http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/535016/internet-of-dna/
Related: Thoughts • Technology /FutureHow J.R.R. Tolkien Found Mordor on the Western Front Photo IN the summer of 1916, a young Oxford academic embarked for France as a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force. The Great War, as World War I was known, was only half-done, but already its industrial carnage had no parallel in European history. “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” recalled . “Parting from my wife,” he wrote, doubting that he would survive the trenches, “was like a death.” Meet Darth Pai, the Sith Lord who’s taken over the Federal Communication Commission. “I find your lack of faith in deregulation disturbing.” — Darth Pai A few weeks ago, in a galaxy not so far away, Tom Wheeler stepped down as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. In his three years at the helm of the FCC, he proved to be a champion everyday people, and a thorn in the side of telecom monopolies. Wheeler worked hard to preserve net neutrality — the principle that internet service providers should treat all traffic on their networks the same. Net neutrality made it illegal to block a website, throttle its loading speed, or charge the website money in return for priority access. It was the only thing stopping providers like Comcast from deciding which websites we can access, and which websites we cannot.
Life Above Earth: An Introduction — Cultural Anthropology This began as a wondering about wind, how it mattered, how it materialized across lives, and how it seemed to refuse to be represented—only becoming visible through its effects on other beings and other things: branch, bird, cloud, kite, sail, smoke. Wind finds itself with no terrestrial home, no borders to maintain, no ownership to be claimed.1 Its pressured and oscillating gases are the kinetic energy of the sky. Wondering into the wind leads us upward. It is an invitation to lose one’s footing. Strange Fluctuations in the Magnetic Field Might Signal an Upcoming Pole Reversal The Earth is blanketed by a magnetic field. It’s what makes compasses point north, and protects our atmosphere from continual bombardment from space by charged particles such as protons. Without a magnetic field, our atmosphere would slowly be stripped away by harmful radiation, and life would almost certainly not exist as it does today. You might imagine the magnetic field is a timeless, constant aspect of life on Earth, and to some extent you would be right. But Earth’s magnetic field actually does change.
What Were Albert Einstein's Political Opinions? Humanity As One One of Einstein's most important views of the world that stayed with him throughout his life? Internationalism and the connectedness of all humans. That, and many other concepts and precepts, defined Einstein's life beyond that of being a Theoretical Physicist, and they're clearly laid out with a plethora of historical cites and references in the new book Einstein and Twentieth-Century Politics: 'A Salutary Moral Influence', released in Autumn, 2016. Remember that he was born in an era where some cultures of the world were just beginning to be explored and understood.
Legally Blind Woman Sees With VISOR-like Device Geordi La Forge would be proud. Yvonne Felix, a legally blind San Franciscan, can see, and quite well, too, with a device -- a battery-powered headset with liquid lens technology inside -- that resembles the VISOR that Geordi wore on Star Trek: The Next Generation. CNET, as part of their ongoing "Tech Enabled" series about the role techonology plays in helping the disability community, profiled Felix and delved, in tremendous detail, into how the eSight 3 has changed Felix's life. Future - How liars create the ‘illusion of truth’ “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Among psychologists something like this known as the "illusion of truth" effect. Here's how a typical experiment on the effect works: participants rate how true trivia items are, things like "A prune is a dried plum". Sometimes these items are true (like that one), but sometimes participants see a parallel version which isn't true (something like "A date is a dried plum"). After a break – of minutes or even weeks – the participants do the procedure again, but this time some of the items they rate are new, and some they saw before in the first phase. The key finding is that people tend to rate items they've seen before as more likely to be true, regardless of whether they are true or not, and seemingly for the sole reason that they are more familiar.
What Will Artificial Intelligence Look Like After Siri and Alexa? In the coming decades, artificial intelligence will replace a lot of human jobs, from driving trucks to analyzing X-rays. But it will also work with us, taking over mundane personal tasks and enhancing our cognitive capabilities. As AI continues to improve, digital assistants—often in the form of disembodied voices—will become our helpers and collaborators, managing our schedules, guiding us through decisions, and making us better at our jobs.
Born Before Women Could Vote, Now They're Proud To Vote For Clinton Chairwoman Alice Paul, second from left, and officers of the National Woman's Party hold a banner with a Susan B. Anthony quote in front of the NWP headquarters in Washington, D.C., in June 1920. AP hide caption toggle caption A beginner’s guide to Ethereum – The Coinbase Blog What is Ethereum? According to the Ethereum website, “Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts.” This is an accurate summary but in my experience when first explaining Ethereum to friends, family, and strangers it helps to compare Ethereum to Bitcoin since a lot of people have at least heard about Bitcoin before.
Google’s Leading Futurist Predicts Humans Will Start Living Forever by 2029 Google’s chief futurist, Ray Kurzweil, is known for his wildly-accurate predictions — back in the 1980s, when all of our current technological advancements seemed like sci-fi fantasies, he predicted self-driving cars, prosthetic legs for paraplegics, and wirelessly accessing information via the internet, among many other spot-on forecasts. Now, his latest prediction is that humans are going to live forever, and he thinks it’s going to happen as soon as 2029. “Many think author, inventor and data scientist Ray Kurzweil is a prophet for our digital age,” writes Playboy’s David Hochman. “A few say he’s completely nuts.” SEE ALSO: Soon We May Live Longer Than 120 Years, Scientists Say According to Kurzweil’s calculations, Singularity — the merging of human intelligence with nonbiological intelligence, or technology — will happen in 2045.
Scientists Have Made a Huge Breakthrough In Cryogenics Cryopreservation Cryopreservation is the process of freezing organs and tissues at very low temperatures in order to preserve them. While it sounds simple in theory, only a handful of cells and tissues have survived this method. This is because while science has successfully developed ways to cool organs to the very low temperatures required for preservation, thawing them out has proven far more difficult.
Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood, reduced to a withering weed. Candor and clarity go a long way in fertilizing the soil, but in the end there is always a degree of unpredictability in the climate of communication — even the warmest intention can be met with frost. Yet something impels us to hold these possibilities in both hands and go on surrendering to the beauty and terror of conversation, that ancient and abiding human gift. And the most magical thing, the most sacred thing, is that whichever the outcome, we end up having transformed one another in this vulnerable-making process of speaking and listening. Why and how we do that is what Ursula K. Le Guin (b.