It’s over for oil.
Every car sold in India will be powered by electricity by the year 2030, according to plans unveiled by the country’s energy minister.
The move is intended to lower the cost of importing fuel and lower costs for running vehicles.
Maybe 10 years away instead of 20?
The UK’s newest fusion reactor, ST40, was switched on last week, and has already managed to achieve ‘first plasma’ — successfully generating a scorching blob of electrically-charged gas (or plasma) within its core.
The aim is for the tokamak reactor to heat plasma up to 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) by 2018 — seven times hotter than the centre of the Sun. That’s the ‘fusion’ threshold, at which hydrogen atoms can begin to fuse into helium, unleashing limitless, clean energy in the process.
Continue reading “The UK Just Switched on an Ambitious Fusion Reactor” »
After 17 weeks inactive, the Large Hadron Collider has started up again – and it’ll soon be performing better than ever.
While the LHC typically takes an annual ‘winter break’ so technicians can perform repairs and upgrades, this year’s stop was longer than usual.
Continue reading “Cern has SUPERCHARGED the Large Hadron Collider” »
AI vs aging the ultimate showdown is in the making.
There are several scientists that are now convinced upon the idea that while aging is a natural occurrence that happens in all creatures, it is, in fact, a disease that can be treated or cured. In that regards, there are some scientists out there looking to slow down the process of aging, while others are looking to stop it all together.
Continue reading “Could Artificial Intelligence Really Be Used to Attain Human Immortality?” »
A nice new write-up on my governor run: https://humanityplus.wordpress.com/2017/04/24/this-transhuma…alifornia/ #transhumanism
It’s a good time to be a transhumanist politician. As faith in the political establishment declines, new technologies, from gene editing to artificial intelligence, are transforming our lives faster than ever. The transhumanist author and politician Zoltan Istvan agrees. He thinks the time is ripe for pro-science and technology governance, and for leaders who will embrace the technologies that could fundamentally transform our conceptions of what it means to be human.
Istvan is a maverick who appears to thrive in an ‘outsider’ role. He self-published a sci-fi novel, The Transhumanist Wager, in 2013, which became a surprise bestseller on Amazon. In 2016, he made an unlikely run for US president as the leader of the Transhumanist Party. Now, he’s making a bid for Governor of California in the 2018 election under a Libertarian Party ticket.
Continue reading “This Transhumanist Politician Wants to be Governor of California” »
FOR years Elon Musk, a South African-born tech entrepreneur, has been telling anyone who will listen that the future of travel is the hyperloop. (Although he thinks it might also be driverless cars. Or perhaps affordable space travel.) Dubai may be about to test the limits of Mr Musk’s imagination.
The hyperloop is a train that moves along a tube that is kept at a thousandth of the normal atmospheric pressure at sea level. Because air resistance is one of the biggest obstacles to high-speed travel, all but eliminating it means that hair-raising velocity becomes possible. The proposed technology could shunt passengers along tunnels at perhaps 745mph, which is faster than a jet plane.
Physicists have been testing the properties of new 2D quantum materials that could usurp graphene as the ‘wonder materials’ of the future.
These materials, which can conduct electricity at nearly the speed of light, could replace silicon in the next generation of hyper-speed computers. One could even form the basis of a new “exotic superconductor” that could actually break time-reversal symmetry — or reverse the flow of time.
“Finally, we can take exotic, high-end theories in physics and make something useful,” says one of the researchers, Jing Xia, from the University of California, Irvine.
