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Mar 25, 2017
Photon Rockets Might Make Mars A Three Minute Trip
Posted by Bruce Dorminey in category: space travel
Professor says all spacecraft have an ultimate speed limit just below that of light. Let’s hope he’s wrong.
Hypothetical photon rocket drives might one day dramatically shrink interplanetary travel times.
Mar 25, 2017
Here Is One Powerful Way the U.S. Could Boost Solar Adoption — By Jamie Condliffe | MIT Technology Review
Posted by Odette Bohr Dienel in categories: energy, governance, government, policy, solar power
Tag: China
Mar 25, 2017
The women who’ll do anything to have whiter skin
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in category: futurism
Former model Irene Major is the wife of Canadian oil tycoon Sam Mail and has used skin lightening creams.
The sale of the product provoked outrage, with some accusing the chain of encouraging racist ideals. Yet Irene, who’s 34 and lives with her husband and four children in a Kent mansion, claims that in some communities the pressure on women to use such products is overwhelming.
Continue reading “The women who’ll do anything to have whiter skin” »
Mar 25, 2017
Evolution Strategies as a Scalable Alternative to Reinforcement Learning
Posted by Alireza Mokri in category: evolution
We’ve discovered that evolution strategies (ES), an optimization technique that’s been known for decades, rivals the performance of standard reinforcement learning (RL) techniques on modern RL benchmarks (e.g. Atari/MuJoCo), while overcoming many of RL’s inconveniences.
In particular, ES is simpler to implement (there is no need for backpropagation), it is easier to scale in a distributed setting, it does not suffer in settings with sparse rewards, and has fewer hyperparameters. This outcome is surprising because ES resembles simple hill-climbing in a high-dimensional space based only on finite differences along a few random directions at each step.
Mar 25, 2017
#Transhumanism getting discussed worldwide yesterday by Catholic Church, with shares via the Vatican Radio, etc
Posted by Zoltan Istvan in category: transhumanism
My work mentioned. This story out in various languages: #Italian, #French, #Portuguese, English, etc. http://fr.radiovaticana.va/news/2017/03/24/troisi%C3%A8me_m%…sa/1300835 & https://zenit.org/articles/father-cantalamessas-3rd-lent-homily-2017/ & http://www.cantalamessa.org/?p=3274 &
http://www.diocesedeamparo.org.br/index.php/2017/03/24/3a-pr…de-cristo/
Mar 25, 2017
UNSW scientists unveil a giant leap for anti-ageing
Posted by Alexander Rodionov in categories: biotech/medical, life extension
UNSW researchers have identified a critical step in the molecular process that allows cells to repair damaged DNA – and it could mean big things for the future of anti-ageing drugs, childhood cancer survivors and even astronauts.