What technologies and innovations will shape our lives after few decades.
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GRAND TOUR confirms: Faraday Future FF91 is the fastest electric sports car ever build and it can learn to be faster
Electric car company Faraday Future unveiled “a new species” of car in Las Vegas on Tuesday night: an electric sedan that will have the acceleration of a Formula One car and the ability to learn and adapt to the driver.
The FF 91, which the company says will go into production in 2018, would see Faraday Future compete with Tesla for the electric sports car market. The FF 91 has 1,050hp and can accelerate 0-60mph in 2.39 seconds, while the Tesla Model S P100D can reach 60mph in 2.5 seconds.
The launch came ahead of the annual Consumer Electronics Show, which starts on Thursday.
Nick Sampson, senior vice president at Faraday Future, said the car would feature a “driverless valet” system – where the driver can leave the car and order it to park itself – and two “aerodynamic antennas”, which will enable the car to essentially act as a big wireless router. The FF 91 will unlock itself by recognising the driver’s face, and will learn things about its driver and continually adapt to those preferences.
But despite all the promises, there is growing skepticism as to whether this sports car-come-sedan-come-artificial brain – which would be Faraday Future’s first ever production vehicle – will ever be built.
In November last year Aecom, the company in charge of constructing the $1bn Faraday Future car factory, stopped work over unpaid invoices.
In December three key executives, including Ding Lei, Faraday Future’s “acting global CEO”, reportedly quit the company in the space of a week.
Sampson himself referenced the problems at the launch. “Despite all the naysayers and the skeptics we will persist,” he said.
The car is a futuristic take on a four-door sedan, with wrap around tinted glass on the doors and roof, a check-pattern along the base, and lots of curves and clean lines. The FF 91 also features a circular glowing light on the hood – a little like the one on Iron Man’s chest.
The audience were also treated to a live, indoor drag race which showcased the car’s speed compared to a Bentley, a Ferrari and the Tesla S P100D. The FF 91 was the fastest, and if Faraday Future’s claims that it can achieve 60mph in 2.39 seconds are accurate, it would be the second-fastest production car ever made.
Cars have become a big part of CES in recent years. This year vehicles capable of “emotion” are expected to take centre stage. Honda claims that its cars will be “artificially generate their own emotions”, while other big brands are planning to unveil their own vehicles that are capable of interacting with the driver.
Faraday Future was keen to stress their car’s intelligence as much as its speed. Hong Bae, director of advanced drive assistance systems and self-driving, showed off the car’s “driverless valet” feature, where the driver can hop out of the car, run off to a meeting and the car will park itself.
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The audience watched a live video of the FF 91 parking itself in a parking lot outside.
There were two spaces available in the lot and the FF 91 duly found a spot, reversing slowly into the space without hitting any of the other vehicles in the lot. Bae and Sampson also talked up the ability of the FF 91 to build a relationship with the driver by learning and adapting to an individual’s in-car preferences.
Faraday Future did not respond to questions about how the factory delay and the departure of its executives – the company’s chief brand and commercial officer and VP for product marketing and growth left along with Lei – would impact production.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/
UK science project, to ensure AI can follow rules and make ethical decisions, is ready to prevent robot world domination
- Researchers at the Universities of Sheffield, Liverpool and the West of England, Bristol will address concerns around artificially intelligent robots -Their £1.4 million project will run until 2018 - Project aims to ensure robots meet industrial standards and are created responsibly, allaying fears that humans may not be able to control them. Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are among the eminent scientists who fear that intelligent robots could be mankind’s downfall.
And just days after Professor Hawking warned that 'artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,' a team of British researchers are embarking on a collaborative project to ensure that the autonomous robots we build in the future will make decisions that are ethical and can follow rules.
Robots that can think and act without human intervention are fast moving from fiction to reality. The nuclear, aerospace, manufacturing and agricultural industries are starting to develop autonomous systems that can carry out tasks that are either too difficult or too dangerous for humans, while driverless cars are already with us.
Researchers at the Universities of Sheffield, Liverpool and the West of England, Bristol have set up a new project to address concerns around these new technologies, with the aim of ensuring robots meet industrial standards and are developed responsibly. The £1.4 million project will run until 2018.
Professor Michael Fisher, principal investigator at Liverpool, said the project will ‘develop formal verification techniques for tackling questions of safety, ethics, legality and reliability across a range of autonomous systems.’ The news may be a relief to scientists such as Professor Hawking, who last week warned that humanity faces an uncertain future as technology learns to think for itself and adapt to its environment.
Speaking at event in London, the physicist told the BBC: 'The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.'
This echoes claims he made earlier in the year when he said success in creating AI 'would be the biggest event in human history, [but] unfortunately, it might also be the last.'
Last month, Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Space-X and Tesla, warned that the risk of ‘something seriously dangerous happening’ as a result of machines with artificial intelligence, could be in as few as five years.
He has previously linked the development of autonomous, thinking machines, to ‘summoning the demon’.
Speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AeroAstro Centennial Symposium in October, Musk described artificial intelligence as our ‘biggest existential threat’.
He said: ‘I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence.
‘I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. ‘With artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon. You know those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram, and the holy water, and … he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.’
In August, he warned that AI could to do more harm than nuclear weapons.
******** Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2865728/How-prevent-robot-world-domination-Project-launched-ensure-AI-follow-rules-make-ethical-decisions.html ********
You can stitch your wounds like Rambo with the new Portable Laser Pens That Can heal skin injuries
Closing wounds and surgical incisions with a laser is a step closer to reality, Israeli scientists say.
The futuristic technique is better than current methods which damage tissue and can cause scarring, researchers from Tel Aviv University believe.
Head of the Applied Physics Department Abraham Katzir was behind the research. He says traditional stitches or more modern glues are inferior to his new method.
"Today most of the incisions that are made by surgeons are bonded using sutures or clips or chemical glues and there are problems with these methods. And we found that if you heat the incisions spot by spot by laser you can bond it without incisions and hopefully with very little or no scarring," he said.
Sutures have been used for thousands of years, but the researchers' handheld bonding device could replace them once the technique is refined enough to be used in human patients.
"The advantages of the procedure are that we can get bonding to be probably much stronger than with sutures. We hope that the scarring will also be less than with sutures and eventually we get the safety of the procedure to be better," said Ichilov Medical Center ophthalmic surgeon, David Versano.
An attempt to 'weld' tissue through heating was tried in the 1970s and 80s, but prior to the Tel Aviv University team's experiments, nobody had been able to accurately control the heat created by laser light, Katzir said.
"If you heat a spot on an incision to temperatures lower than say 50 or 55 degrees centigrade nothing happens. If you are above 65 degrees than you cause scaring and therefore we found that you have to heat each spot on an incision to roughly 60 degrees centigrade and then you get good bonding without scaring. And we carried out experiments on a large number of tissues, on skin, on cornea," Katzir said.
Katzir and his team made their discovery after developing an innovative optical fiber that can transmit infra-red light and simultaneously measure the heat of the tissue. Only the single fiber method affords the device the ability to accurately control the laser's power, he said.
"What we developed is a special optical fiber that can both transmit the laser energy to a spot on an incision and carefully measure the temperature of that spot, so then we can monitor and control the temperature of that spot and this is something that others have not done yet," he said.
Tissue bonding occurs with the aid of collagen, a protein whose structure resembles microscopic hooks on each edge of a cut which can link together when heated. The bond becomes firm when the tissue cools, Katzir said.
He predicted that a practical tool, once developed, would have dramatic implications in medicine.
The laboratory device has been tested on healing corneal incisions in eyes taken from dead cows and a permanent, tight seal was achieved instantly with minimal thermal damage to the tissue, the research paper said.
The single optical fiber is narrow enough to be threaded into a very thin tube which would allow the device to be used in endoscopic surgery for microscopic repairs to internal blood vessels and nerves, Katzir said. In the first tests on 10 human patients, undertaken in recent months, wounds treated with the laser technique successfully healed, with a reduction in scar tissue. According to Katzir, follow-up examination one year after the surgery should show whether the technique leaves less scarring than traditional stitching.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/ozone-epa-idUSL1N1K427A
New world's tallest building - Kingdom Tower, Jeddah, Saudia Arabia aka Mile-High Tower
Kingdom Tower (Arabic: برج المملكة Burj al Mamlakah), previously known as Mile-High Tower, (Arabic: برج الميل), is a skyscraper currently (aug 2014) under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at a preliminary cost of SR4.6 billion (US$1.23 billion).[7] It will be the centrepiece and first phase of a SR75 billion (US$20 billion)[8] proposed development known as Kingdom City that will be located along the Red Sea on the north side of Jeddah. If completed as planned, the tower will reach unprecedented heights, becoming the tallest building in the world, as well as the first structure to reach the one-kilometre-high mark. The tower was initially planned to be 1.6 kilometres (1 mi) high; however, the geology of the area proved unsuitable for a tower of that height. The design, created by American architect Adrian Smith, who also designed Burj Khalifa, incorporates many unique structural and aesthetic features. The creator and leader of the project is Saudi Arabian Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the wealthiest Arab in the Middle East,[9] and nephew of King Abdullah. Al-Waleed is the chairman of Kingdom Holding Company (KHC), the largest company in Saudi Arabia,[10] which is a partner in Jeddah Economic Company (JEC), which was formed in 2009 for the development of Kingdom Tower and City.[10] Reception of the proposal has been highly polarized, receiving high praise from some as a culturally significant icon that will symbolize the nation's wealth and power, while others question its socioeconomic motives, and forecast that it will have negative financial consequences.
More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Tower
Player One is Ready to seek the next Halliday’s clue in the theaters
Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures’ Ready Player One – the already much-anticipated sci-fi action adventure, to be directed by Steven Spielberg—has been slated for release on December 15, 2017. The announcement was made today by Dan Fellman, President, Domestic Distribution; Sue Kroll, President, Worldwide Marketing and Distribution; and Veronika Kwan Vandenberg, President, Worldwide Distribution, Warner Bros. Pictures.
A three-time Academy Award winner, Spielberg (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan) is directing Ready Player One, based on Ernest Cline’s bestseller of the same name, which has become a worldwide phenomenon. The film is being produced by Spielberg; Donald De Line, under his De Line Pictures banner; Dan Farah; and Spielberg’s longtime colleague Kristie Macosko Krieger; with Bruce Berman serving as executive producer. De Line and Farah originally brought the project to Warner Bros.
Ready Player One marks a return to Warner Bros. for Spielberg, who previously directed the studio’s Empire of the Sun, The Color Purple and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, in addition to producing the hits Gremlins and The Goonies.
In making the announcement, Fellman stated, “Any film from Steven Spielberg is an event film, so it felt right to date this thrilling new project from one of our greatest filmmakers for the holiday season.”
Sue Kroll added, “From the success of the book, ‘Ready Player One’ already has a devoted following, and we’re excited for its fans and moviegoers everywhere to see this fantastically innovative story come to life. We know it couldn’t be in better hands, and look forward to working with Steven and the producers to bring it to the big screen.”
Kwan Vandenberg said, “There are few directors with the global stature of Steven Spielberg, so we are thrilled to be delivering his latest adventure to audiences worldwide.”
A presentation of Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures, Ready Player One will be distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company, and in select territories by Village Roadshow Pictures.
Source: http://www.comingsoon.net/
Views : 1493
Owner: Dagger_69
First Human Head Transplantation Surgery
A man set to become the world’s first head transplant patient has scheduled the procedure for December 2017.
Valery Spiridonov, 30, was diagnosed with a genetic muscle-wasting condition called Werdnig-Hoffmann disease, and volunteered for the procedure despite the risks involved, Central European News (CEN) reported.
“When I realized that I could participate in something really big and important, I had no doubt left in my mind and started to work in this direction,” Spiridonov, a Russian computer scientist, told CEN. “The only thing I feel is the sense of pleasant impatience, like I have been preparing for something important all my life and it is starting to happen.”
Dr. Sergio Canavero, an Italian neurosurgeon, will perform the procedure on Spiridonov. The procedure is expected to last up to 36 hours, and it will require Spiridonov’s head be cooled as well as the donor’s body to extend the period during which the cells can survive without oxygen, CEN reported.
“According to Canavero’s calculations, if everything goes to plan, two years is the time frame needed to verify all scientific calculations and plan the procedure’s details,” Spiridonov told CEN. “It isn’t a race. No doubt, the surgery will be done once the doctor and the experts are 99 percent sure of its success.”
3-D Printing Can Improve Face Transplants
Spiridonov joked that first thing he plans to do after the procedure is go on a vacation.
“But on a serious note, this operation is aimed at restoring independence of severely disabled people. Once I get it back I’ll see what the life of a healthier person looks like,” he said.
Source: http://news.discovery.com/
Views : 1368
Owner: Dr. Sergio Canavero
One million Smog Free Cubes are made to support the message of The Studio Roosegaarde's Smog Free Movement
Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde and his team of experts have created the world's largest smog vacuum cleaner. The Smog Free Tower uses patented ion technology to produce smog-free bubbles of public space, allowing people to breathe and experience clean air for free.
Creating a tangible souvenir, Roosegaarde designed Smog Free Rings, Smog Free Cubes and Smog Free Cufflinks of compressed smog particles. By sharing Smog Free Jewellery, you donate 1000m3 of clean air to the city. Now available exclusively via mail@studioroosegaarde.net.
The Smog Free Project is not only intended to be a final local solution, but also a sensory experience of a clean future. Along with governments, NGOs and the clean-tech industry, people can become here part of the solution instead of the problem.
Specifications:
2014-2018. The first 7-meter high Smog Free Tower equipped with environment-friendly and patented ozon free ion technology is now open for public at Vierhavensstraat 52 in Rotterdam NL, and will travel around the world. The first Smog Free Tower cleans 30.000m3 per hour without ozon, runs on green wind energy and uses no more electricity than a waterboiler (1400 watts). Smog Free Jewellery specifications available on request.
Source: https://www.studioroosegaarde.net/project/smog-free-project/info/
With your support we already managed to successfully launch the first Smog Free Tower in Rotterdam. With the first tower built, we are now able to illustrate and demonstrate the functioning of the Tower towards other interested parties and cities.
Our current focus is on bringing the Tower to as many places as we can. We are involved in negotiations in Mumbai, Paris and Kazakhstan and in contact with parties in China, Japan, Malaysia, Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. As soon as we are able to confirm our next locations with certainty, you are the first ones to know! Thank you for all your requests and suggestions of where the Tower should travel next, we are trying to take them all into account. Here are some of the things you shared with us:
Now that the first Tower is activated and Smog is continously being extracted, we are able to measure the impact of the Tower on its direct environment. To do so, we are using professional RIVM (Rijksinstituut voor volksgezondheid en milieu / institution of public health and environment) technology and measuring over a longer period of time.
We collect the gathered Smog particles from the Tower once a week and are continuously creating all the Smog Free Cubes, Rings and Cufflinks.
Source: https://www.kickstarter.com/
Releasing All of J.F. Kennedy’s Assassination Secret Records
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time (18:30 UTC) on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas.[1][2] Kennedy was fatally shot by a sniper while traveling with his wife Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife Nellie, in a presidential motorcade. A ten-month investigation from November 1963 to September 1964 by the Warren Commission concluded that Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, and that Jack Ruby also acted alone when he killed Oswald before he could stand trial.
In 1964, the Warren Commission submitted the unpublished portion of the assassination records to the National Archives, where it was to be sealed and locked away until 2039 (75 years later). This was to serve as protection for innocent persons who might be damaged because of their relationship with participants in the case. However, due to the popularity of Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, and because of the public outcry, it led to the passage of The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. This Act mandated that all assassination-related material be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The Act also requires that each assassination record be publicly disclosed in full, and be available in the collection no later than 25 years after the date of enactment. From 1994 to 1998, almost all of all Warren Commission documents had been released to the public. The resulting collection consists of more than 5 million pages of assassination-related records, photographs, sound recordings, motion pictures and artifacts. By 2017, all existing assassination-related documents will be made public.
Views : 1348
Owner: Scotty_69
Russian nuclear experts will participate in the process of extending the operating life of Unit 5 of the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant. Russian company "Rosenergoatom" has reported that a contract was signed between the power plant and a Russian-French consortium that will have to justify extending the life of the reactor to 60 years. This consortium involves " Rosenergoatom", "Rusatom Service" and "Electricité de France". Currently, "Rosenergoatom" and EDF are already involved in the preparation of units 5 and 6 of Kozloduy NPP for extending their operating lives, expiring respectively in 2017 and 2021.
Source: http://bnr.bg/en/post/100470579/russian-experts-to-prolong-operating-life-of-unit-5-of-bulgarias-kozloduy-npp
Trump will be impeached that MF
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