Category Archives: Futurist

It could help transmit data when using conventional WiFi isnt possible. Fast Neutrons

A team of researchers at Lancaster University have created a new type of WiFi that transmits data wirelessly using nuclear radiation.

The engineers transferred data using fast neutrons from a radioactive isotope called californium-252, according to a press release from the university. Information such as words and randomly generated numbers were encoded into the neutron field and successfully transmitted to a laptop, where it was then decoded.

A paper of the study has been published in the journal Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. While radioactive WiFi sounds more like a satirical technology in a Fallout game, researchers believe that there are plenty of potential real-life applications of it.

We demonstrate the potential of fast neutron radiation as a medium for wireless communications for applications where conventional electromagnetic transmission is either not feasible or is inherently limited, Professor Malcolm Joyce, lead author of the study, said in the press release.

Joyce added that fast neutrons can provide reliable data transmissions in safety-critical scenarios where you cant easily create structures and pathways for Internet cabling such as submarine bulkheads, vaults, and reactor contaminants. In these cases, he said, the neutrons would still be able to transmit information and negate the need for such penetrations.

So yeah. As cool as it sounds, youre not likely going to see radioactive WiFi available commercially which is probably for the best to avoid any Chernobyl-esque body horror scenarios while browsing Twitter.

READ MORE: Nuclear radiation used to transmit digital data wirelessly [Lancaster University]

More on WiFi: Police Ticket Driver Who Bolted Starlink Antenna to Car Hood

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Scientists Create Cursed WiFi That Transmits Using Nuclear Radiation - Futurism

Tough luck, NFT fans.Forbidden NFT

Non-fungible tokens, better known as NFTs, have rocked the worlds of both blockchain and art this year, while generating endless new debates about everything from money laundering and fraud to what it really means to own a digital asset.

And now the dramas getting even deeper, with the US governments Office of Foreign Assets Control declaring this week that numerous NFTs, and even one entire exchange, are now verboten.

The list of banned stuff, first spotted by blockchain startup Elliptic and highlighted byVices Motherboard, include a Latvian NFT marketplace called Chatex as well as dozens of specific works of digital art including, intriguingly, some assets listed on a US-based exchange.

In other words, the fracas is a collision of art world drama, federal government drama, blockchain drama and international sanctions drama a spicy meatball of legal, technical and financial shenanigans that could shed light on the most explosive aspects of NFT culture were likely to see moving forward.

Basically, it sounds like the feds think Chatex was using digital asset sales to launder money from ransomware and darknet shenanigans.

The most interesting part of the saga, though, is arguably that the outlawed NFTs included ones listed on the US-based exchange OpenSea though the site did remove the listings afterMotherboard reached out about the issue.

We automatically block addresses on the U.S. sanctions list from buying, selling, or transferring on OpenSea, an OpenSea spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement. Nobody was able to transact with these NFTs once the addresses were added to the sanctions list. As an additional measure, the items and accounts are no longer visible on OpenSea.

More on NFTs: 12-Year-Old Earns $400,000 Selling NFTs to Idiots

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The US Government Says These NFTs Are Now Illegal - Futurism

It shouldnt be so surprising that Kiss legend Gene Simmons is loudly in support of vaccines, but here we are.

In an interview published on celebrity video streaming startup TalkShopLive, the rock star panned delusional anti-vaxxers for putting the people around them at risk.

If youre willing to walk among us unvaccinated, Simmons said, you are an enemy.

I dont care about your political beliefs, he added. You are not allowed to infect anybody just because you think youve got rights that are delusional.

For Simmons, the outrage is justifiably personal: both he and his fellow Kiss frontman Paul Stanley caught breakthrough COVID in late August after being vaccinated. And earlier in the year, a guitar tech for the band died from the deadly virus.

Simmons really went off in the interview as he tends to do likening anti-vaxxers to people who speed through red lights and ignore traffic laws.

I dont want to catch your disease, Simmons raged. I dont want to risk my life just because you want to go through a red light. This whole idea, this delusional, evil idea that you get to do whatever you want and the rest of the world be damned is really terrible.

Being himself, however, the Kiss singer couldnt helping taking potshots at both sides of the evil political spectrum, accusing Democrats and Republicans alike of spouting all kinds of nonsense.

Politics are the enemy, he said, reminding us all that he lived through the 60s. Humanism and humanity is what we should all be concerned about. Love thy neighbor as thyself.

He went on to compare so-called vaccine skeptics to Flat Earthers, blasting them for claiming that the estimated five million people who have died so far of COVID somehow dropped dead for other reasons.

No, bitch, they died because they got COVID, Simmons said.

Latent glamness and vulgarity aside, Simmons stance on the vaccine culture war is refreshing given that so many other celebrities, like Eric Clapton and Matthew freakin McConaughey, are publicly railing against vaccine mandates.

Hes not wrong: WHO: Anti-Vaxxers Now One of the Greatest Threats to World

More on the man himself: Google News Genetics Section Is Full of Articles About People Named Gene

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Gene Simmons to the Unvaccinated: "You Are an Enemy" - Futurism

It turns out theres plenty of oxygen on the Moon after all but theres a catch.

The Moons near-vacuum atmosphere doesnt have anywhere near enough oxygen to sustain human life. But as Southern Cross University soil researcher John Grant wrote this week inThe Conversation, its top layer of rocky soil, known as regolith, likely contains enough oxygen for 8 billion people to survive for about 100,000 years.

The only problem, of course, is that you cant breathe rocks.

Thats where a new joint program between the Australian Space Agency and NASA comes in. Inked in October, the deal will send an Aussie rover to the Moon via NASAs Artemis program to collect lunar rocks and, as NASA put it in a press release, attempt to extract oxygen from lunar regolith.The results have the potential to be civilization-shifting because if lunar settlers can synthesize breathable air in situ, a long-term Moon base would become vastly more feasible.

The technology for the extraction, known as electrolysis no, not the laser hair removal already exists and is a pretty straightforward process, Grant said.

On Earth this process is commonly used in manufacturing, such as to produce aluminium, he wrote. An electrical current is passed through a liquid form of aluminium oxide (commonly called alumina) via electrodes, to separate the aluminium from the oxygen.

Oxygen makes up about 45 percent of lunar soil, Grant noted, but to extract it from the other elements that make up the regoliths composition, such as silicon, aluminum, and magnesium, scientists will have to usea lot of energy and industrial equipment to break them apart.

To be sustainable, the Southern Cross University soil scientist supposed, it would need to be supported by solar energy or other energy sources available on the Moon.

While the logistics of extracting oxygen on the lunar surface represents a mighty challenge, Grant noted that Space Applications Services, a Belgian startup, has announced plans to construct three reactors and send them to the Moon to create oxygen via electrolysis.

And it could happensoon, if all goes according to plan. The company has said that it plans to send its experimental reactors to the Moon by 2025 in tandem with the European Space Agencys in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) program.

While its awesome to imagine a vibrant human presence on the Moon,dont forget that the hoi polloi will almost certainly not be invited.

Read more: The Moons top layer alone has enough oxygen to sustain 8 billion people for 100,000 years [The Conversation]

More on Moon mining: China Analyzing Moon Rocks as Potential Fusion Power Source

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The Moon Has Enough Oxygen Buried Beneath Its Surface to Sustain Billions of People - Futurism

While time travel and historical films are all the rage right now, Andrew Pandian, who is directing Breaking News, starring Jai, has begun a new film titled 2030, which will be a futuristic action drama with Mahat Raghavendra and newbie Swathi in the lead roles. The film has elements of action, romance and sci-fi catering to all kinds of audiences. It is a revenge drama, in which the female leads parents are killed in 2021. And the revenge takes place 10 years later. So, in that sense, it will be a flash-forward film. We will be showing a futuristic Chennai, with changes in the landscape, architecture, objects, and so on. Futuristic dramas will be interesting to show people what kind of a world we want to live in. A lot of R&D has gone into this, says the filmmaker.So, what prompted him to rope in Mahat and Swathi? We wanted a newcomer for the heroines role. We had several auditions. Swathi is an athlete, well-educated, and practises martial arts. Her character is that of an intelligent and knowledgeable girl and I found her perfect for the role. As for Mahat, he is already well-known. When I narrated the script to him, his body language seemed perfect for the character a CBI officer. Our thoughts, too, were in sync and he is a fit guy, too, says Andrew.The shooting is taking place in Chennai, mostly in studios because of the futuristic setting. Andrew says, The first schedule is over and we will begin our next schedule soon. Simultaneously, the CG work has also begun. We want this to be a pan-Indian project since the subject wil

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Mahats next film, 2030, is a futuristic action drama - Times of India

Is Bitcoin the new gold?All-Time Records

The value of Bitcoin hit all-time highstoday, trading above $68,000 Tuesday morning and investors are predicting that its rise isnt over yet, CNBC reports.

The price calmed back down to around $66,700 at the time of writing,but theres stillplenty of appetite for Bitcoin, and investors are more enthusiastic about the cryptocurrencys short-term future than ever before. However as weve seen many times before its impossible to predict when exactly the Bitcoin gravy train will run out of steam and start plummeting again.

Analysts suspect rising inflation, caused by stimulus plans and government spending, may be behind the surge of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies including Ether.

Inflation will see the value of money decrease over time, whereas Bitcoin has a fixed limit on the number of coins which can be created, Susannah Streeter, from financial services company Hargreaves Lansdown, told UK newspaper The Evening Standard.

In other words, investors are starting to treat Bitcoin like gold, an inflation hedge allowing them to hold on to value long-term.

Inflation is a major consideration for investors today, and the younger generation of investors often favors cryptocurrency as a hedge over gold, Wilfred Daye, the head of the trading platform Securitize Capital, told The Guardian.

Wall Street is also expecting the trend to continue, with JPMorgan doubling down on its prediction that Bitcoin will eventually rise to a whopping $146,000, according to CNBC.

Its not just finance folks who are excited, either. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey called for Bitcoin to be the native currency for the internet during an investors call last week.

The digital currency is also about to get its first upgrade in four years, called Taproot. The tech allows transactions to gain a new level of privacy and efficiency, laying the groundwork for the smart contracts popularized by Ethereum.

How much headroom there still is for the value of Bitcoin remains to be seen. But as inflation is expected to continue to rise, we may see the digital currency keep rallying in the coming months.

READ MORE: Bitcoin hits new all-time high above $68,000 as cryptocurrencies extend rally [CNBC]

More on Bitcoin: Bitcoin Hits Highest Price in Its Entire History

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Bitcoin Crushes All-Time Record, With JPMorgan Predicting $146,000 - Futurism

It's also accelerating some cosmic rays to near the speed of light.Rays Banned

A team of Chinese researchers has discovered a mysterious barrier that appears to be stopping cosmic rays from penetrating through to the center of the Milky Way. Even more strangely, the same region seems to be accelerating these rays to blistering speeds.

The research underlines just how difficult it is to get a precise reading of what the hell is going on inside the swirling ball of excited cosmic rays that makes up the center of our galaxy.

Highly energetic events such as two galaxies smashing into each other, or objects like supermassive black holes, spew out storms of cosmic rays,which essentially amount to protons. These rays often are accelerated to almost the speed of light by these events and celestial objects,which interact in fascinating ways withour galaxys magnetic field, which appears to form them into whats referred to as the cosmic sea.

Scientistsworking theory is that theres a supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*, sitting at the center of our galaxy, where it whips cosmic rays into a whirlwind.

In their paper published this week in the journal Nature Communications, the team found that some of these rays were unable to push their way past a dense barrier and enter a central molecular cloud of interstellar dust and hydrogen gas known as the cosmic ray sea.

The team used data collected using the Fermi Large Area Telescope, a space observatory that analyzes a host of cosmological phenomena including gamma ray bursts and solar flares.

Other rays that werent entirely stopped by this barrier first slowed down and then mysteriously sped up again as they passed through the central cloud, leading the researchers to believe theres something like a particle accelerator at the galactic center.

The most apparent answer for this acceleration would be the existence of Sagittarius A* but the team wasnt able to come to a definitive conclusion, nor rule out other possible explanations, including the remnants of a supernova.

In other words, thereare still many questions when it comes to our galaxys turbulent center. This newresearch just goes to show just how much there is still to learn.

READ MORE: Data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope suggests there is a particle accelerator in the galactic center [Phys.org]

More on Sagittarius: Nobel Prize Winner on Falling Into a Black Hole: I Would Not Want To

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Scientists Surprised by Mysterious Barrier at the Core of our Galaxy - Futurism

Breadcrumb Trail Links

Global futurist Jonathan Brill talks about future-proofing yourself from events like the pandemic

Author of the article:

Virtually no one was prepared for the dramatic shift in every aspect of their lives caused by COVID-19.

But there were major exceptions. In a 2015 TED Talk, Bill Gates warned a disruptive Spanish flu-like pandemic was inevitable. He observed the response to West Africas 2014 Ebola outbreak and the poor response from the rest of the world.

It was as if the world was hit by a Rogue Wave, says global futurist Jonathan Brill, the author of a book by that name. In the book, he said rogue waves are far more likely to happen than previously understood. The key, according to Brill, is to spot the changes that foreshadow their arrival.

Spotting the telltale signs is, however, only step 1 in the development of appropriate responses that ensure you can successfully navigate the choppy waters. Brill encourages readers to adopt a Sherlock Holmes approach to observing, assessing or deducing and then eliminating the impossible, which means that whatever remains, no matter how crazy, must be possible.

The challenge with this approach is that it is antithetical to the processes most of us employ individually and as companies processes built for less-volatile times. Brill says those processes presume that you can deliver compound growth year after year, if you reduce risk, improve efficiencies, and keep your products up to date.

We invited Brill to join for a Conversation That Matters about how you can future-proof yourself and your business to survive and profit from radical change.

Please become a Patreon subscriber and support the production of this program, with a $1 pledge here .

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Conversations That Matter: A survival guide for rogue times - Vancouver Sun

A team of researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital claims to have improved the specific functionsof the human brain by using artificial intelligence paired with electrical brain stimulation.

In a study involving 12 patients who were undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy, the scientists say they wereable to improve the patients mental function when stimulating areas of the brain with small amounts of electrical energy.

The surgery involves placing hundreds of tiny electrodes across several different regions of the brain to record neural activity and track down the areas where the seizures are coming from.

The researchers used all of this data to zero in on a region of the brain called the internal capsule that they believe is responsible for cognitive control. In other words, its the area of the brain that appears to allow us to shift our attention from one task to another.

Its a potentially revolutionary treatment for those struggling with mental illness that is, if it indeed turns out to be effective for the broader public. While the human studys results are impressive, the researchers still have a long way to go to demonstrate the need or effectiveness of such a severe medical intervention.

The goal of the stimulation was to get patients back in the drivers seat and let them feel a new sense of agency, said Alik Widge, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School and coauthor of a paper about the research published the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering earlier this week, in a statement.

An example might include a person with depression who just cant get out of a stuck negative thought, said Widge. Because it is so central to mental illness, finding a way to improve it could be a powerful new way to treat those illnesses.

A machine learning algorithm helped the team isolate the patients control abilities from their brain activity and their actions.

This system can read brain activity, decode from that when a patient is having difficulty, and apply a small burst of electrical stimulation to the brain to boost them past that difficulty, Widge said.

The analogy I often use is an electric bike, he added. When someones pedaling but having difficulty, the bike senses it and augments it. Weve made the equivalent of that for human mental function.

Participantsin the trial reported that their anxiety got better once the system jumped into action, mostly due to the fact that they had more cognitive control and were able to shift their focus better.

This could be a totally new approach in treating mental illness, Widge said. Instead of trying to suppress symptoms, we could give patients a tool that lets them take control of their own minds.

READ MORE: Researchers boost human mental function with brain stimulation [University of Minnesota Medical School]

More on brain stimulation: Stanford Scientists Say Brain Magnets Can Relieve Depression

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Scientists Claim to Improve Human Brain Function With Implants and AI - Futurism

"The virus, COVID-19, may well have been one negative feedback."Gaias Return

Influential environmentalist James Lovelock has long believed that the Earth self-regulates like a living organism.

His Gaia theory, named after the Greek deity of the same name who represents the personification of the Earth, suggests that our planets environment adjusts itself in response abuse such as what humanity is currently throwing at it.

And given our horrendous treatment of the environment, Gaia is about to return with a vengeance, the 102-year-old warns in anew commentary piece for The Guardian.

While that kind of argument may sound a bit like the plot of Avatar, it is an elegant encapsulation of the idea that our actions are throwing processes that long preexisted us seriously out of whack. And that means we need to act right now or face serious consequences.

Lovelock argues that surface temperatures of our planet were modulated for billions of years thanks to Gaia: forests, oceans and other elements in the the Earths regulating system, which kept the surface temperature fairly constant and near optimal for life.

But humanity has messed with that carefully balanced formula substantially.

Two genocidal acts suffocation by greenhouse gases and the clearance of the rainforests have caused changes on a scale not seen in millions of years, he writes. We are entering into a heat age in which the temperature and sea levels will be rising decade by decade until the world becomes unrecognizable.

To Lovelock, we cant simply put up a bunch more solar and wind farms to end our reliance on burning fossil fuels. In fact, the environmentalist made a surprising conclusion: We need to build more nuclear power stations to overcome that, though the greens will first have to get over their overblown fears of radiation.

And a global pandemic should come as a warning, he said. The virus, COVID-19, may well have been one negative feedback, Lovelock writes. Gaia will try harder next time with something even nastier.

READ MORE: Beware: Gaia may destroy humans before we destroy the Earth [The Guardian]

More on climate action: World Leaders Mocked for Flying Private Jets to Climate Conference

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Famed Scientist Warns That Earth May Rise Up and Kill Humanity - Futurism