Category Archives: Transhuman News

Ten Strong

The Solar System hasnt been the same since Pluto was downgraded from a planet to a dwarf planet, and all bets have been off since this monumental decision. Case in point, last year, scientists at the California Institute of Technology proposed that there might be a true Planet Ninein our solar system. The team asserted that it appears to be 10 times the mass of Earth and that it is hiding out in the remote recesses of our solar systemwell beyond the orbit of Pluto.

At the time of the discovery, Mike Brown, who was behind the work, noted that the existence of a 9th planet is extremely likely: Hey Planet Nine fans, a new eccentric KBO was discovered. And it is exactly where Planet Nine says it should be, Brown tweeted. Furthermore, he says, the new object takes the probability of this being a statistical fluke down to ~.001% or so.

Similar discoveries have been made in relation to new dwarf planets. Located about 13.7 billion km (8.5 billion miles) from the Sun, 2014 UZ224 measures about 530 km (330 miles) in diameter and takes around 1,100 Earth years to complete its orbit. And so, our littler corner of the cosmos has been in quite the state of flux.

Kathryn Volk and Renu Malhotra at the University of Arizona have noticed some strange movement out in the Kuiper beltmovement that they believe could suggest the existence of a tenth planet. To break this down a bit: Objects in the Kuiper belt are far enough away from the other major bodies in our solar system that the gravitational influence of the large planets doesnt impact them (at least, not to a measurable degree); however, their movements can still be predicted, thanks to sky surveys and a host of advanced technologies.

Notably, if these predictions dont match up, it may mean theres another objectanother large bodypast our vision whose gravity is impacting themovements of the Kuiper belt objects.

The search for Planet Ninehas lead scientists to believe that it is orbiting around700 AU from the Sun. However, Volk and Malhotra believe that this tenth planet could be much closer,as the orbit of Kuiper belt bodies shifted just beyond 50 AU. They also contend that the planet would be roughly comparable to Mars, in terms of size.

Other astronomers, however, are not so quick to hop on this train of thought. Alessandro Morbidelli at the Cte dAzur Observatory in Nice, France tellsNew Scientist I am dubious that a planet so close and so bright would have remained unnoticed.

Still, Volk is confident in these findings, which are set to be published in The Astronomical Journal. It would have to be quite a fluke for this to not be a real effect, she says. We think there is a real signal there and this implies an additional planet.

The discovery of more bodies in the Kuiper beltwill help to support or debunk these findings. Either way, our little solar family is going to continue to grow with these long-lost distant relations.

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New Evidence Suggests That Our Solar System Has 10 Planets - Futurism

On Wednesday, the price of Ether flash-crashed by over 99.9% in less than a second on GDAX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges. This was due to a multi-million dollar sell order being placed on the exchange. Because the exchange did not have enough buy orders on its books to accommodate a sell this large, the price crashed immediately from $317.81 to $224.48; this movement was enough to then trigger a wave of about 800 automatic position liquidations due to margin calls and stop-loss orders, driving the price briefly as low as $0.10, and causing GDAX to suspend trading.

This is only the most recent of a series of similar events across crypto exchanges, and rather than being a reflection on GDAX in particular, its a symptom of the underlying problems created by the stress of capital flow increasing faster than market infrastructure development.

Although the price quickly returned back above $300, the millions of dollars that investors lost due to forced selling of their positions will not be recovered. This incident highlights the relative immaturity of the cryptocurrency trading ecosystem, which has been stressed by a 20x increase in daily trading volume since the start of 2017 without any fundamental change in market structures.

From the trader-in-questions side (assuming they were simply trying to get out of this position in a crude way and not a malicious actor or market manipulator) dumping the whole position at once will have likely incurred millions in liquidity costs. A single huge move like this is both bad for them and for the margin traders who were forced out of positions at even worse prices, all due to price actions that would be easily avoidable through more intelligent trading logic.

On the other side, the exchange doesnt have adequate safeguards to prevent such a flash-crash. When a participant has a margin position less than their margin requirements in traditional markets, they are typically given 2448 hours to post collateral. GDAX, on the other hand, seems to instantly liquidate you (with market orders) into their very thin order book. Some version of this problem exists on most crypto exchanges, although a few (like Poloniex) try to mitigate it with simple trading logic to soften the price impact of underwater margin position liquidations.

GDAX stop losses operate similarly. For major foreign exchange trading pairs in traditional markets, the largest differential between a persons stop loss and actual execution price is ~0.10%. On GDAX, people who had stop losses at $316 actually sold their ether at $0.10. Furthermore, GDAX does not specify if stop orders are time-priority based or price based. For example, if someone has a stop loss order at $50, and someone puts a stop loss order later at $100, when a flash crash occurs, who gets to sell their ether first?

While this creates a short term windfall in margin calls for the exchanges owners, they pay that price in reputation and deterring players from trading crypto on margin. The uncertainty a trader has to live with in this environment is one of the major barriers to entry for the large institutional pools of capital that can bring the crypto markets into maturity and raise the overall market cap to the size of traditional asset classes.

While these events are frustrating due to the negative impact they have on the space as a whole, they are also exciting because they illustrate the massive opportunity present for those willing to do the work to build out sophisticated financial infrastructure.

The Omega One platform, which will be launched later in 2017, will provide a structural solution to problems like this, protecting both traders and exchanges.

If the trader who put the $30m order on GDAX had put the order in on Omega One, the market would barely have moved at all. Instead, the Omega trading engine would have taken this traders order and broken it into thousands of tiny sell orders, and placed those orders intelligently over time across all the worlds liquid crypto exchanges.

The order books on GDAX, Poloniex, Bitfinex, Kraken, and other exchanges would each have seen a tiny increment of additional selling pressure in the first seconds after the order enough to absorb the available demand to buy on those exchanges, but not enough to force a price move.

As those initial sell orders were traded, the Omega One trading engine would have monitored the outcomes and adjusted behavior accordingly within milliseconds, releasing sell orders to the market at exactly the pace that the market could absorb. Instead of pushing the entire order into one place within one second and thus crashing the market, Omega One would have spread the order out over all the worlds crypto exchanges over the space of perhaps an hour, and nobody would be any the wiser for it.

In addition to not losing millions of dollars and crashing the market, the unknown trader from Wednesday would have also have avoided the risk of putting their millions of dollars worth of crypto in the hands of an exchange. In order to sell the Ether on GDAX, they first needed to send that Ether to GDAX, giving up custody of their funds and trusting GDAX not to be hacked or otherwise compromise their funds.

If the unknown trader had been using Omega One, they could have kept their funds on the Ethereum blockchain in a wallet under their control, right up until the point of settlement. The combination of security and cost benefits provided by Omega One will transform the crypto markets, facilitating the next level of maturity of the crypto trading ecosystem.

Disclosure: Futurism is exploring a financial relationship with Omega One and has a personal affiliation with ConsenSys. This is a piece of editorial content. Omega One and ConsenSys do not have any review privileges on editorial decisions.

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Why the Ethereum Flash Crash Isn't Surprising, and What It Means for Crypto - Futurism

In BriefResearchers from the Chalmers University of Technology thinkthey've developed a method that could eliminate one of remainingobstacles to stable and sustainable nuclear fusion, which couldprovide the world with a source of virtually limitless cleanenergy. Taking It Slow

Scientists consider nuclear fusion the holy grail of energy production for good reason. Not only could it provide a virtually unlimited amount of energy, the energy would also be clean.

To that end, nuclear scientists have been hard at work since the dawn of the Atomic Age to replicate this energy that feeds the stars, and just this week, a team from the Chalmers University of Technology published a new study inPhysical Review Lettersthat outlines a way to eliminate one of the biggest remaining obstacles.

While nuclear fission creates energy by splitting atoms, fusion works in reverse. By combining two light nuclei, usually hydrogen atoms, nuclear fusion generates several times more energy than fission. Sustaining this reaction, which occurs within conditions of intense pressure and high temperatures, is difficult on its own, and the matter is further complicated byrunaway electrons, which candamage or even destroyfusion reactors.

The Chalmers researchers came up with a method to manage these runaway electrons. They found that injecting heavy ions in gas or pellet form into the reactor slows down the erring electrons by colliding with them. When we can effectively decelerate runaway electrons, we are one step closer to a functional fusion reactor, study co-author Linnea Hesslow said in a university press release.

As efforts to improve the worlds renewable energy sources continue, many see nuclear fusion as having the most potential. It can provide clean energy, with virtually zero carbon emissions, and it isnt seasonal like solar and wind.

Considering there are so few options for solving the worlds growing energy needs in a sustainable way, fusion energy is incredibly exciting since it takes its fuel from ordinary seawater, Hesslow added.

Thankfully, a number of efforts tostabilize nuclear fusionare underway. For instance, a Canadian collective aims to replace fossil fuels with nuclear fusion by the 2030s. That timeline is possible, especially considering the progress made over the past 50 years in fusion energy, but it wont be easy.

Many believe it will work, but its easier to travel to Mars than it is to achieve fusion. You could say that we are trying to harvest stars here on Earth, and that can take time, Hesslow explained. It takes incredibly high temperatures, hotter than the center of the Sun, for us to successfully achieve fusion here on Earth. Thats why I hope research is given the resources needed to solve the energy issue in time.

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Fusion Breakthrough Puts Us One Step Closer to Limitless Clean Energy - Futurism

In Brief At a recent ESA Science Program Committee meeting the LISA mission was set for a 2034 launch. The trio of satellites will search for gravitational waves from collisions of supermassive black holes millions of times larger than those detected by LIGO. LISA Launch Set

The ESAs Science Program Committee met on June 20, and at the top of their agenda was addressing planning for theagencys missions to come over thenext 20 years one ofwhich will be athree satellite Laser Interferometer Space Antenna mission (LISA). The space antennawas designed to detect gravitational waves. The LISA mission has been selected to move forward and is set to launch in 2034.

The project uses the satellite trio to create a huge triangle in space. The satellites form the corners and lasers bouncing across the 2.5 million kilometers (1.55 million miles) between them form itssides. The triangle itself will follow Earth as it orbits the Sun. Meanwhile, the satellites will be sorting through an impressive array of cosmic noise to determine which signals are the most promising signs of supermassive black holes, and which are just false leads.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) first detected gravitational waves in September 2015, confirming its initial findings when the waves weredetected again in June of 2016. By February of 2017, scientists learned that LIGO also produces the waves. Earlier this year, LIGOdetected the waves for the third time.They appearto be from a supermassive black hole thats 49 times larger than our sun.

LISA is taking the detection of gravitational waves to the next level by searching for supermassive black holes millions of times larger than those found by LIGO. LISA should also be able to give scientists enough lead time to observe the black holes with telescopes, enabling us to discover more about how these collisions work.

Well be able to see signals for months, so well have time to point all these other telescopes at that point in the sky to see if theres any other signals coming from that area when the merger happens, ESAs senior advisor for science & exploration Mark McCaughrean told New Scientist.

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Europe's Space Program Will Launch a Gravitational Wave Hunting Spacecraft in 2034 - Futurism

In BriefA Tesla Model S was just used to set a new record for distanceon a single charge: 901.2 km. The drivers were able to achieve thismilestone by hypermiling (operating the vehicle with the specificgoal of increasing efficiency), taking nearly an entire 24 hours tocomplete the run. The Model S Record

ATeslaModel S P100D has just been used to set a new record for distance driven on a singlecharge: 901.2 km (~560 miles). Steven Peeters and Joeri Coolsmanaged to breakthe record for the lowest energy consumption for the vehicle as well, achieving 88 Wh/km (54.7 Wh/mile).

They did so by hypermiling (driving the vehicle with the specific goal of increasing efficiency). For example, because cars are not asefficient at high speeds, the drivers averaged only 40 km/h (24 mph) a speed that wouldnt be ideal for actual travel, but thats great for breaking records.

Most previous approaches to hypermiling have focused on driving cars in a straight line, but Peeters and Cools opted for a different approach, following a 26 km (~16 mile) closed loop in Belgium in order to learn to optimize the cars energy usage.

By the time we finished the attempt, we knew perfectly how to take every turn and roundabout to make sure we drove with the least possible consumption, Peeters explained in a blog post. They also learned how to drive under different temperature conditions as theattempt took them almost an entire day: 23 hours and 45 minutes.

In 2015, Elon Muskpredicted thata Tesla with a 950 km+ (~600 mile) maximumrange would be ready by 2017. This attempt was just shy of the prediction, butthe drivers think they did the best they could under their circumstances and explained what would be necessary to break the 1,000 km (~621 miles) record:Thatwould have to be a perfect run in perfect circumstances, which I believe are not possible in our country.

Hypermiling is not the way the vast majority of people drive, but it is a good test to show just how efficient a car can be. We must also consider that this test was undertaken in the error-strewn landscape of human judgement.If the Model Ss Autopilotwereadjusted to maximize efficiency, it could potentiallylearn more quickly than the drivers and make the appropriate adjustments.

The previous Tesla record holder, Casey Spencer,achievedan 885 km (550 mile) run last year, so this record-breaking run marks an impressive new milestone for the Model Ss efficiency.

While these scores are not particularly close to beating the records set by non-electric vehicles, we must remember that this is only the second Tesla car ever built (with the Model 3 coming soon), updates are arriving quickly, and a lower maximum milage is a happy sacrifice for a more environmentally friendly mode of transportation.

If Teslas cars continue progressing at this rate, it wont be long before their environmentally unfriendly counterparts are matched in performance the only category theyre really ahead in anymore. Electric cars are now closing in fast on their fossil fuel-poweredcounterparts, with other recent feats including a Nio EP9 achieving a staggering time of 6:45:9 around Germanys Nrburgring track. Soon, theyll be ready for full industry domination.

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A Tesla Just Drove a Record Breaking 900+ Kilometers on a Single Charge - Futurism

In BriefThe Canadian Cancer Society has projected that almost half ofCanadians will at some point be diagnosed with cancer, and one inevery four will die from it. The leading forms of cancer areprostate, breast, lung, and colorectal. The Canadian Cancer Epidemic

Anew reportfrom the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) predicts that almost 50 percent of Canadians will be diagnosed with cancer, and half of these (25 percent of Canadians overall) will die from the disease. This makes cancer the leading cause of death in the country. The diagnosis rate for men is 49 percent, while for women it is 45 percent.

More than half of these cases are accounted for by prostate, breast, colorectal, and lungcancers. Lung cancer specifically was noted to kill more than the other three combined, and85 percent of its cases were caused by smoking. However, pancreatic cancer is the most deadly form in terms of percentage of people killed post-prognosis, with 5,500 Canadians to be diagnosed and 4,800 of these dying.

The CCS stated that the rise in cancer cases is primarily being driven by an aging and growing population. According to todays report, an estimated 206,200 Canadians will be diagnosed with cancer this year, and almost 90 percent of these cases will be among Canadians 50 years of age and older. While this news is shocking, it has not bucked the upward trajectory of cancer treatment in Canada: the five-year cancer death rate has decreased from 75 percent in the 1940s to 40 percent today.

Changing lifestyle choices is the key to decreasing your likelihood of cancer, said Leah Smith, CCS epidemiologist and one of the reports authors.She said in an interview for a CCS press release,Actions like quitting smoking, eating well, being physically active and practicing sun safety, along with appropriate cancer screening tests, can go a long way to reducing your risk of getting cancer.

The research was a collaborative effort between the CCS, the Public Health Agency of Canada, Statistics Canada, and provincial and territorial cancer registries. This collaboration is crucial because it gives an objective viewpoint and provides new statistics that, according to the CCS, are a better reflection of the risk of being diagnosed with cancer at some point in life.Without cooperation between different branches of the civil sector, such objectivity would be impossible.

The news, while tragic, serves to highlight the benefits of open information because Canadians along with the rest of the world can make changes to their lifestyles to lower their risk of adding to these cancer cases. It may also encourage more individuals to make appointments with doctors for possible cancer symptoms, which is vital, as early detection is one of the most powerful weapons against cancer.

There are promising pieces of research worldwide that focus on cancer detection and treatment although there could be more of theseas the CCS claim that 60 percent of high-priority research goes unfunded. Pivotal workincludesa new blood test, backed by Bill Gates, that can detect cancer; a possible new cancer treating drug called Pembrolizumab that has been fast-tracked by the FDA for its potential; and the development of a cancer vaccine that could inhibit cancer development in the first place.

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A New Study Reveals That Half of Canadians Will Be Diagnosed With Cancer in Their Lifetimes - Futurism

In Brief Swedish car company Volvo just announced that it has developed a separate brand to produce and market their upcoming line of electric vehicles.

A string of recent reports from Volvo has suggested that the Swedish car company is preparing to take on Tesla with an electric vehicle (EV) division. The company has released plans for their upcoming Tesla Model 3 competitor, an SUV slated for release sometime before 2019. More recently, the company announced that they will no longer develop diesel engines, signaling a shift toward electric models.

All of this has culminated in Volvos latest announcement. The company has also introduced a separate brand to produce and market high-performance electric cars, called Polestar. Hkan Samuelsson, president and chief executive of Volvo Cars said that Polestar will be a credible competitor in the emerging global market for high performance electrified cars.

Volvos first EV is expected to cost something in the range of $35,000 to $40,000, roughly similar to Teslas Model 3. However, Volvos electric option does seem to boast a slightly higher range at around 402 km (250 miles), compared to the Model 3s 346 km (215 miles).This could be the beginning of the EV wars to come. Volkswagen recently unveiledthree concept cars of its own and is planning to become an EV juggernaut by 2015. This competition will only push the transition from fossil fuel burning cars to EVs.

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Volvo Takes on Tesla with Announcement of Its New Electric Vehicle Brand - Futurism