Tag: technology

A Technology That Would Change The World (If It Exists)

Cold Fusion burst on the scene in 1989 with the announcement that researchers Fleischmann and Pons had created energy through a chemical process that induces fusion at room temperature.

When nobody else was able to replicate their findings, cold fusion went down as one of the biggest science fiascoes in decades. But some believe they were on the right track, and that their method could be the key to change the world.

How Technology Destroyed The Truth

The promise of the internet was that if we connect the world and give everyone a voice, we could move forward as one. It didn’t turn out that way.

The way we consume information has changed drastically over the years.

For the majority of modern history, newspapers were the arbiter of truth, and people read the newspaper once a day and then talked about the issues with friends, family, and coworkers.

When radio came around, the news was delivered 2-3 times a day, by distinguished and trusted broadcasters like Edward R. Murrow that delivered the news right down the middle.

Broadcast TV increased the amount of news to 3-4 times a day, but still news was just something people ingested in between other forms of entertainment. And different sides of the news were presented evenly thanks to the Fairness Doctrine.

But with cable TV and the first cable news network, CNN, all that changed. Then news became the entertainment and more cable news outlets like Fox News, MSNBC, Headline News, and CNBC split into different ideological camps.

But with the rise of social media, the news became an all-day every day feast, and worst of all, it removed the gatekeepers. Meaning anybody with any viewpoint could get their message heard.

This was supposed to be a good thing. But it has proven to divide us even further and be exploited by troll farms and moneyed interests.

Even more upsetting is this is happening at a time when we need together on the same page to combat various existential threats.

The post-truth era could be one of the contributors to the downfall of humanity if we’re not careful.

This Isn’t The End Of Printed Photos, It’s The Golden Age

As a society, we now produce more photographs than ever before, and the total number is becoming difficult to fathom. This year, it is estimated that billions of humans armed with smartphones will take some 1.2 trillion pictures.

Many of them will be shared on social media, but many more will simply be forgotten. A few good selfies will flash before your eyes as you swipe left or right on them, late some Friday night.

But hardly any will make the transition into the physical world, bits becoming blots of ink that coalesce into an image on a piece of paper, canvas, wood, or metal — a print.

The reasons for this are rational, and there’s no point fighting progress, but nor should we ignore the value of a print. We may no longer print every photo by default, but this can actually be a good thing for printing.

It is now about quality rather than quantity, and the pictures we choose to print deserve the best treatment.

Honestly, there has never been a better time to print than now, thanks to technological advances in both digital cameras and inkjet printers.

If you haven’t yet tried your hand at photo printing, you owe it to yourself to do so, even if you’re just a casual photographer.




Print isn’t dead — it’s better than ever

It’s a common refrain in the digital age, and not just in reference to photography. Print is dead, or at least dying, right? In truth, a certain type of print has certainly declined, but this isn’t a tragedy.

Prints used to be the only way we had to view our photos. We’d drop our film off at the drugstore and pick it up 24 hours later not because it was a better system, but because it was all we had.

We tend to romanticize the print, but when printing was the norm, many photos were still lost and forgotten (and some were found again).

Most were destined for photo albums or shoeboxes that would sit around and collect dust until moving day. If fewer were forgotten, it was because fewer were made.

Far fewer, in fact — in 2000, Kodak announced 80 billion pictures had been taken that year.

Sure, that sounds like a lot (it was a new milestone at the time), but for those who think of such large numbers as vague clouds of zeros, consider that 80 billion is still 1.12 trillion shy of 2017’s 1.2 trillion photos.

For the mathematically disinclined, let’s put it another way: Subtracting the total number of photos made in the year 2000 from those made in 2017 would have no effect on the number of shirtless mirror selfies posted by lonely men on Tinder.

With so many photos being taken, it’s no wonder so relatively few are being printed. Every print costs money, after all, so of course people aren’t going to print 1.3 trillion photos.

What’s more, the point of printing (often the point of taking a photo in the first place) was to share your memory with someone else.

Now that we don’t need prints to do that, it makes sense that people are choosing not to spend money on them, especially when electronically sharing images also happens to be much more convenient.

But people still love prints. Even the “low end” of printing is alive and well as instant photography has seen a huge resurgence in recent years.

Polaroid Originals has built an entire brand around it, and Fujifilm Instax cameras and film packs made up six of the top ten best selling photography products on Amazon last holiday season.

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Pass it on: Popular Science

Meet Your Future Robot Overlords

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Robots no longer live in science fiction. They’re all around us. Right now. Let’s look at the current most advanced robots and see where things might go in the future.

From their first mention in a Czech play to Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnought” automated factory, robots have been slowly becoming a huge part of our lives.

The types of robots include:
Industrial/Warehouse Robots
Service/Companion Robots
Military Robots
Exploratory Robots

Industrial robots include AMRs, which automate products around a warehouse floor.

Service and Companion robots include Asimo from Honda, Romeo and Pepper from SoftRobotics, and Milo, a robot for autistic kids.

Military Robots are usually funded by DARPA and include the Atlas and Spotmini from Boston Dynamics

Exploratory robots include NASA space probes including the Curiosity Rover.

Ditching Microbeads: The Search For Sustainable Skincare

Is smoother skin worth more than having potable water or edible fish?

For years, research has shown that beauty products made with tiny microbeads, gritty cleansers that scrub off dead skin cells, have been damaging water supplies, marine life and the ecological balance of the planet.

Beat the Microbead, an international campaign to ban the plastic beads, reports that marine species are unable to distinguish between food and microbeads.

According to the campaign, “over 663 different species were negatively impacted by marine debris with approximately 11% of reported cases specifically related to the ingestion of microplastics“.

To make things worse, microbeads can act like tiny sponges, absorbing several other dangerous chemicals, including pesticides and flame retardants. As they ingest microbeads, marine animals also consume these other poisons.




The obvious solution to the microbead problem is to cut it off at the source.

But while major cosmetic companies like Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, and Procter & Gamble have pledged to phase out the use of microbeads in favor of natural alternatives, they also say that the shift could take several years.

And as more research is done, it appears that microbead replacements may come with dangers of their own.

Some of the natural replacements for microbeads also have negative consequences.

Greg Boyer, chair of the chemistry department at SUNY-College of Environmental Science and Forestry, says a possible negative consequence is with degrading sugars that biochemically “burn” the sugar for energy.

A variety of biodegradable ingredients are available to developers.

Victoria Fantauzzi, co-founder of Chicago-based La Bella Figura Beauty, says that her company recently released a facial cleanser that uses enzymes found in papaya and pineapple, ingredients known to effectively exfoliate skin cells.

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Pass it on: Popular Science

Are Quantum Computers On The Verge Of A Breakthrough?

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For years now, quantum computers have been just out of reach, but some exciting new developments over the last year indicate that the age of quantum computing is a lot closer than we think.

 

Check out Jason’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS-u…

LINKS LINKS LINKS:

D-Wave video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvfkX…

Quantum Annealing Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV_Rl…

Supercooled qubits: https://newatlas.com/stable-supercool…

IBM’s new Neuromorphic chip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE819…

Google Bristlecone: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/g…

Silicon based quantum chip: https://gizmodo.com/new-silicon-chip-…

Moore’s Law Is Ending – Here’s 7 Technologies That Could Bring It Back To Life

Gordon E. Moore was one of the co-founders of Intel and first proposed was came to be known as Moore’s Law, which predicted that computer power would double every 2 years.

For nearly 50 years, the industry kept pace with this prediction, but in recent years there’s been a slowdown. 2 main reasons are heat and the quantum tunneling effect that occurs at the atomic scales.

Some of the technologies that have been theorized to break through this barrier include:

Graphene processors. Graphene carries electricity far better than traditional silicon processors, but is currently very expensive to produce.

Three Dimensional Chips. Some manufacturers are experimenting with 3-D chips that combine processing and memory in one place to improve speed.

Molecular transistors. Transistors that use a single molecule to transfer electricity.

Photon transistors. These take electrons out of the process entirely and replaces them with laser beams.

Quantum computers. These long-hyped machines could perform multiple calculations at once by using the superposition of quantum particles to process information.

Protein computers. These use folding proteins to make calculations.

And finally, DNA computers. DNA is the perfect data storage device, allowing scientists to store 700 terabytes of information in only one gram. But it can also be used in logic gates and are being tested in a processing capacity.

Links:

https://phys.org/news/2016-05-graphene-based-transistor-clock-processors.html

Computerphile on the physics of computer chips

Computerphile on the end of Moore’s Law:

http://www.livescience.com/52207-faster-3d-computer-chip.html

First Functional Molecular Transistor Comes Alive

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/scientists-build-single-molecule-transistor-gated-with-individual-atoms/

http://news.mit.edu/2013/computing-with-light-0704

Michio Kaku on Moore’s Law

https://www.engadget.com/2016/02/26/scientists-built-a-book-sized-protein-powered-biocomputer/

Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/dna-computer.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

https://www.pcper.com/news/Storage/IDF-2016-Intel-Demo-Optane-3D-XPoint-Announces-Optane-Testbed-Enterprise-Customers

How To Survive The Future – The Answers With Joe Podcast

This is the audio version of the YouTube video, so some references may be made to something you can’t see.

Automation and artificial intelligence are already causing massive disruptions to commerce and industry all over the world. Economists warn that in the next 10 years, 30% of jobs could go away due to technological advancement. An unemployment rate that would be worse than even The Great Depression. How does society react in the face of this kind of change, and what can we do to position ourselves to be ready for the changes to come? In this audio version of my YouTube video, I discuss what I think are the best options.

 

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