may soon be able to stop asking (sort of). This week, Germany-based company Lilium Aviation took its new all-electric, two-seater vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) prototype for its first test flight. The jet was piloted remotely during the tests, but its creators say the vehicle’s first manned flight will happen soon.
Thirty-six separate jet engines mounted on 12 movable flaps on the Lilium Jet’s 10-meter-long wings power the craft. The flaps point down at take-off to provide vertical lift, and then they tilt gradually into a horizontal position for forward thrust. Lilium says that its electric battery enables the aircraft to reach a maximum cruising speed of 300 kph (183 mph) and achieve a range of 300 kilometers (183 miles), all while it “consumes around 90 percent less energy than drone-style aircraft,” according to a recent press release.
POWERED BY RENEWABLES
The startup plans to build a five-passenger version of the jet eventually, and Lilium envisions its product being used in an on-demand capacity in dense, urban areas — the Uber of flying cars (though Uber itself is working on its own flying model). Patrick Nathen, co-founder and head of calculation and design for Lilium Jet, told The Verge that the company’s ultimate goal is to make the technology accessible for everyone, replacing expensive ground taxi trips in urban areas with flights at a fraction of the cost.
Although electric-powered aviation is not yet highly developed, this prototype’s design makes it far more efficient in terms of power consumption than other electric aircraft. And although electric cars with the same 1,000-pound batteries used in this aircraft are typically limited to a range of about 482 kilometers (300 miles) per charge, Nathen says that’s enough for their jet.
This jet and virtually all other innovative vehicles in development right now will run on renewables. This is more than a trend — it is simply the way of the future. Tesla vehicles will soon be as affordable as standard vehicles, and their semi trucks and pickups are on the way. This kind of electric-powered aircraft is the next step in truly getting clean energy off the ground while leaving fossil fuels in it.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
01-07-2017
Microbotjes halen bacteriën uit het water
Microbotjes halen bacteriën uit het water
Tim Kraaijvanger
Vervuild water kan gefilterd worden met behulp van microbotjes.
In een nieuw paper beschrijven wetenschappers hoe de techniek werkt. Ieder botje bestaat voor de helft uit magnesium. Hierdoor ontstaan waterstofbellen in het water, waardoor de botjes door het water bewegen. De andere helft is gemaakt van verschillende laagjes goud en ijzer met daar bovenop zilveren nanodeeltjes. De bacteriën komen vast te zitten tussen de ijzeren en gouden lagen, waarna ze gedood worden door de nanodeeltjes.
Des te meer microbotjes er in vervuild water worden losgelaten, des te effectiever wordt het water gefilterd. De onderzoekers beweren dat de botjes in twintig minuten tijd tachtig procent van de E. coli-bacteriën in vervuild water kunnen doden.
Magnetisch Uiteraard kan het water niet gedronken worden met de microbotjes er nog in. Dit is de reden dat ieder microbotje voor een deel uit ijzer bestaat. Hierdoor kunnen de botjes met een magneet uit het water worden gehaald.
Geen elektriciteit Het grote voordeel is dat deze microbotjes geen elektriciteit nodig hebben om te werken. Toch is het de vraag hoe deze microbots daadwerkelijk ingezet gaan worden, want het lijkt ons alsnog een dure operatie om zakken vol microbotjes te vervoeren. Ook is tachtig procent nog geen honderd procent. Dan is deze filtermethode pas echt effectief.
Toekomst De onderzoekers beloven hun microbots verder te verfijnen. Als de botjes goed werken, dan kunnen zij de kwaliteit van leven voor 663 miljoen mensen verbeteren. Dit zijn mensen die geen toegang hebben tot schoon drinkwater. Maar dat niet alleen! Deze microbotjes gaan in de toekomst misschien wel medicijnen afleveren in ons lichaam.
Scientists from the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are now able to use brain activation patterns to identify complex thoughts and their roots.
The ‘mind reading’ technology shows that the brain forms complex thoughts through various sub-systems and are not word-based.
The research carried out by CMU’s Marcel Just offers fresh evidence that the basics of concept representation are universal and not specific to language.
Professor Just said: "One of the big advances of the human brain was the ability to combine individual concepts into complex thoughts, to think not just of 'bananas,' but 'I like to eat bananas in evening with my friends’.
"We have finally developed a way to see thoughts of that complexity in the fMRI signal.
“The discovery of this correspondence between thoughts and brain activation patterns tells us what the thoughts are built of.”
The study revealed that the brains coding of complex sentences, such as "The witness shouted during the trial”, uses an alphabet of 42 meaning components and triggers activity in the brain relating to person, setting, size, social interaction and physical action of the items involved in a given sentence.
GETTY
"This advance makes it possible for the first time to decode thoughts containing several concepts."
Each bit of information is processed in a different region of the brain which allowed the computer, which used machine learning algorithms, to predict what type of thoughts are being conjured.
The scientists used seven adult participants and asked them to think of 240 pre-agreed sentences.
By monitoring the brains using fMRI scans the machine was able to predict with 89 per cent accuracy what features were being left out of a sentence.
Prof Just added: "Our method overcomes the unfortunate property of fMRI to smear together the signals emanating from brain events that occur close together in time, like the reading of two successive words in a sentence.
"This advance makes it possible for the first time to decode thoughts containing several concepts. That’s what most human thoughts are composed of."
"A next step might be to decode the general type of topic a person is thinking about, such as geology or skateboarding.
“We are on the way to making a map of all the types of knowledge in the brain."
The year is 2030. In a high-security containment lab, scientists gathered around a towering machine, eagerly awaiting the first look at a newly discovered bacterium on Mars.
With a series of beeps, the machine—a digital-to-biological converter, or DBC—signaled that it had successfully received the bacterium’s digitized genomic file. Using a chemical cocktail comprised of the building blocks of DNA, it whirled into action, automatically reconstructing the alien organism’s genes letter-by-letter.
Within a day, scientists had an exact replica of the Martian bacterium.
To Craig Venter, the genetics maverick who created the first synthetic life form in 2016, beaming aliens back to recreate on Earth may sound like science fiction, but is “potentially real.”
Recently, working with Daniel Gibson, vice president of DNA technology at Synthetic Genomics, Venter published a prototype DBC capable of downloading digitized DNA instructions and synthesizing biomolecules from scratch.
Not only did the futuristic machine pump out functional bits of DNA, vaccines, and proteins, it also automatically synthesized viral particles from scratch.
Teleporting alien life to Earth is just one role Venter envisions for the DBC. Working the other way, we may be able to send Earth’s extremophile bacteria to a printer on Mars. If genetically enhanced to pump out oxygen, the bacteria may slowly change the Martian landscape, making it more habitable to humans before we ever set foot on the Red Planet.
More close to home, the DBC could allow instant, on-demand access to life-saving medicine or vaccines during an outbreak or finally enable access to personalized medicine.
“We are excited by the commercial prospects of this revolutionary tool, as we believe the DBC represents a major leap forward in advancing new vaccines and biologics,” says Venter in a press release.
All life is code
At the basis of Venter’s foray into “biological teleportation” is the idea that all life forms—at least on Earth—are essentially DNA software systems. DNA directs and creates the more tangible biological “hardware” made of proteins, cells, and tissues.
Because DNA contains all the necessary information to boot up a life form, by hacking its code and writing our own, we now have the power to create living organisms never before seen on Earth.
Back in 2010, Venter inserted a bacterial genome completely synthesized from chemicals in the lab into a single-cell recipient. The synthetic genome booted up the living bacterium, allowing it to replicate into a large colony of artificial organisms. Six years later, his team ventured even further into the realm of science fiction, creating a new bacteria species with just 437 genes—the absolute known minimum amount of genetic code needed to support life.
These studies and others clearly show we now have a new set of tools that allow scientists to manufacture new living species to join “our planet’s inventory of life.” But why stop there? If life is nothing but code that can be packaged, emailed, downloaded, and copied, why not use the same technology to transmit life?
Digital-to-Biological Converter
The DBC is Venter’s attempt to transfer and manufacture life.
Standing at eight feet long and six feet tall, the machine is a Frankenstein beast of mechanical blocks and wires splayed out across a double-deck table. “We’re working on the portability of the machine using new technologies such as microfluidic chips and microarrays,” explained the authors.
Equipped with an ethernet hub, the DBC downloads DNA files from the internet and prints the code using the four chemical bases of DNA—adenosine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine (A, G, T, C).
“It’s packaging complex biology that each of our tiny cells do remarkably well at a much, much smaller scale,” explains Venter.
While automated DNA printers have already hit the market, the DBC takes it one step further. The machine is capable of building proteins from the genetic code (printing biological hardware, so to speak), bringing it one step closer to building living cells from scratch.
At the heart of the system is Archetype, proprietary software that optimally breaks down the input DNA sequence into more manageable short sequences to synthesize in parallel. This massively increases efficiency and reduces sequencing errors that increase with longer DNA strands.
Once assembled, the machine scans the strands for any errors before “pasting” the bits back into complete DNA assembles. From there, a series of robotic arms transfer the DNA from module to module, automatically adding reagents that turn the synthetic genes into functional proteins.
Synthetic Medicine
In one proof-of-concept study, the machine pumped out green fluorescent protein, an algae protein that often serves as an experimental canary in the lab. Following the DBC run, the resulting product glowed bright green as expected, and subsequent analysis found that over 70 percent of all synthesized molecules were error-free.
While impressive, the team acknowledges that future models need to do better.
“All it takes is one DNA base to be incorrect for a protein not to work, or a therapeutic to not do what it’s supposed to, or for a cell to not be functional,” warns Gibson.
In another experiment, the DBC successfully produced functional flu viral particles, RNA vaccines, and bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria that can be used to combat infections or even cancer.
That’s huge. “If there is a pandemic, everyone around you is dying and you cannot go outdoors, you can download the vaccine in a couple of seconds from the internet,” says Venter. A machine like this in hospitals, homes, and remote areas could revolutionize medicine.
Venter also has his eye on personalized medicine. In the future, if you have an infection you get its genome sequenced in minutes, he says. The doctor could then cross-reference your bug with an online database, download and print the available phage treatments in office and send you on your way.
Space Travel
Venter’s ambition doesn’t stop there. He imagines combining the DBC with technologies from his synthetic organisms to construct a “blank slate” recipient cell capable of producing food, oxygen, and fuel—the perfect workhorse to send around the world or into space.
In theory, the cell would be capable of receiving any synthetic genome designed to produce life-supporting molecules. These cells have to be engineered, says Venter, but stresses that it can be done.
Having a DBC on board means a crew hurtling through space would no longer rely on supply ship rendezvous—and we’ll never have a real life Mark Watney starved and stranded on Mars.
But that’s looking way far ahead.
According to Gibson, before we get too distracted with fanciful thoughts of space, a lot more work still has to be done. For one, the DBC needs to shrink down to a more manageable size. For another, current DNA synthesis technologies are incredibly inefficient and wasteful—“about 99.999 percent of the raw materials go to waste,” he says—a problem further magnified as the team moves on to larger DNA constructs.
These aren’t small challenges, but the DBC shows that biological teleportation for biological materials is feasible. So why not aim high?
“Mine is not a fantasy look at the future,” says Venter. “The goal isn’t to imagine this stuff. We are the scientists actually doing this.”
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26-06-2017
De vliegende auto: het transportmiddel van de toekomst? Nee!
De vliegende auto: het transportmiddel van de toekomst? Nee!
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Mensen zien er al decennia reikhalzend naar uit en dit jaar kun je ‘m pre-orderen: de vliegende auto. Maar waarschijnlijk is ‘ie een stuk onhandiger dan je denkt.
In 1940 voorspelde Henry Ford al dat ‘ie zou gaan komen. En nu – bijna 80 jaar later – lijkt het zover te zijn. Nog dit jaar kun je de vliegende auto pre-orderen. Wie dat wel ziet zitten en zijn auto direct wil inruilen, moet er rekening mee houden dat er – een beetje afhankelijk van de auto die je nu rijdt – nog een beetje geld bij gelegd moet worden. Naar verwachting staat op het prijskaartje van de eerste vliegende auto namelijk een bedrag met vijf nullen. Maar goed: beter duur dan niet te koop, nietwaar?
De vliegende auto spreekt al lang tot de verbeelding. Hier zie je Jess Dixon in zijn zelfgebouwde vliegende auto. Het kiekje werd omstreeks 1940 gemaakt.
Verenigen Dat de vliegende auto zo duur is – en dat we er zo lang op hebben moeten wachten – is goed te verklaren, zo vertelt Hans Heerkens, als luchtvaartspecialist verbonden aan de Universiteit Twente. “Er moeten heel veel dingen ingestopt worden die eigenlijk niet in een auto of vliegtuig passen. Zo moet de auto wielaandrijving hebben, terwijl het vliegtuig weer een propeller of vleugels met een flinke spanwijdte nodig heeft. En terwijl een vliegtuig zo licht mogelijk moet zijn, is het met het oog op de veiligheid weer prettig als de auto wat robuuster en zwaarder is. Ook heb je in een vliegtuig heel andere instrumenten nodig dan in een auto. Daarnaast zijn de veiligheidseisen anders.” Om dat allemaal met elkaar te rijmen en uiteindelijk vliegtuig en auto in één transportmiddel te verenigen: dat valt niet mee en is dus duur.
Waarom zou je? Verschillende fabrikanten hebben er desalniettemin de afgelopen decennia tijd, geld en energie ingestoken. Heerkens snapt daar eerlijk gezegd weinig van. “Waarom zou je met een vliegtuig over de weg willen rijden? Het is toch veel handiger om dan een auto én een vliegtuig te bezitten?” Dat geldt zeker als we kijken naar de vliegende auto’s die niet verticaal op kunnen stijgen en kunnen landen. “Dan kun je niet vanaf huis vliegen en moet je dus met je vliegende auto eerst naar een startbaan rijden. Ik zou dan zeggen: rijd naar die startbaan, parkeer je auto en pak het vliegtuig.” Ook technisch gezien is dat veel praktischer. “Een vliegende auto kun je heel moeilijk optimaliseren,” vertelt Heerkens. Want de eigenschappen van een optimale auto staan vaak haaks op die van een optimaal vliegtuig. Zo is een auto fijn stabiel met vier wielen. Maar diezelfde vier wielen zitten het vliegtuig weer in de weg. “Ze zitten redelijk ver van het zwaartepunt, waardoor je heel veel kracht moet zetten op het roer om de neus van het vliegtuig tijdens het opstijgen omhoog te krijgen.”
“DE VLIEGENDE AUTO KAN EIGENLIJK ALLEEN EEN SUCCES WORDEN ALS ELITE-SPEELTJE”
Elite-speeltje Wie de vliegende auto aanschaft, moet dus niet verwachten dat hij een optimaal presterende auto en optimaal presterend vliegtuig in één koopt. Ook moet je niet verwachten dat je er zomaar eventjes mee naar je werk kunt vliegen. Want aan piloten worden strenge eisen gesteld. Je zult regelmatig medisch gekeurd moeten worden. Je moet je vliegbrevet halen, op jaarbasis voldoende vlieguren maken en zo af en toe in het gezelschap van een instructeur aantonen dat je het allemaal nog in de vingers hebt. Dat kost allemaal tijd en – wederom – geld. Met al die haken en ogen kun je jezelf serieus afvragen of de vliegende auto wel een toekomst heeft. Voor nu ziet Heerkens deze naar eigen zeggen vooral als “een elite-speeltje”. Leuk om tijdens verjaardagen of op de miljonairsfair over op te scheppen en zo af en toe eens met over je landgoed te vliegen.
Autonoom En zelfs als de prijs scherp zou dalen, lijkt de vliegende auto in zijn huidige vorm niet het ideale transportmiddel voor Jan Modaal. “Als iedereen er één heeft, raakt het luchtruim hartstikke vol.” En dan komt de veiligheid weer in het geding. De veiligheid kan in zo’n situatie in de ogen van Heerkens maar op één manier gehandhaafd worden. “Als we de vliegende auto volledig automatiseren.” Daarnaast is het noodzakelijk dat de vliegende auto verticaal kan landen en opstijgen, want anders sta je alsnog in de file bij de start- en landingsbaan. Zodra een vliegende auto echter in staat is om verticaal te landen en op te stijgen, graaft het tweezijdige transportmiddel echter zijn eigen graf. “Want als je verticaal kunt opstijgen en landen heb je toch eigenlijk geen auto meer nodig?” merkt Heerkens fijntjes op. En zo lijkt niet de vliegende auto, maar het autonome vliegtuig dat verticaal kan landen en opstijgen de toekomst te hebben.
De AeroMobil, een vliegende auto die je nog dit jaar kunt pre-orderen. Verkoopprijs is nog onbekend, maar zal zeker een bedrag met vijf nullen zijn.
Afbeelding: Aeromobil.com
Opportunistisch Aangezien de acceptatie van de zelfrijdende auto al wat voeten in de aarde heeft, lijkt het omarmen van de vliegende equivalent daarvan bijna ondenkbaar. “Dat zal inderdaad niet vandaag of morgen gebeuren,” denkt Heerkens. “Tegelijkertijd zijn mensen ook heel opportunistisch.” Als ze op een gegeven moment de voordelen van het autonome vliegtuig inzien, met schrik in de benen instappen en het een paar keer goed gaat, kan hun mening zomaar veranderen. Heerkens heeft dat eerder zien gebeuren. “Lang stak men de Atlantische Oceaan alleen over met vliegtuigen die drie of vier motoren hadden.” Als er dan eentje uitviel, was er geen vuiltje aan de lucht. “Maar op een gegeven moment gingen fabrikanten tweemotorige vliegtuigen ontwikkelen. Je hoorde de deskundigen roepen dat dat veel te gevaarlijk was en dat ze daar nooit in zouden stappen. Inmiddels kijken we alleen nog maar naar wat het goedkoopste ticket is.” En vliegen we dus allemaal met tweemotorige vliegtuigen naar de andere kant van de Atlantische Oceaan. “Je hoort niemand meer over veiligheid.” En zo kan het ook gaan met het autonome vliegtuigje “als mensen inzien dat het goedkoper en gemakkelijker is en zich de eerste paar jaar geen ongelukken voordoen.” Wat dat laatste betreft, is Heerkens optimistisch. “Ik denk dat een autonoom vliegtuigje veiliger kan zijn dan een vliegtuig dat door mensen bestuurd wordt.”
Dubai De vliegende auto lijkt het dus af te leggen tegen het autonome privé-vliegtuig. Maar wanneer kunnen we dat pre-orderen? “Dat kan nog wel dertig tot veertig jaar duren,” denkt Heerkens. Op korte termijn ziet hij meer in onbemande luchttaxi’s, waar momenteel in Dubai (zie het filmpje hieronder) al druk mee geëxperimenteerd wordt. “Dat kan veel sneller gaan. Misschien vliegen ze binnen tien jaar al wel rond.” Dat die luchttaxi’s hun doorbraak sneller kunnen beleven, heeft natuurlijk te maken met de aanschafkosten. Maar weinigen zullen zich een autonoom rondvliegend privé-vliegtuigje kunnen permitteren. “En waarom zou je ook een privé-luchttaxi willen als je zoiets met één appje kunt laten komen wanneer je het nodig hebt?”
Het staat eenieder die nog ergens een bedrag met vijf nullen in een oude sok heeft zitten natuurlijk vrij om later dit jaar de vliegende auto te pre-orderen. Maar wie verstandig is, wacht nog even. Met een beetje geluk word je geduld beloond en stap je over een jaar of tien in een volledig autonome luchttaxi. Heerkens kan niet wachten. “Heerlijk, met een leesboek instappen en het boek pas dichtklappen als je op je bestemming landt. Ik teken ervoor.”
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
24-06-2017
The world's first hoverbike is officially for sale
The world's first hoverbike is officially for sale
Published on Feb 23, 2017
The Event Is Coming Soon - The World’s First Hoverbike is Ready to Ride
byPaul Seaburn
Start saving your bitcoins (or whatever it is you do to accumulate a sizeable pile of them). If your bucket list includes being the first on your block to own an operational and really cool hoverbike, your wait is over. The Russian startup company Hoversurf announced it has achieved its goal of … Making flying as easy as riding a bike. OK, a really dangerous bike, but that’s why you want one, right? The Scorpion-3 was unveiled this week by Hoversurf in a warehouse at its headquarters in San Francisco. The company – whose motto is “Aim high” (with an implied “Kids, don’t try this at home”) – began as a manufacturer of heavy-lift cargo drones with carrying capacities ranging from 90 to 2,500 kg. (198 to 5511 lbs.). That should be good news for the ‘bigger biker’, right?
Not quite. While based on the same platform as the cargo drones, the Scorpion-3 has a weight limit of 266 pounds of “amateur and professional navigators.” That’s a code phrase for ‘extreme sports enthusiasts’ and other adrenaline addicts who can ride a fast bike AND deal with it being 33 feet (10 meters) off the ground – the current restricted altitude limit.
Well, “fast” is relative – the top speed of the Scorpion-3 is currently restricted to 33 mph (53 kmph) but that undoubtedly seems a lot faster when flying. Hoversurf says its engineers used a standard motorbike design to make it easy for riders with cycle experience to handle the Scorpion-3. For lift and thrust, an electric motor powers the quadcopter propellers taken from the drone platform and can reportedly keep the Scorpion-3 aloft for 27 minutes – more than enough time to generate enough excitement to require a change of pants.
This incredibly creative ad from Gatorade uses a “liquid printer” and precision-timed strobe photography to create a stop-motion athlete from drops of water. What’s more, it was created entirely in-camera, according to the company.
The video starts off with a human figure being pumped out of a water printer. Okay, that’s pretty cool, but water printers are nothing new. But then the figure jogs over to a box and starts doing box jumps, with water splashing as its feet hit the box.
The figure stands and starts kicking a punching bag, which recoils with each strike. The ad would be pretty impressive on its own, but Gatorade says that the entire thing was created in-camera.
The water printer itself comprises over 20,000 parts, and took over 5,000 man hours to construct. The printer they built had 2,048 individual nozzles, which turned on and off within 2 milliseconds. The strobes were then set to freeze the droplets mid-air. James Medcraft, the project’s director of photography explains:
We’re using the flash to freeze the water droplets at a very precise moment in space, and we’re having to do that with millimetre and microsecond accuracy.
To create the motion, the nozzles were driven by motion capture data of a real athlete who ran, jumped, and kicked while wearing sensors. The water rig would then drop a frame-by-frame animation, which was frozen with each flash.
The result is the very impressive ad, that you can watch in full at the top. The one thing we can’t figure out – how did they create the punching bag scene without CGI?
Gatorade has shared a behind the scenes video, which you can watch below. How do you think they did it?
The PAL-V will be the first flying car to hit the consumer market, with aims to reach customers by 2018. In competition with it are AeroMobil are Terrfugia, both of which are launching futuristic aero-vehicles.
FLYING CARS BY 2018
The Personal Air Land Vehicle (PAL-V) Liberty is looking likely to become the first flying car intended for general adoption and real world application — and it could be available soon. While the first model was developed in 2012, the company is aiming to deliver its first car to the first customer by the end of 2018. They hope to produce 50 to 100 models in 2019, and a few hundred by 2020.
The planned price is €299,000 EUR ($333, 340 USD) for the sport version and €499,000 EUR ($556, 310 USD) for the first edition. Of course, cost isn’t the only consideration: customers will need to acquire both a flying and driving license before using the vehicle, and each car will need to undergo 150 hours of flight testing before being approved.
The PAL-V is one of many flying cars in development at the moment. Other bids include Toyota’s plan to bring a flying car to the 2020 Toyko Olympics — although the end goal for this model would be carrying the Olympic torch, rather than being destined for mass production.
At the moment, the PAL-V’s main market competition are companies like AeroMobil, and another called Terrfugia. Both use plane-like propulsion systems, as opposed to the Pal-V’s gyrocopter technology, to take off. Aerombil has already started accepting pre-orders for 2020, while Terrafugia is expected to deliver their first Transition in 2019.
THE FUTURE OF TRANSPORT?
It may well be that flying cars as the future of transport. They would provide a way to decrease traffic congestion, cut out airport flight times, provide alternatives for people living a long way from work, and give a means of transport to countries that lack the infrastructure for consistent large scale flights.
However, not everyone agrees with that assessment: Elon Musk isn’t so sure flying cars are the future of transport, as he told Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin: “Obviously, I like flying things, but it’s difficult to imagine the flying car becoming a scalable solution.”
Among the main criticisms of the technology are the fact that it would need to produce a lot of downforce to stay in the sky — which produces a lot of noise and wind — and that they may well be more dangerous than road cars: should they be involved in an accident, passengers and debris could quite literally end up falling from the sky. The PAL-V has handled the the first issue with its gyrocopte, which keeps speed in check and is a key safety feature.
While a future with flying cars is an exciting one to behold, there are some major obstacles the industry needs to overcome first. And while it’s certainly encouraging that there’s interest, we shouldn’t take the acceptance of pre-orders as being interchangeable with government policy or even approval.
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18-06-2017
OUR NEXT EVOLUTIONAL STAGE WILL BE THE CYBORG
OUR NEXT EVOLUTIONAL STAGE WILL BE THE CYBORG
Cyborgs – hybrid creatures forged from human beings and machines – have gradually been making the transition from science fiction staple into reality in the past decades.
Primarily, the use of robotic technology in human beings is used as a medical tool in the present day but as the technology improves it may be employed for a whole host of different reasons. This has led leading philosophers to suggest that the time has come to discuss the ethical implications of creating cyborg humans in the near future.
Most people do not tend to think of prosthetic limbs as the type of robotics which lead to the creation of cyborg humans. However, the latest technology in this field is far more advanced than the majority of people suspect. Carbon fiber and titanium prosthetic limbs are used as a matter of routine in the modern age and the vast majority of false limbs which are fitted today are fully functional.
Prosthetic limbs have become so adept and dexterous recently that experts are even beginning to discuss whether they are more effective than organic limbs. Researchers have also created phenomenal robotic hands which can be triggered by the brain of the patients. Some of the most recent robotic hands produced even have a sense of touch.
Recently, robotic engineers have progressed beyond artificial limbs and have begun to dabble with the idea of implanting human beings with microchips. In recent months, there has been news that a company in Sweden has begun to implant its employees with microchips so that they can perform tasks such as opening doors with the wave of a hand. Even more ambitiously, the Tesla CEO Elon Musk is in the process of developing a so-called neural lace which will eventually be capable of connecting the human mind to electronic devices such as computers and smartphones.
Humanity is becoming more and more ambitious with its plans to push the boundaries of science and technology, particularly regarding space exploration. For many individuals, developing effective cyborg technology could be an essential step towards achieving these dreams. However, others believe that before cyborg technology goes too far that it is incredibly important to discuss the moral and legal questions posed by this next stage of human history.
Ethical philosophers are already beginning to question various aspects of life with cyborg human beings such as establishing safeguards to ensure that human beings cannot be hacked. There are also concerns that there could be troubling implications for the world’s military forces who might use the new developments in cyborg technology to create humans with exoskeletons.
It is very important to consider these questions now to make sure that this next stage in human development is a success and not a complete disaster
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
14-06-2017
A New 3D Printed Bionic Hand Could Help Two Million Worldwide
A New 3D Printed Bionic Hand Could Help Two Million Worldwide
Daniel Omar, now 14, was fitted with a 3D-printed prosthetic arm after losing both arms during an aerial attack in Sudan. Photograph: Not Impossible/Project Daniel
OpenBionics
IN BRIEF
Open Bionics have produced a 3D printed bionic hand that could benefit thousands with its modifiability, low turnaround time, and cost-effectiveness. If the clinical trial proves that the hand is safe and effective, it could radically change prosthetic care.
A new, affordable, 3D printed bionic hand that could transform the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) has begun its first clinical trial in England. BBC’s coverage focuses on a girl called Tilly Lockey who is one of the 10 children taking part in the trial.
The arm is built by Open Bionics, based near Bristol, with the goal to create “low-cost bionic hands” to help the estimated two million hand amputees worldwide. Their hands can be created in just over 42 hours and cost around £3,000 ($3,360).
The hands can also be modified to the wearer’s preference. Most endearingly, the company has shown child-specific styles, which them look like Star Wars or Iron Man hands. As Tilly says in the video, when people see it “They’re like ‘oh my gosh that’s a cool hand!'”
These cheap, functional, and quick-to-produce bionic arms have the potential to revolutionize the treatment of those missing arms in Britain. If the clinical trial is successful, they will be rolled out as part of the free NHS service, improving thousands of lives.
The future of bionics looks bright as we see more limb replacements that are miles ahead of the crude hooks of the past. At the most advanced end of the spectrum, there are even arms that can translate thoughts into prosthetic movements, and prosthetics that come equipped with a full technological arsenal — including a drone, interactive screen, and USB port.
Orthopaedic technician Moses Kaweesa assembles a 3D-printed artificial leg at CoRSU hospital in Uganda.
University of Cambridge researchers have developed an AI algorithm that can assess how much pain a sheep is in by reading its facial expressions. This system can facilitate the early detection of painful conditions in livestock, and eventually, it could be used as the basis for AIs that read emotions on human faces.
READING SHEEP
One of today’s more popular artificially intelligent (AI) androids comes from the TV series “MARVEL’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” Those of you who followed the latest season’s story — no spoilers here! — probably love or hate ADA by now. One of the most interesting things about this fictional AI character is that it can read people’s emotions. Thanks to researchers from the University of Cambridge, this AI ability might soon make the jump from sci-fi to reality.
The first step in creating such a system is training an algorithm on simpler facial expressions and just one specific emotion or feeling. To that end, the Cambridge team focused on using a machine learning algorithm to figure out if a sheep is in pain, and this week, they presented their research at the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition in Washington, D.C.
Image credit: Robinson, et al./University of Cambridge
The system they developed, the Sheep Pain Facial Expression Scale (SPFES), was trained using a dataset of 500 sheep photographs to learn how to identify five distinct features of a sheep’s face when the animal is in pain. The algorithm then ranks the features on a scale of 1 to 10 to determine the severity of the pain. Early tests showed that the SPFES could estimate pain levels with an 80 percent accuracy.
HUMANE AND HUMAN
SPFES was a departure for Peter Robinson, the Cambridge professor leading the research, as he typically focuses on systems designed to read human facial expressions. “There’s been much more study over the years with people,” Robinson explained in a press release.“But a lot of the earlier work on the faces of animals was actually done by Darwin, who argued that all humans and many animals show emotion through remarkably similar behaviors, so we thought there would likely be crossover between animals and our work in human faces.”
As co-author Marwa Mahmoud explained, “The interesting part is that you can see a clear analogy between these actions in the sheep’s faces and similar facial actions in humans when they are in pain – there is a similarity in terms of the muscles in their faces and in our faces.”
Next, the team hopes to teach SPFES how to read sheep facial expressions from moving images, as well as train the system to work when a sheep isn’t looking directly at a camera. Even as is, though, the algorithm could improve the quality of life of livestock like sheep by facilitating the early detection of painful conditions that require quick treatment, adding it to the growing list of practical and humane applications for AI.
Additional developments could lead to systems that are able to accurately recognize and react to human emotions, further blurring the line between natural and artificial intelligences.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
15-05-2017
A Robot Can Print This $32,000 House in as Little as 8 Hours
A Robot Can Print This $32,000 House in as Little as 8 Hours
PassivDom
IN BRIEF
PassivDom uses a 3D printing robot that can print the walls, roof, and floor of a 380-square-foot model home in about eight hours. When complete, the homes are autonomous and mobile, meaning they don't need to connect to external electrical and plumbing systems.
Building a house by hand can be both time-consuming and expensive. Numerous homebuilders have chosen to automate part of the construction (i.e., by printing the home’s parts) instead.
A new Ukrainian homebuilding startup called PassivDom uses a 3D printing robot that can print parts for tiny houses. The machine can print the walls, roof, and floor of PassivDom’s 380-square-foot model in about eight hours. The windows, doors, plumbing, and electrical systems are then added by a human worker.
When complete, the homes are autonomous and mobile, meaning they don’t need to connect to external electrical and plumbing systems. Solar energy is stored in a battery connected to the houses, and water is collected and filtered from humidity in the air (or you can pour water into the system yourself). The houses also feature an independent sewage system.
PassivDom’s homes, which start at $31,900, are now available for preorder online in Ukraine and the US, and the first ones will be delivered later this year.
Check out the homes below.
PassivDom’s smallest model measures 380 square feet and costs $31,900, designer Maria Sorokina tells Business Insider.
Passivdom
Here’s what the house looks like when you walk in the front door. It’s a large open space with a small kitchen and floor-to-ceiling windows.
Passivdom
This model doesn’t include a separate bedroom, which means residents need a sleeper sofa. A small bathroom is located near the kitchen.
Passivdom
PassivDom offers three models of homes and can make custom models as well. The premium models come with furniture, but the one pictured below comes unfurnished.
Passivdom
The homes also offer the possibility of living off the grid.
“We should have opportunities to live in nature away from civilization, but have comfortable conditions of a traditional house,” Sorokina says. “This technology can allow us to live in the woods, on mountains, or on the shore — far away from people and infrastructure.”
Passivdom
To make a PassivDom home, the team maps out the plan for the 3D printer in its factories in Ukraine and California. Layer by layer, the seven-axel robot prints the roof, floor, and 20-centimeter-thick walls, which are made of carbon fibers, polyurethane, resins, basalt fibers, and fiberglass.
Passivdom
Doors, windows, appliances, an alarm system, solar panels, and the septic, electrical, healing, cooling systems are then added.
Depending on the model, the whole process can take under 24 hours. The design and production of larger houses with more specifications and finishes, like the one below, can take up to a month. If a house is premade, it can be shipped the next day.
Passivdom
The startup believes 3D printing is a cheaper, more efficient way to build homes that it can sell at a (relatively) affordable price. “Over 100 million people do not have a roof over their heads,” Sorokina says. “It is necessary to build more affordable houses.”
Passivdom
PassivDom is not the only company using 3D printing to build homes. The San Francisco-based housing startup Apis Cor, Dus Architects in Amsterdam, as well as Branch Technology from Chattanooga, Tennessee, say they can construct homes in mere days or weeks.
A team out of Beijing, China has developed and built another giant robot that it wants to enter in the upcoming robot battle set for August.
The Monkey King can fight on all fours or standing on two legs while holding a staff.
The upcoming MegaBots battle was just delivered a surprise twist with another giant bot looking to square up in the ring. What was originally a two titan grudge match for the ages now has the potential of becoming a three-way death match rife with black blood and twisted metal.
This new contender hails from Beijing’s Greatmetal and goes by the name of Monkey King. This behemoth sets itself apart from the competition with its ability to fight both on all fours and bipedally. Even more, it can wield a staff while fighting on its hind legs.
The Monkey King could go up against the Mk. III from the U.S. or Japan’s KURATAS. The original plan was for the American and Japanese bots to square off sometime in August. And, while a three-way melee sounds incredible, it might be more likely that the champion from the planned fight in August would earn the right to go toe-to-toe with royalty in a more tournament-style match.
This could be the start of a brand new sports league combining the brains of robotics with all the muscle of pro-sports. Stay tuned for updates on the exact date and time of the first brawl as well as any more hints as to whether or not the Monkey King will be joining the fray.
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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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Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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