They don’t call Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson ‘The Mountain’ for nothing.

In 2015, the strong man and Game of Thrones actor broke a millennium-old record by taking – or more accurately, staggering – five steps with a 650 kilogram (1,430 pound) log on his back.

To most of us, this was simply an extraordinary example of heroic strength. To scientists, this feat marked a crushing limit to the gravitational pull any mortal could ever hope to endure, setting a boundary on the mass of planets we might expect to colonise.

Continue reading “Scientists Think They’ve Finally Found The Crushing Limits of Gravity Humans Could Survive” »

LEAF’s Rejuvenation Roundup September 2018 is out!

Happy autumn—or spring, if you live in the southern hemisphere! Be as it may, in a post-aging world, the season of your health would always be summer; let’s see how much closer we got to that world during last September.

LEAF News

Continue reading “Rejuvenation Roundup September 2018” »

To rapidly detect the presence of E. coli in drinking water, Cornell University food scientists now can employ a bacteriophage — a genetically engineered virus — in a test used in hard-to-reach areas around the world.

What’s up with these 2 factions trying to split reality in 2? 🤔.

Are you a multispecies mix of human and microbial bits – or is there a fuzzy boundary between you and your tiny companions?

While the rest of the country has been transfixed by the Brett Kavanagh confirmation drama, the White House was quietly but steadily taking major steps to secure America’s high-tech future.

The first was the release of the National Cybersecurity Strategy last week, which I discussed in a previous column. This week came the National Strategic Overview for Quantum Information Science (QIS), released by a subcommittee of the Committee on Science for the National Science and Technology Council. This document is a big win for Jacob Taylor, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s point man on all things quantum, and a major win for America.

Be gone flat earthism.

The nature-versus-nurture argument of intelligence just got a lot more complicated with the discovery that the environment can modify the expression of a key gene in the brain, affecting intelligence far more than we previously thought.

Such a finding may not come as a surprise if you remember that numerous genes influence our IQ and stressful experiences can lock and unlock genes in our brains. Yet having hard evidence of the link will no doubt stir debate on just what it means to be “smart”.

Continue reading “Your Environment Could Be Changing Your IQ on a Genetic Level, Study Finds” »

As the artificial brain races towards the singularity, what we often forget is the boost to human brainpower that will accompany it. As we increase our senses and perceptions, humans have a choice what to do with these new superpowers, that can be used to reinforce one’s tunnel vision of life or to ignore it.

This story is part of What Happens Next, our complete guide to understanding the future. Read more predictions about the Future of Fact.

Not everyone experiences the world in the same way. Whether it’s how you react to the results of an election or what tones you hear in a sound clip, observable reality is often not as objective as you think it is.

Continue reading “Virtual and augmented reality will change our sense of a shared reality” »

How to solve the problem of which map to use, without distortion.

Check out more details at our EuroVis 2018 paper at: https://vis.yalongyang.com/papers/vr-maps-globes.pdf

Continue reading “[EuroVis 2018] Maps and Globes in Virtual Reality (VR)” »

A new tool using data and AI is hoping to better predict famine and help millions experiencing food insecurity.