Category Archives: Futurism

In Brief A new program, inspired by the efforts of French president Emmanuel Macron, is opening the country up to scientists and other experts who are working on solution to the climate problem.

Recently elected French president Emmanuel Macron has madehis offer to U.S. climate scientistsmore official: the French government has launched a program that gives four-year grants to scientists, teachers, business people, and even students who are working on climate change solutions. Of course, to receive the grant, the individual must be willing tomove in to France.

The program, called Make Our Planet Great Again, wasinspired by a speech Macron gave last week in response toPresident Donald Trumps decision to withdraw the United Statessupport and commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement.

Where ever we live, whoever we are, we all share the same responsibility, Macron said the speech,Make our planet great again, anobvious play on President Trumpscampaign slogan.

To all scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and responsible citizens who were disappointed by the decision of the President of the United States, I want to say that they will find in France a second homeland, Macron said. This echoes an earlier message the French president posted viavideo on Facebook almost a month before he was elected.

With this new initiative, France is affirming the importance of a combined global effort to combat climate change, which remains aglobal problem. Its necessary to pool the minds of the worlds experts and to fund projects particularly those devoted to research aimed at curbing climate change. As Macron said, its crucial for all of us to work together on concrete solutions for our climate, our environment.

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France is Now Offering US Scientists Grants to Research Climate Change - Futurism

In BriefApple recently held their Worldwide Developers Conference(WWDC) and made a slew of announcements about some of the updatesand new products that we can expect in the next year. The companyseems to be ratcheting up their focus in the field of AR/VR. Vision of the Future

Apple revealed its 10-year plan for the future this week.

If you dont remember that slide from the hours of presentations Apple executives made onstage during the companys developer conference on Monday, youre not alone.

Apple didnt explicitly call it a 10-year plan. And the company was very subtle about how it showed this road map.

But look closely, and its easy to see.

Instead of introducing flashy new products that will change your life today, this years WWDC conference was all about putting the pieces in place for what comes next.

Its a Trojan-horse strategy sneak the seeds for the next breed of technology products into the stuff that were already using.

A new augmented reality platform, virtual reality development tools, the HomePod speaker, and improvements to iOS 11 on the iPad may not feel revolutionary or even particularly useful right now, but they are the building blocks for the technologies Apple is betting will power our future.

Lets break it down:

Ask most tech companies which product will replace the smartphone and the answer will probably revolve around a wearable device for augmented reality, the tech that overlays digital images on the real world.

Microsoft has the HoloLens headset. Google has Project Tango for Android devices and, one day, headgear like Google Glass. Facebook announced its AR ambitions a few months ago, and Mark Zuckerberg even said AR glasses would replace the need for most screens in your life one day.

Apples approach is different.

There werent any AR goggle demos or TED-talk-esque prophecies about how a pair of glasses will soon be the only computer you need. Instead, Apple is starting with something already very familiar: the iPhone and a new way for developers to build AR apps for the phone. When iOS 11 becomes available on tens of millions of Apple devices this fall, Apple will immediately have the largest AR platform. Even better, itll be on the devices that people already use not futuristic glasses or headsets. Apple will get a major advantage over its AR competitors with one simple software update.

That wont be a game changer right away of course, and it certainly wont deliver the kind of jaw-dropping experience being developed by companies like Magic Leap. AR-enabled iPhones will mostly mean some cool games and entertainment apps at first. Pikachu will look more realistic in Pokmon Go. Youll be able to build virtual Lego models on your coffee table. The rainbow puke in your Snapchat selfies will look even better.

But AR on the iPhone sets Apple up for the long run by building a base of developers already dedicated to the platform who want to make stuff for the largest number of users they can. If and when Apple decides to take AR to the next level with a pair of smart glasses or something else, itll be in a better position than companies trying to win over developers.

Apple has been hesitant to get involved with virtual reality, even as the rest of the tech industry seemed to be hyperventilating over its prospects. But now the time feels right for Apple, and its offering a new set of tools in the coming macOS Sierra software that it says will let developers connect VR headsets and create 3D and VR content.

This isnt about attracting gamers and VR enthusiasts to the Mac. This is about making sure Apples most dedicated class of users has the tools it needs to create the content of the future. Apple has historically been the platform of choice for digital artists, filmmakers, and other professionals, and adding VR development tools will make sure those users have what they need and dont abandon Apple.

HomePod, the new Amazon Echo competitor, is Apples biggest new Trojan horse of all.

Even though Apple focused on HomePods music capabilities and pitched it as a new kind of home stereo, it undersold the rest of the real potential. HomePod is also Apple putting Siri in your home in a new way and making a long-term play for the concept of ambient computing, in which everything you own is connected and powered by an underlying artificial intelligence.

HomePod is a way to put Siri everywhere else when youre not looking at your iPhone, typing on your Mac, listening to your AirPods, or tracking your workout on your Apple Watch. HomePod is Apple creeping into the rest of your life under the guise of a really nice Wi-Fi stereo. Apple may be focusing on music now with HomePod, but its also sneaking in a lot of Amazon Echo-like features like controlling your connected appliances and getting updates from Siri.

That said, its pretty clear why Apple would want to bury the AI features of HomePod. Pitching it as a digital assistant instead of a music player will only open up Apple to more criticism about how it is falling behind in AI compared with Google and Amazon. Apples Siri is still much less capable as a virtual assistant than the offerings from Amazon and Google, and Apple has a lot more work to do to catch up. But theres no question that AI is a big area of investment for Apple, and HomePod will play an important role in this strategy as Apple makes progress.

The biggest news with iOS 11 wasnt on the iPhone. It was on the iPad.

Apple has finally started making improvements to the software that help turn the iPad into the laptop replacement the company has been promising for years. Theres a new file-storage system, an app dock similar to the one on Mac, the ability to drag and drop content in between apps, and apps that float in separate windows. The iPad is starting to feel less like a giant iPhone and more like a touch-screen Mac.

Theres still a lot of work to do. The iPad Pros keyboard isnt as good as the one on a normal laptop, and its now up to developers to build compelling apps that take advantage of all the new iOS 11 features and give people a better reason to ditch their laptop for an iPad. The new 10.5-inch iPad is a small move in the right direction because its larger size allows for a full-size keyboard, but its still not enough.

But Apple is inching closer toward its ultimate goal of creating a super thin and portable laptop replacement, and iOS 11 feels like a huge milestone.

A lot of this stuff may not work out. Were in a period of relatively flat innovation across most of the tech industry, where new gizmos improve only incrementally each year. Its impossible to tell which wild idea will actually end up taking off and which will fizzle. (Two years ago everyone thought smartwatches were going to revolutionize the tech industry, after all. Now thats barely part of the conversation.)

In some sense, Apples latest batch of WWDC announcements feels underwhelming, as if Apple is dabbling in various areas rather than making a bold move in any one direction. But the companys vision for the future is already being etched into its products. Just look closely; its right in front of you.

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Tim Cook Reveals Apple's 10-Year Plan For Future Tech - Futurism

In Brief In a tweet today, Elon Musk said that the highly anticipated Falcon Heavy launch would take place within the next few months. The rocket will transport the first space tourists, and it could take humanity farther in space than ever before.

Elon Musk is having a rather goodweek. He put on an excellent showing at Teslas annual shareholders meeting,and today, the news broke that Teslas stock price has surged. The company is listed on the Fortune 500 list for the first time ever. But of course, we cannot forget about another of Musks revolutionary outfits: SpaceX.

Musks space company has a number of milestone eventplanned for the coming months. Case in point, afew moments ago, a question from a Twitter user sparked an update from Musk on the companys plans to launch the Falcon Heavy, SpaceXs massive rocket that will one day take humans to the Moon.

In the tweet, Musk confirmedthat we will beseeing the rocket launch in just four months, at theend of the summer.

The Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful rocket in the world, capable of launching 54 metric tons (119,000 lb) of cargo and crew into space. The rocket will be used to boost the first space tourists to the Moon in a launch expected to take place in 2018. The entire journey is expected to take about six to seven days.

The Falcon Heavy will likely also play a role in preparing SpaceX for the highly anticipated first manned missions to Mars, set to happen by 2025.

We look forward to the upcoming launch and all the promise that its success will bring.

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Elon Musk: The Rocket That Will Eventually Take Humans to the Moon Will Launch in 4 Months - Futurism

In Brief Astronomers have observered a phenomenon known as gravitational microlensing in stars for the first time. Predicted by Einstein as part of his theory of general relativity, this could help measure the mass of distant stars using gravitational deflection. Celestial Warping

According to Einsteins general relativity theory, spacetime bends or gets distorted when it crosses a massive object due to its gravity. In the same manner, Einstein theorized that such a distortion also happens tolight from a distant star when it passes another star along a line of sight from Earth like a near stellar eclipse, so to speak. In this case, gravity should act as a magnifying lens by brightening and bending the light from the distant star, warping its apparent position.

Einstein, however, wasnt particularly confident about ever seeing such this gravitational deflection of starlight. In an article published in Sciencein 1936, he said that because stars are so distant from one another there is no hope of observing this phenomenon directly. An international team of researchers, however, have just proven Einstein wrong but also right by seeing a type of gravitational microlensing from a star other than the Sun.

The team, led by Kailash Sahu from the Space Telescope Science Institute, reported their findings in a new studypublished in the same journal.Einstein would be proud, Terry Oswalt saidin an interview with Wired. One of his key predictions has passed a very rigorous observational test.

Sahus team used the Hubble Space Telescope with its superior angular resolution to measure the shifts in a distant background stars apparent position around a nearby white dwarf star called Stein 2051 B as its light was deflected. The observations were made on eight dates in a two year period, between October 2013 and October 2015.

In the same way that a 1919 total solar eclipse provided the first observations of starlight curving and gave the initialconvincing proofs of Einsteins general theory of relativity, the new study confirms it anew. It also gave Sahus team a way to measure the mass of the foreground white dwarf star, which was previously unmeasurable.

The astrometric lensing approach used by Sahu et al. can be used equally well for any other nearby stars that happen to pass in front of background stars, Oswalt wrote in a perspective article in Science. In the coming era of truly massive sky surveys such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, astronomers are bound to observe other similar events, despite their rarity.

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Scientists Finally Witnessed a Phenomenon That Einstein Thought Impossible - Futurism

In BriefScientists have just discovered the oldest human fossils inMorocco. This find alters the narrative of human origins and helpsfill in missing details in our evolution as a species. Rediscovering Ourselves

On Wednesday, scientists reported they had discovered the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens in Morocco.The bones and other remains are approximately 300,000 years old. This revelation provides new insights into the origins of humankind: a consequence of such findings would be that human beingsevolved earlier than had previously believed. The fossils also indicate that despite fundamental differences in the brains of modern humans and early Homo sapiens, our faces strongly resemble those of our early ancestors.

Until this remarkable find at Jebel Irhoud, the oldest human fossils only dated back 195,000 years. These new fossils make experts believe that our species evolved not in Eastern Africa (specifically near Ethiopia) where later fossils were found, but across the continent in Western Africa where modern Morocco is situated.

We did not evolve from a single cradle of mankind somewhere in East Africa, paleoanthropologist Phillipp Gunz, a co-author of the two new studies on the fossils, told The New York Times.

Before now, fossils found in different places made paleoanthropologists believe that Homo sapiens arose in East Africa and then moved across the continent. However, mysterious human fossils from other parts of Africa didnt seem to fit in with this story, and caused scientists to wonder where they fit into the Homo sapiens puzzle. The remains discovered in Morocco will helpsolve these mysteries, even as it suggests new questions for further research.

For example, the recent finds at Jebel Irhoud confirm that Homo sapiens had flatter faces, similar to ours today. National Museum in London paleoanthropologist Christopher Stringer speculates that the flattened faces of early Homo sapiens may be related to the advent of speech. We really are at very early stages of trying to explain these things, Dr. Stringer told theThe New York Times.

The larger, rounder brain of modern humans is a more recent development. Dr. Gunz indicates that the human brain may have evolved into a rounder shapeduring a later phase of human existence. Two areas of the brain in particular the cerebellum and the parietal lobe, both toward the back of the head seem to have adapted over thousands of years. That being said,scientists dont yet know how the rounder brain changed how humans think.

Flint blades from around the same time have been found elsewhere across Africa, and the Jebel Irhoud fossils suggest that they may have been made by early humans. Dr. Gunz and his team believe that is this is true: Homo sapiens may have evolved across the continent as a network of groups. The only way well ever know for sure and resolve other questions these findings may bring up will bethrough additional research, which will require adequate funding.

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New Discovery of the Oldest Known Human Remains Will Change the Narrative of Human Evolution - Futurism

In Brief The government of Hawaii signed two bills on Tuesday which formalizes its commitment to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. This comes after U.S. President Donald Trump decided to pull out of the climate deal.

Tuesday was a historic moment for Hawaii as it became the first state in the U.S. to make its stand on the Paris Climate Agreement formal. The Pacific state signed two bills to honor the climate deal after the federal governments decision to withdraw from it. In his statement during the signing of the two bills, Hawaii governor David Ige said that hes looking forward to working with other states to fight global climate change.

Governor Ige signed Senate Bill 559 which would ensure statewide support for Hawaiis green initiatives and to further theStates commitment to combat climate change by systematicallyreducing and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions through theenactment of principles that mirror many of the provisions adopted in the Paris Agreement.

The governor also signed House Bill 1578, which creates a task force to help keep Hawaiis soil and air clean. It would identify agricultural and aquacultural practices to improve soil health and promote carbon sequestration the capture and long-term storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide to mitigate climate change.

Hawaii isnt the only state that pledged to uphold the guidelines set by the Paris Agreement. Several governors and a dozen mayors across the U.S. have promised to do the same. The Hawaii State Legislature understands the importance of taking action, and I applaud its work this session to ensure that we continue to deliver the island Earth that we want to leave to our children, Ige said.

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Blazing a Trail: Hawaii Becomes the First US State to Commit to the Paris Climate Accords - Futurism

In BriefMark Cuban has attacked Bitcoin on Twitter, claiming it is nota currency, it is a bubble, and that the whole system of valuationconcerning it is wrong. But is he right? Mark Cubans Twitterstorm

Mark Cuban has recently raised a series of criticisms of bitcoin on Twitter, which has resulted in the cryptocurrencys exchange rate dropping rapidly illustrating many of the issues with the currency that he discussed in the Tweet themselves.

Mark Cuban rose to wealth by selling his start-up businesses MicroSolutions (a PC company that he sold to CompuServe for $6 Million) and Broadcast.com (which transmitted sports games over the internet, and was subsequently sold to Yahoo for $5.7 Billion) in the 1990s, and rose to prominence by becoming owner of the NBA team the Dallas Mavericks.

Earlier today he took his opinions of Bitcoin toTwitter:

Cuban crucially differentiates between blockchain and Bitcoin: the former being a means of transaction that is more secure, transparent, and distributive, and the latter a cryptocurrency.

However, Cuban likens bitcoin to the religious worship of gold as an asset and describes it as a stock, which is fundamentally different from a currency currencies measure how much of an asset you have. This is why Cuban progresses to state I am not questioning value. Im questioning valuation.

Just because bitcoins exchange rate has reached thousands of dollars, this doesnt mean that anyone would be willing to give you thousands of dollars for your bitcoin. Currencies are universal measures of value in the country you operate which allows anyone to trade with anyone as part of a universal system of value. This is in contrast to assets which you can buy with that value system but not necessarily trade anywhere as easily.

Currencies, in order to operate in this way, need to be relatively stable which Cuban showed bitcoin was not due to the almost instant drop after his tweetstorm. To analogise: can you imagine the dollar, pound, or euro drastically dropping in a matter of hours just because of a few tweets?

On the surface, Bitcoin looks monumentally impressive: it has grown every year apart from 2014, has climbed 141 percent in value this year alone, even peaking at $2,900 this past week. However, the precise reason for this success is the reason for its potential failure it is too turbulent, too successful.

This means that while Bitcoin may seem extremely seductive it has been billed as, among other things, the ultimate investment and a universal currency we must be careful when investing in it (particularly because it is difficult to convert back into dollars), putting faith in it, and being overoptimistic about its potential.

Bitcoin is one particularly famous use of a potentially more promising and widely applicable system called blockchain, which has the potential to revolutionize everything from the music industry to sustainable development and even banking accountability.

According to many, it is blockchain, not bitcoin, that has the potential to revolutionize future transactions: If the internet bought us near instant digital communication, then the blockchain brings us near instant asset transfer, asset movement and security of data movement said Simon Taylor, the previous head of Barclays cryptocurrency division.

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Mark Cuban Asserts That Bitcoin is Not Currency - Futurism

Wow! Messages From Space

In 1977, the sound of extraterrestrials was heard by human ears for the first time or so people at the time thought.The Wow! Signal was detected by astronomer Jerry Ehman using Ohio State Universitys Big Ear radio telescope. It isa radio signal detector that, at the time, was pointed at a group of stars called Chi Sagittariiin the constellation Sagittarius.

When scanning the skies around the stars, Ehmancaptured a 72 second burst of radio waves: He circled the reading and wrote Wow!: next to it, hence the signals name. Over the last 40 years, the signal has beencited as evidence that we are not alone in the galaxy. Experts and laypeople alike believed that, finally, we had evidence of alien life.

However, Professor Antonio Paris, of St Petersburg College, has now discovered the explanation: A pair of comets. The work was published in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences.

These comets, known as 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs, have clouds of hydrogen gas millions of kilometers in diameter surrounding them. The Wow! Signal was detected at 1420MHz, which is the radio frequency hydrogen naturally emits. Notably, the team has verified that the comets were within the vicinity at the time, andtheyreport that the radio signals from 266/P Christensen matched those from the Wow! signal.

While this discovery is a disappointment to alien enthusiasts everywhere, as the Wow! Signal is the strongest signal we have ever received from space, it is a testament to our ability to accurately interpret signals and sounds from the cosmos. This gives us hope in our attempt to decode the hundreds of strange, alien signals coming from other stars that have been observed recently.

We have several weapons in our cosmic detection arsenal, most of which are used by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI). Their main means of detection is using radio-telescopes, and their most ambitious project to date has been Project Phoenix; the worlds most sensitive and comprehensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

For this project, they used three of worlds biggest radio telescopes: the Parkes radio telescope in Australia (210 feet indiameter), the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia (140 feet in diameter), and Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico (the worlds largest at 1,000 feet in diameter). They have also built The Allen Telescope Array with financial backing from Paul Allen.

While the technology for detecting alien messages is remaining relatively static, ideas for communicating better with our own satellites is advancing rapidly, with possibilities including communicating by a laser beam and establishing a space satellite network.

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The 40-Year Old Mystery of the Wow! Signal Was Just Solved - Futurism

In Brief Researchers at the University of Adelaide have developed an AI that can analyze CT scans to predict if a patient will die within five years with 69 percent accuracy. This system could eventually be used to save lives by providing doctors with a way to detect illnesses sooner. Predicting the Future

While many researchers are looking for ways to use artificial intelligence (AI) to extend human life, scientists at the University of Adelaidecreated an AI that could help them better understand death. The system they created predicts ifa person will die within five years after analyzingCT scans of their organs, and it was able to do sowith 69 percent accuracy a rate comparable to that of trained medical professionals.

The system makes use of thetechnique of deep learning, and it was tested using images taken from 48 patients, all over the age of 60. Its the first study to combine medical imaging and artificial intelligence, and the results have been published in Scientific Reports.

Instead of focusing on diagnosing diseases, the automated systems can predict medical outcomes in a way that doctors are not trained to do, by incorporating large volumes of data and detecting subtle patterns, explained lead authorLuke Oakden-Rayner in a university press release. This method of analysis can explore the combination of genetic and environmental risks better than genome testing alone,according to the researchers.

While the findings are only preliminary given the small sample size, the next stage will apply the AI to tens of thousands of cases.

While this study does focus on death, the most obvious and exciting consequence of it is how it could help preserve life. Our research opens new avenues for the application of artificial intelligence technology in medical image analysis, and could offer new hope for the early detection of serious illness, requiring specific medical interventions, said Oakden-Rayner. Because it encourages more precise treatment using firmer foundational data, the system has the potential to save many lives and provide patients with less intrusive healthcare.

An added benefit of this AI is its wide array of potential uses. Because medical imaging of internal organs is a fairly routine part of modern healthcare, the data is already plentiful. The system could be used to predict medical outcomes beyond just death, such as the potential for treatment complications, and it could work with any number of images, such as MRIs or X-rays, not just CT scans. Researchers will just need to adjustthe AItotheir specifications, andtheyll be able to obtain predictions quickly and cheaply.

AIsystems are becoming more and more prevalentin the healthcare industry.Deepmind is being usedto fight blindness in the United Kingdom, and IBM Watson is already as competent as human doctors at detecting cancer. It is in medicine, perhaps more than any other field, that we see AIs huge potential to help the human race.

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An AI Can Now Predict How Much Longer You'll Live - Futurism

In Brief Researchers from St. George's, University of London have found that combining chemotherapy with cannabinoids can effectively treat leukemia. Though the tests were done in vitro, it showed that it could potentially lower the needed dose for chemo. Working in Tandem

Theres a growing literature of research showcasing the supposed health benefits of cannabis, specifically its active chemicals like cannabinoids. These have gone to cover various diseases, most notably brain-related ones such as epilepsy, Alzheimers, dementia, as well as heart problems and cancer. One study even claims that cannabis could potentially reverse aging. Now, researchers from St Georges, University of London have found cannabinoids to be effective in treating leukemia.

Specifically, the research involved using phytocannabinoids the naturally-occurring cannabinoids in the cannabis plant in tandem with chemotherapy. Phytocannabinoids possess anticancer activity when used alone, and a number have also been shown to combine favorably with each other in vitro in leukaemia cells to generate improved activity, according to a study published in the International Journal of Oncology.

Though the tests were done in the laboratory, the researchers are confident that combining phytocannabinoids with chemotherapy for leukemia patients could mean lower doses for the latter effectively lessening its side-effects.

As with most studies involving cannabis, its worth mentioning that its not possible to achieve the effects claimed by the study by recreational use of the drug. These extracts are highly concentrated and purified, so smoking marijuana will not have a similar effect, lead researcher Wai Liu said in a press release. But cannabinoids are a very exciting prospect in oncology, and studies such as ours serve to establish the best ways that they should be used to maximize a therapeutic effect.

With cancers continuing prevalence, research into potential treatments have become rather creative over the past years. Gene therapy is, perhaps, the most popular and other explore the use of nanoparticles. The strangest of these potential treatments is in an anti-cancer drug-delivery mechanism courtesy of sperm cells. At any rate, for a fight against one of the worlds deadliest diseases, we need all the help we could get.

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New Research Shows That Cannabinoids Can Help Treat Leukemia - Futurism