Give me my data and no one gets hurt (I’ll lease it back to you, no problem:-)

At the Gartner Symposium/ITExpo, Rometty laid out three principles for companies working ethically with AI.

Maybe they’re not alien doppelgangers — mirror images of us.

But extraterrestrial life—should it exist—might look “eerily similar to the life we see on Earth,” says Charles Cockell, professor of astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Indeed, Cockell’s new book (The Equations of Life: How Physics Shapes Evolution, Basic Books, 352 pages) suggests a “universal biology.” Alien adaptations, significantly resembling terrestrial life—from humanoids to hummingbirds—may have emerged on billions of worlds.

-O, The Oprah Magazine

For years we have been told to obsessively monitor when we’re angry, what we eat, how much we worry, and how often we go to the gym. So why isn’t everyone healthy? Drawing from the most extensive study of long life ever conducted, The Longevity Project busts many long- held myths, revealing how:

At this year’s AIAA Space and Astronautics Forum and Exposition, engineer Marco Peroni presented his proposal for a modular Martian base that would provide its own radiation shielding.

WASHINGTON — A Swedish company with plans for a geostationary communications satellite announced Oct. 16 a contract with SpaceX for a Falcon Heavy launch no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2020.

Ovzon of Solna, Sweden, has not yet purchased the satellite, but paid Eutelsat $1.6 million earlier this year to move one of its satellites to an unspecified Ovzon orbital slot to preserve spectrum rights at that location.

In a statement, Ovzon CEO Per Wahlberg said procurement of the company’s first satellite is “in the final stage,” and that production of an advanced onboard processor started earlier this month.

A RUDN physicist demonstrated how to describe the shape of any symmetrical wormhole—a black hole that theoretically can be a kind of a portal between any two points in space and time—based on its wave spectrum. The research would help understand the physics of wormholes and better identify their physical characteristics. The article was published in the Physics Letters B journal.

Modern concepts of the universe provide for the existence of wormholes—unusual curvatures in space and time. Physicists imagine a wormhole as a black hole through which one can see a distant point of the universe in four dimensions. Astrophysicists are still unable to determine the shape and sizes of black holes precisely, let alone theoretical wormholes. A RUDN physicist has now demonstrated that the shape of a wormhole can be calculated based on observable physical characteristics.

In practice, physicists can observe only indirect properties of wormholes, such as red shift—a downward shift in the frequency of gravitational waves in the course of moving away from an object. Roman Konoplya, a research assistant from the RUDN Institute of Gravitation and Cosmology, the author of the work, used quantum mechanical and geometrical assumptions and showed that the shape and mass of a wormhole can be calculated based on the red shift value and the range of gravitational waves in high frequencies.

SRI Newsletter #06 2018 Great success both for the public and for the speakers, despite the enrollment fees definitely out of budget for many: more than 6300 registered participants, of which almost 50% very young, more than 2000 papers presented in the various symposia. The title of the Congress was very interesting: “Involving everyone”. This gave the impression that there was plenty of space at the Congress for the themes of civil development in space. The attention to the impetuous development of the NewSpace sector is now felt everywhere, and the most important global space congress could not avoid being impacted. After all, it is thanks to the growth of the NewSpace sector if the IAF Congress has recorded this remarkable success. But which were the predominant themes of the Congress? Has the promise announced in the title been kept? In part, yes, but a lot of work remains to be done. And the main NewSpace entrepreneurs didn’t come to Bremen. Read the whole article.

The 69^th Congress of the International Astronautical Federation took place in the halls of the Bremen exhibition center from 1 to 5 October.

Great success both for the public and for the speakers, despite the enrollment fees definitely out of budget for many: more than 6300 registered participants, of which almost 50% very young, more than 2000 papers presented in the various symposia. The title of the Congress was very interesting: “Involving everyone”. This gave the impression that there was plenty of space at the Congress for the themes of civil development in space. The attention to the impetuous development of the NewSpace sector is now felt everywhere, and the most important global space congress could not avoid being impacted. After all, it is thanks to the growth of the NewSpace sector if the IAF Congress has recorded this remarkable success. But which were the predominant themes of the Congress? Has the promise announced in the title been kept? In part, yes, but a lot of work remains to be done.

One aim was to “include everyone”, for example, in the exploration of the Moon. And we have seen some concrete cases of inclusion. The company Part Time Scientists, earlier in the context of the Lunar X-Prize, and then with the development of subsequent innovative projects, has put in place a lunar exploration project, in which some industries not belonging to the aerospace sector are involved as technological partners, as well as sponsors, such as Audi, Nokia, Vodafone. Of course, so far we are talking about exploration, mainly robotics, and not about industrial settlements on the Moon. The Moon Village Association thinks about that and presented their initiatives in a context that is becoming more and more receptive and interesting for many.

Yes, seriously.

Earlier this year, we hosted the Ending Age-Related Diseases 2018 conference at the Cooper Union in New York City. This conference was designed to bring together the best in the aging research and biotech investment worlds and saw a range of industry experts sharing their insights.

Dr. Oliver Medvedik, LEAF vice president and Director of the Maurice Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering at the Cooper Union, chaired a panel with a focus on starting up biotech companies and dealing with the challenges inherent to launching a company in this industry.

Surprising discoveries for health and long life.

“An extraordinary eighty-year study has led to some unexpected discoveries about long life.”

-O, The Oprah Magazine

For years we have been told to obsessively monitor when we’re angry, what we eat, how much we worry, and how often we go to the gym. So why isn’t everyone healthy? Drawing from the most extensive study of long life ever conducted, The Longevity Project busts many long- held myths, revealing how:

Today on The Neuroethics Blog is a post by Adina L. Roskies, Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Cognitive Science Program and Helman Family Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College, entitled “What can neuroscience tell us about ethics?”

By Adina L. Roskies Image courtesy of Bill Sanderson, Wellcome Collection What can neuroscience tell us about ethics? Some say nothing – ethics is a normative discipline that concerns the way the world should be, while neuroscience is normatively insignificant: it is a descriptive science which tells us about the way the world is. This seems in line with what is sometimes called “Hume’s Law”, the claim that one cannot derive an ought from an is (Cohon, 2018). This claim is contentious and its scope unclear, but it certainly does seem true of demonstrative arguments, at the least. Neuroethics, by its name, however, seems to suggest that neuroscience is relevant for ethical thought, and indeed some have taken it to be a fact that neuroscience has delivered ethical consequences. It seems to me that there is some confusion about this issue, and so here I’d like to clarify the ways in which I think neuroscience can be relevant to ethics.

It will be our second conference totally focussed on the science of actual human rejuvenation therapies to repair the damage of aging.

We are happy to begin introducing the speakers, starting with Dr. Jerry Shay.

Dr. Shay is the Vice Chairman of the Department of Cell Biology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Dr. Shay´s work on the relationships of telomeres and telomerase to aging and cancer is well recognized.

“Jerry has been a stalwart supporter of the SENS concept for well over a decade, and a world leader in the telomere biology field for much longer than that. He spoke at the very first SENS conference, back in 2003, and it will be a joy to welcome him again.” says Aubrey de Grey.

We are in the early days of what might be called the “physical cloud,” an e-commerce ecosystem that functions like the internet itself. Netflix caches the movies you stream at a data center physically close to you; Amazon is building warehouse after warehouse to store goods closer to consumers. And the storage systems at those warehouses are looking more like the data-storage systems in the cloud. Instead of storing similar items in the same place—a helpful practice when humans were fetching the goods—Amazon’s warehouses store multiples of the same item at random locations, known only to the robots. Trying to find an Instapot at one of Amazon’s warehouses would be like trying to find where in the cloud one of your emails is stored. Of course, you don’t have to. You just tap your screen and the email appears. No humans are involved.

What if you could store and deliver goods as easily as data? Amazon, Walmart and others are using AI and robotics to transform everything from appliance shopping to grocery delivery. Welcome to the physical cloud.

YouTube is down and reports are coming in worldwide about the service being unavailable.

Original Story: This evening, SpaceX is set to launch a used Falcon 9 rocket from California, a flight that will be followed by one of the company’s signature rocket landings. But this time around, SpaceX will attempt to land the vehicle on a concrete landing pad near the launch site — not a drone ship in the ocean. If successful, it’ll be the first time that the company does a ground landing on the West Coast.

Up until now, all of SpaceX’s ground landings have occurred out of Cape Canaveral, Florida, the company’s busiest launch site. SpaceX has two landing pads there, and has managed to touch down 11 Falcon 9 rockets on them. And each time the company has attempted to land on land, it’s been a success.

60 years of NASA has brought us the first moon landing, the Voyagers, a progression of Mars rovers, Hubble, Cassini, TESS…and the next six decades are going to see it venturing even further into uncharted territory, but this time, the space agency will not be alone on the voyage.

NASA couldn’t even start fantasizing about private spaceflight—or collaborating with the private sector—when it first took off in 1958. Now companies like SpaceX, Boeing and Blue Origin will bring dreams that originally lived between the pages of science fiction books into reality. Dreams like space travel for anyone.

Private companies could potentially lower the cost of suborbital flights from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. That still might sound astronomical to the average Earthling, but to NASA, it could mean more opportunities than ever. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program is a collab with Boeing and SpaceX to fly astronauts to and from the ISS (which is not going to end up as space junk after all). SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner will start making crewed flights into low-Earth orbit as soon as next year.

The air cargo industry is already considering one-person flight crews. Self-flying planes may be next.

Hacking humanity — russell brand & noah yuval harari

Penguin Talks is a new series of free creative events which gives young people the opportunity to hear…

The famed astrophysicist sits down with CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Major Garret for “The Takeout”.

Blue Origin believes in a future where millions of people are living and working in space. Why? Because we believe that in order to preserve Earth, our home, for our grandchildren’s grandchildren, we must go to space to tap its unlimited resources and energy. If we can lower the cost of access to space with reusable launch vehicles, we can enable this dynamic future for humanity.

It’s a hopeful vision.

Blue Origin is committed to building a road to space so our children can build a future. www.blueorigin.com

The upper atmosphere of Venus is the most Earth-like location in the solar system.

Popular science fiction of the early 20th century depicted Venus as some kind of wonderland of pleasantly warm temperatures, forests, swamps, and even dinosaurs.

In 1950, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Natural History Museum were soliciting reservations for the first space tourism mission, well before the modern era of Blue Origins, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic. All you had to do was supply your address and tick the box for your preferred destination, which included Venus.

Today, Venus is unlikely to be a dream destination for aspiring space tourists. As revealed by numerous missions in the last few decades, rather than being a paradise, the planet is a hellish world of infernal temperatures, a corrosive toxic atmosphere, and crushing pressures at the surface.

The lovely Ms. Chiara Bordi (https://www.facebook.com/Chiara-Bordi-474572166390000/), Miss Italia 3rd place runner up (aka the “Bionic Beauty”) stopping by to visit our associates at HealthQE (www.healthqe.cloud), and QantiQa (https://www.qantiqa.com/), to test out their new Musyke device

Bio-mechanics and Bio-acoustics

Two critical components in the regeneration, repair, and rejuvenation equation, and part of the integrated age-reversal paradigm of Embrykinesis at Bioquark Inc.- (www.bioquark.com)

Today is our first Ask LEAF Anything where you can ask us questions about our work in the rejuvenation biotechnology field.

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In 2014, the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation was established as a 501©(3) non-profit organization dedicated to promoting healthy human lifespan through fiscally sponsoring longevity research projects and raising awareness regarding the societal benefits of healthy life extension.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk updated the timeline to release the company’s new neural net computer, which they claimed will be the ‘world’s most advanced computer for autonomous driving’.

They are now aiming for the new computer to be in production in about 6 months and it could result in a 500‑2000% increase in operation per second, according to Musk.

The release of this new computer with Tesla’s own AI chip would be the culmination of a long project that Tesla started about 3 years ago as it anticipated a need for more computing power in its vehicles.

New houses could soon deliver on a long-awaited promise and incorporate windows or roof tiles that harvest solar energy, research conducted at KAUST suggests.

Derya Baran, at the KAUST Solar Center, and her colleagues have developed a photovoltaic organic material that captures light efficiently and that potentially could be coated on building materials.

Traditional roof-mounted solar panels are made from slabs of silicon, but organic molecules can also capture energy from sunlight. These molecules could be formulated as inexpensive printable inks that are applied to regular building components such as windows. Turning sunlight into electricity is a multistep process, and the key to developing high-performance organic photovoltaic materials has been to find organic molecules that are good at every step, Baran explains.

Six-hundred million people in Sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity. To meet these power needs, a mix of large public-run utility grids and standalone systems will be necessary for universal access in the region. Governments, aid organizations, and scientists are working to understand which electricity grid solution would be most cost-effective and reliable across urban, peri-urban, and rural areas.

Standalone, or “decentralized” electricity systems—most often solar power with battery storage—are usually thought to be too expensive compared to large state-run grids in all but the most remote locations. However, declining costs of solar and new battery technologies are changing the best pathways to deliver reliable power to people that currently lack access to electricity. New UC Berkeley research published today in Nature Energy finds that decentralized electricity systems in sub-saharan Africa can be designed for extremely high reliability, and that this may come at remarkably low costs in the future.

Jonathan Lee, a Ph.D. candidate in the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) and Associate Professor Duncan Callaway worked with more than 10 years of solar data from NASA and developed an optimization model that determines the lowest cost way to build a standalone system given component costs and a target reliability. At current costs, their model indicates that most regions in Sub-Saharan Africa can get 95% reliable power—meaning customers can use electricity from some combination of solar panels and batteries 95% of the time—for roughly USD$0.40 per kWh. Though that cost is high relative to current grid costs, their model indicates that with aggressive but plausible future cost declines in decentralized system costs, largely in batteries, these costs would drop to levels competitive with the grid in many parts of the continent in less than a decade.

Visions for what we can do with future electronics depend on finding ways to go beyond the capabilities of silicon conductors. The experimental field of molecular electronics is thought to represent a way forward, and recent work at KTH may enable scalable production of the nanoscale electrodes that are needed in order to explore molecules and exploit their behavior as potentially valuable electronic materials.

To keep up with an impending astronomical increase in data about our universe, astrophysicists turn to machine learning.

Invite to consolidation of efforts.

Top of Longevity and healthtech companies. AI, blockchain, digital health and mHealth are the top investment opportunities in aging world.

Our universe is permeated with a vast, unseen force that seems to oppose gravity. Physicists call this force dark energy, and it is thought to be constantly pushing our universe outward.

But in June, a group of physicists published a paper in the preprint journal arXiv implying that dark energy changes over time. This means that the universe will not expand forever but might eventually collapse into the size it was before the Big Bang.

Almost immediately, however, physicists found problems with the theory: Several independent groups subsequently published papers that suggested revisions to the conjecture. Now, a paper published on Oct. 2 in the journal Physical Review D suggests that, as it stands, the original conjecture can’t be true because it can’t explain the existence of the Higgs boson — which we know exists, thanks to the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle collider on the border between France and Switzerland. [Beyond Higgs: 5 Elusive Particles That May Lurk in the Universe].

Scientists from Russia, China and the United States predicted and have now experimentally identified new uranium hydrides, predicting superconductivity for some of them. The results of their study were published in Science Advances.

Fletcher told the ABC the guidelines were developed in consultation with people living with autism, researchers and doctors, and had been approved by the National Health and Medical Research Council.

“It does not change what the NDIS does and indeed it may well be that there are people who, today, would not be diagnosed who will be diagnosed,” he said. “That will be a judgment for clinicians and medical profession and the NDIS will continue to do what it does, which is make an assessment of the impairment that somebody suffers as a result of a disability. Is it likely to be permanent and lifelong? Is it significant? What impact does it have on the functioning?”

Dr Wenn Lawson, the co-chair of the Australian Autism Research Council, said a consistent assessment and diagnosis process for autism meant people would be able to access more appropriate supports.

The impact of gravitational-microlensing observations from 1993.

On October 16, 2017, an international group of astronomers and physicists excitedly reported the first simultaneous detection of light and gravitational waves from the same source—a merger of two neutron stars. Now, a team that includes several University of Maryland astronomers has identified a direct relative of that historic event.

We can’t all be Dorian Gray, Father time (and natural selection) comes for us all.

“This may be the best example of an animal masquerading as a plant that we have,” biologist Nicholas Paul, an expert on seaweed and algae at Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast, said in an email. He wasn’t involved with the new study.

The new species exclusively feed on the seaweed genus Caulerpa and are found throughout the Pacific, including Malaysia, Australia, Guam, and the Philippines. Humans consider the algae’s caviar-like bulbs, called sea grapes, a delicacy—but few sea creatures dare eat the stuff, making them highly invasive. Thanks to the global aquarium trade, the algae has invaded waters from the Mediterranean to Japan.

MIT has launched the Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, a $1 billion center dedicated to “reshaping its academic program” around AI. The idea, said MIT president L. Rafael Reif, is to use AI, machine learning and data science with other academic disciplines to “educate the bilinguals of the future,” defining bilingual as those working in biology, chemistry, politics, history and linguistics with computing skills that can be used in their field.

‘My name is Pepper,’ robot tells MPs

Jump to media player Pepper the robot answers questions from MPs on the education select committee about helping to care for older people.

“IV. What are the Ends which are also Duties? They are: A. Our own perfection, B. Happiness of others.”

His notion of “categorical imperative” is that of a universally applicable, non-contradictory, absolute necessity which everyone can use pure practical reason to understand without it needing to be experienced or taught to them.

He says that “ethics may also be defined as the system of the ends of the pure practical reason.”

Perfection is doing what’s necessary, virtuous, moral, ethical and so forth, and doing it well, but it’s more of a direction to move in than a destination to be at.

He says it’s adding to happiness of others that is necessary, not happiness of ourselves, but if pain, poverty or so forth are to become us, it is our duty to remedy it not for our happiness, but to secure proper functioning of our moral agent in pursuit of our own perfection and happiness of others.

“That this beneficence is a duty results from this: that since our self-love cannot be separated from the need to be loved by others (to obtain help from them in case of necessity), we therefore make ourselves an end for others; and this maxim can never be obligatory except by having the specific character of a universal law, and consequently by means of a will that we should also make others our ends. Hence the happiness of others is an end that is also a duty.”

It’s pursuit of perfection of oneself that already covers personal happiness. If we took our own happiness on as an end then it would be unstructured, superfluous and generally unconcerned with imperative ends. That time could be used on the fulfilling and consequential variety of satisfaction that comes from sense of uprightness, accomplishment, and humanity-scale progress and security gained from contributing to and belonging to a happier collective when one is in pursuit of perfection. As people like Viktor Frankl and Abraham Maslow have told us, the brand of fulfillment derived from contributing to progress of humanity takes a person to a level beyond happiness and is capable even of eliminating suffering. Kant says:

“For he who is to feel himself happy in the mere consciousness of his uprightness already possesses that perfection which in the previous section was defined as that end which is also duty.”

To make others happy is not to go out of one’s way to shower them with greatness so much as it is to make sure that you aren’t a creator of its deficit. It’s just as easy to keep the peace. Any joy we impart beyond that is all bonus. A needlessly rude neighbor, for instance, is neglecting their duty because they are throwing off peoples focus, rhythm, productivity or whatever it may be.

“Moral well-being of others […] is our duty to promote, but only a negative duty […] it is my duty not to give him occasion of stumbling.”

Kant says you can’t just consider reasoned priorities that urgently need to get done and forget about them, because a pure and practical rational end demands an action. It’s unethical to bring them to mind and not move toward them by acting. It would mean we are not free because a free person internally compels their self to get what they know is indispensable done.

Most of the industrialized world is happy to be free to work for enjoyable things, games to play, skills to hone, prestige to build, vacations to go on, and so forth. We are not truly free though, when unable to respond to these duties of self-perfection and happiness of others.

“The man, for example, who is of sufficiently firm resolution and strong mind not to give up an enjoyment which he has resolved on, however much loss is shown as resulting therefrom, and who yet desists from his purpose unhesitatingly, though very reluctantly, when he finds that it would cause him to neglect an official duty or a sick father; this man proves his freedom in the highest degree by this very thing, that he cannot resist the voice of duty.”

If people cannot trade in some jet ski vacations, 5% of dart league time and 25% of television time to engage the necessity of survival and advancement of humanity for sake of removing absurdity and waste from the core of our existence then they are slaves to dart league and television and are neglecting duty. Those things have shackled them and taken control of their mind, are holding them back against their will. They need to find the source of those obstacles and remove them.

“all duty is necessitation or constraint”

It is sine quo non, indispensable for us to know what’s going on and constrain ourselves from absorbing too much of our time with things that distract us from figuring it out. We can’t do it right if we don’t know what it is we need to be doing right.

Since the worlds flow energy is generally preoccupied with these trends, hobbies and grunt labors, it can make it hard to reason this stuff through. That causes a lot of people to take shortcuts and let others think for them. Sometimes we’re just mentally lazy. It’s dangerous to close our eyes and let others lead us, but when challenged to look and think things through, tend to get defensive. “Thinking is stupid, don’t think a lot. Just say what pops into your head, that’s obviously best. If I have to exchange more than two sentences about a profound topic then I’m going to insult you with as much underhanded passive aggression as I can muster.”

If people cannot or aren’t wary enough to see these obstacles they are stumbling or stuck on, it is then upon those around them to counteract that, and we do that not through force or demand, but by enabling them to overcome in what ways we can. It’s a categorical imperative because if everybody stumbled and nobody cleared and lit paths then progress would be wasted, overall happiness would suffer, and it would be harder for anyone to pursue perfection in such a world. The Sumerians wouldn’t have shown writing to cultures around them, fire making and agriculture wouldn’t have been passed down, and the steam engine wouldn’t have kicked off the industrial revolution.

“Now I may be forced by others to actions which are directed to an end as means, but I cannot be forced to have an end; I can only make something an end to myself.”

As Kant explains, and many others tell us as well, you must let people make duty their end, it doesn’t work well enough when it comes from things like laws or customs.

People need policies, not commands, that promote education of their need to figure out what is going on, so they can know what to ultimately do. People at city and state levels can vote in policies supplying X amount of supporting infrastructure without having to make commands. An ethical pressure on the FCC and broadcasting directors can push to get enough information about it on air. Kids books, libraries, monuments, songs and slogans, scholarships, movies, banners, there are all kinds of spaces for ethics to delineate influential promotional action potential that helps enable realization of duty.

“To every duty corresponds a right of action”

That’s an interesting concept to consider and I find that I agree, every person has a right to act on duty. Not only is it ethical to make people happy, everyone has a right to be able to make people happy. A person would be denied a substantial part of their right to engage their duty to perfection if language were kept from them or all their earnings were taxed away. No one deserves to be rendered “Raphael without hands” as they say. 

What, then, is the general fundamental thing preventing everyone’s perfection? What is the name of the limb that all of us Raphaels are missing? If you did arrive at perfection, how would you know? It couldn’t be known. The world isn’t in the right position for that yet. In order to achieve perfection, an understanding of the nature of existence is needed. What is going on in the full scope of reality needs to be known. That’s our missing limb: we don’t know what is going on. Our vision of the playing field and the game is missing. Figuring out what is going on in the full scope of reality is our most important duty; it is the path to perfection. If we didn’t work to know what is going on, knowing what to do could never be known. If we don’t know and don’t try to know what to do, only lives of absurdity and waste are possible. Neglect that renders life an absurd waste is anything but pursuit of perfection, and who would consciously choose or promote that?

Kant quotes this line by Albrecht von Haller which makes for a good summary of much of what he is saying, “With all his failings, man is still — better than angels void of will.”

I would say that for all their troubles, freedom fighters are still, better off than the slave by choice with no voice and no will. It’s unbecoming of an animal with the superpower of intellectual sentience to forgo its use. Our responsibilities in life aren’t something to sleep through.

“Virtue then is the moral strength of a man’s will in his obedience to duty […] strength is requisite, and the degree of this strength can be estimated only by the magnitude of the hindrances which man creates for himself, by his inclinations. [We valiantly fight those internal and external monsters that keep us from duty] wherefore this moral strength as fortitude constitutes the greatest and only true martial glory of man; it is also called the true wisdom, namely, the practical, because it makes the ultimate end of the existence of man on earth its own end. Its possession alone makes man free, healthy, rich, a king, etc., nor either chance or fate deprive him of this, since he possesses himself, and the virtuous cannot lose his virtue.”

That’s right, being completely virtuous, moral and ethical isn’t what makes us great, because it is likely that none of us are or can be. It’s in taking time to recognize what’s right and committing ourselves to move in its direction that makes us great martial activists, free, wise Kings and Queens fighting for the glory inherent in the ends of the human condition. Nothing can take away your work and struggle for morally and ethically virtuous, categorically imperative ends of life. You will either take your place as a burning star in causes great pathways across the skies of history — and like all stars you will cast a tremendous swath of light across the universe in all directions whether anybody sees you from a given point or not — or you will be one of those lucky enough to be there when the worlds collective virtue helps lay the first train tracks to the future. You might ride that path of stars toward full realization of it all with a pocket full of intergalactic nickels and a backpack full of dreams. Either way, you’ve done your job, and that’s all you can do. All success possible to you will be yours when you heed duty.

All in all it seems to be the case that everyone is inherently endowed with the necessary right of living in a world where everyone tries as hard as they can to wield that tremendous and wise power of setting personal and non-binding tentative societal policies that enable but not force stoppage of any flow impediments that may hold their self back from pursuing perfection or anyone else back from being happy so that we all have opportunity to fill out our fullest, richest volume of potential.

Duty to perfection involves knowing what is going on so we can know what to do. It is an absolute necessity being that since it’s unknown, we have no idea if there are crucial things to be done or not. This fundamental necessity can be brought to our attention through pure practical reasoning. To know what is going on the full scope of existence needs to be pioneered and cannot be done without everyone pitching in to secure an indefinite amount of time to make it happen. Hence the movement for indefinite life extension and pioneering the full scope of existence are categorical imperatives, and therefore ethical and duties.

Scientists at TU Wien, the University of Innsbruck and the ÖAW have for the first time demonstrated a wave effect that can lead to measurement errors in the optical position estimation of objects. The work now published in Nature Physics could have consequences for optical microscopy and optical astronomy, but could also play a role in position measurements using sound, radar, or gravitational waves.

With modern optical imaging techniques, the position of objects can be measured with a precision that reaches a few nanometers. These techniques are used in the laboratory, for example, to determine the position of atoms in quantum experiments.

“We want to know the position of our quantum bits very precisely so that we can manipulate and measure them with laser beams,” explains Gabriel Araneda from the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck.

Levitation is often thought of as the realm of magicians or The Jetsons, but it is technically possible. That said, the tech seems to be moving pretty slowly. Now, researchers at the University of Sussex have developed SoundBender, a technology that bends sound waves around obstacles to acoustically levitate objects above them.

At Blue Origin, Amazon’s space-obsessed founder is building rockets, and he hopes to someday blast humanity into an extraterrestrial future.

Some of Allen’s philanthropy has taken a scientific bent: Allen founded the Allen Institute for Brain Science in 2003, pouring $500 million into the non-profit that aims to give scientists the tools and data they need to probe how brain works. One recent project, the Allen Brain Observatory, provides an open-access “catalogue of activity in the mouse’s brain,” Saskia de Vries, senior scientist on the project, said in a video. That kind of data is key to piecing together how the brain processes information.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen died today from complications with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was 65. Allen said earlier this month that he was being treated for the disease.

Allen was a childhood friend of Bill Gates, and together, the two started Microsoft in 1975. He left the company in 1983 while being treated for Hodgkin’s lymphoma and remained a board member with the company through 2000. He was first treated for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2009, before seeing it go into remission.

In a statement given to ABC News, Gates said he was “heartbroken by the passing of one of my oldest and dearest friends.” He went on to commend his fellow co-founder for his life after Microsoft:

Dark matter supposedly makes up 85% of the matter in the universe, but so far, efforts to catch hypothesized dark matter particles have all ended in failure. Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are no-shows at grand experiments housed in Italy, Canada, and the United States. Even tinier axions have not been detected either. Neutralinos, born out of supersymmetry, may look nice on paper but so far have no bearing on reality.

Speaking from beyond the grave, Professor Stephen Hawking has told a new generation growing up in an increasingly insular world: ‘Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.’

The eminent cosmologist, who had motor neurone disease and died in March, had his final public thoughts broadcast at a special event to launch his last book, Brief Answers To The Big Questions.

Prof Hawking’s words of advice and defiance, echoing from an Imax screen at London’s Science Museum, brought tears to the eyes of his daughter Lucy.

The “slow motion” modes on modern smartphones crank up the speed of video recording so that when it’s played back at regular speed, the motion you see on the screen is slowed down. It’s a neat feature to mess around with, but slow motion capture has some very serious scientific applications as well. Capturing the microscopic world at high speeds can help researchers shed light on all kinds of interesting behaviors and phenomena that shape our reality.

Now, imaging specialists have built what is being called the fastest camera on the planet, allowing for the capture of movement at up to 10 trillion frames per second. Forget slowing down a video of a home run at your kid’s softball game, this incredible contraption can slow down light itself.

A new paper published in Light: Science & Applications explains how the camera works, and boy is it complicated. To put it in its most basic terms, the camera uses laser pulses so ultra-fast that they are measured in quadrillionths of a second and combines those frames with images captured from a second camera moving at the same speed, allowing for high-quality images generated 10 trillion times every second.

Hard as it is to believe, for the first time the life expectancy for Americans (not counting  the effect of wars) has https://www.ajc.com/lifestyles/health/cdc-life-expectancy-de…279HCufnO/” target=”_blank” rel=” nofollow noopener noreferrer” data-ga-track=” ExternalLink: https://www.ajc.com/lifestyles/health/cdc-life-expectancy-de…279HCufnO/”>dropped for two consecutive years. Perhaps less hard to believe is that this is https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/for-life-expe…y-matters/” target=”_blank” rel=” nofollow noopener noreferrer” data-ga-track=” ExternalLink: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/for-life-expe…y-matters/”>not true across economic levels. The richest Americans are gaining in longevity, indeed to unprecedented levels. The poor don’t have it so well, and in the U.S., this includes the shrinking middle class, who are also dying earlier. With the widening income gap, there’s a growing discrepancy between life expectancies for the rich and poor. Depending on geography, those on the lower end of the income bracket spread can expect to live 20 years less than their better-off counterparts, a shocking finding from an http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullart.…2017.0918” target=”_blank” rel=” nofollow noopener noreferrer” data-ga-track=” ExternalLink: http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullart.…2017.0918”>in-depth study coming out of the University of Washington.

The standard model of modern cosmology is unthinkable without dark matter, although direct detections are still missing. A broad perspective of how dark matter was postulated and became accepted is presented, from prehistory, over observations of galaxy clusters, galaxy rotation curves, the search for baryonic dark matter, possible alternative explanations via modified gravity, up to the hunt for dark matter particles. The interplay is described between observational discoveries and theoretical arguments which led finally to the adoption of this paradigm.

Scientists studying the Taupo Volcanic Zone in New Zealand have uncovered clues to what causes giant eruptions.

If you replace classical bits with qubits, though, you go back to only needing one per spin in the system, because all the quantum stuff comes along for free. You don&s;t need extra bits to track the superposition, because the qubits themselves can be in superposition states. And you don&s;t need extra bits to track the entanglement, because the qubits themselves can be entangled with other qubits. A not-too-big quantum computer— again, 50–100 qubits— can efficiently solve problems that are simply impossible for a classical computer.

These sorts of problems pop up in useful contexts, such as the study of magnetic materials, whose magnetic nature comes from adding together the quantum spins of lots of particles, or some types of superconductors. As a general matter, any time you&s;re trying to find the state of a large quantum system, the computational overhead needed to do it will be much less if you can map it onto a system of qubits than if you&s;re stuck using a classical computer.

So, there&s;s your view-from-30,000-feet look at what quantum computing is, and what it&s;s good for. A quantum computer is a device that exploits wave nature, superposition, and entanglement to do calculations involving collective mathematical properties or the simulation of quantum systems more efficiently than you can do with any classical computer. That&s;s why these are interesting systems to study, and why heavy hitters like Google, Microsoft, and IBM are starting to invest heavily in the field.