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Category Archives: Transhuman News

Senate package deals with a different transportation issue: Human trafficking

Posted: March 1, 2015 at 8:40 am

Three Washington State Senate bills aim to increase awareness of human trafficking and help agencies coordinate efforts to confront the problem.

Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle, in her proposal would require anti-trafficking information to be posted in all public restrooms, including in private businesses.

A notice would be created by the states Office of Crime Victims Advocacy with input from businesses and anti-trafficking advocacy groups. Costs of printing and distributing the notices to businesses, under Senate Bill 5883, would be covered by anti-trafficking non-profit organizations.

The posters would list a hotline number for the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, which provides mental health, counseling, legal and referral services for victims.

Stephanie Martinez, advocacy manager at Seattle Against Slavery, said Washington is among the states with the highest per-capita call volume, citing the national resource centers statistics. In 2013 the center received 500 calls from within the state of Washington.

Posters with online numbers are one of the top 10 ways people call the center for services, she said. Mandatory-post laws and targeted campaigns significantly affect increasing call volume.

Another Kohl-Welles proposal uses a direct approach to combat human trafficking.

Under Senate Bill 5884, Washingtons Office of Crime Victims Advocacy would create a websiteWashington State Clearinghouse on Human Traffickingto gather information on anti-trafficking efforts around the state.

Its been recommended that we have a single point in state government to coordinate everything because we have many new bills that are being directed to various agencies in our state, Kohl-Welles said.

Statewide task-force reports, a directory of services for trafficking victims and other state and federal information would be gathered for the website.

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Senate package deals with a different transportation issue: Human trafficking

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Will 2015 Be The Year Our Smartphones Link Up To Our Brains?

Posted: at 8:40 am

Provided by Popular Science The Boston office of Thync, its interior walls covered in scribbles of dry-erase marker, exudes the youthful energy of any tech startup. But theres one noticeable departure from the typical startup visible just as I walk in the front door: a sign notifying study participants to please take a seat: someone will be with them shortly. Over the course of an hour, a handful of these participants, mostly college-aged, cycle through Thyncs offices, where they will fasten electrodes to their heads and become another data point in the companys growing body of neurological knowledge.

Thync bills itself first and foremost as a neuroscience company. Its sole productslated for release later this yearis a smartphone-controlled wearable device that will allow the user to actively alter his or her brains electrical state through transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). The big idea: give users active influence over their brain chemistries, and therefore their moods, their anxiety, and even their mental productivityan app that can conjure feeling of calm and tranquility or dial up a users attention and focus on demand.

Its the kind of technology thats been long promised but never delivered, a melding of consumer electronics and human biology that smacks of fantasy futurism. But nearly 2,000 people have already logged thousands of hours with Thyncs device in scientific trials. Thats what Thyncs founders believe differentiates their company from the many brain-interfacing technologies that have fizzled before it, and why a rotating cast of test subjects--including me--are at Thyncs offices today with small electrodes stuck to our heads. Were part of the science that Thyncs researchers believe will deliver the first real brain-interfacing consumer product before the end of the year.

Were in uncharted territory, its a new frontier, and people are going to be skeptical, says Issy Goldwasser, Thyncs co-founder and CEO. We want to make sure we have something real. So the company has from its outset been about the science, and thats important.

Thyncs other co-founder and chief science officer, Jamie Tyler, puts it another way. This company started as a science experiment, he says, which is to say it started with a technological outcome rather than a specific product in mind. Goldwasser sought out Tyler, who at the time was doing some envelope-pushing research into ultrasounds effects on the brain. The duo launched Thync in late 2011 to explore how ultrasound could be used to stimulate certain regions of the brain to produce specific responses, with the ultimate aim of integrating ultrasound into a brain-interfacing device.

Ultimately the ultrasound efforts foundered, and they turned to tDCS, or transcranial direct current stimulation. The technology, which involves stimulating targeted brain regions with low-current pulses of electricity, was, they concluded, consumer-ready.

Since then, Thync has grown to 20 full-time staff, collected roughly $13 million in venture funding, and produced a closely-guarded prototype of a consumer device that, Tyler says, is easy to use and works for the vast majority of people. With just a couple of electrodes stuck on the temple and at the back of the neck, Thyncs tDCS device delivers specially-designed waveforms of electricityThync calls these waveforms vibesto specific regions of the cranium.

These customized vibes are Thyncs secret sauce; the resulting mild shift in the brains electric state can reduce stress and anxiety or call up a persons best stuff on demand, Tyler says. And thats really just the beginning. Thync plans to launch its app with two vibes, Calm and Energy, but as the technology (and the science) progresses, more vibes for more feelings could be on the way.

Tyler, Goldwasser, and the rest of the Thync team are adamant that the technology works, and are themselves daily users of the prototype Thync technology. To prove it, theyve done extensive in-house research (hence the collegiate-types rotating through the front office) as well as contracted a third-party chronic-use study with City College of New York.

Conducted in the lab of Biomedical Engineering Professor Marom Bikson at City College New York, subjects were given tDCS stimulation via Thyncs device, a conventional clinical tDCS device, or sham stimulationtDCS that wasnt targeted in any specific way but, in terms of the tactile feel, indistinguishable from real tDCS. One hundred test subjects underwent stimulation as many as five times a day, four times per week, for six weeks running.

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Will 2015 Be The Year Our Smartphones Link Up To Our Brains?

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PVRIS – My House (Futurist Edit) – Video

Posted: at 8:40 am


PVRIS - My House (Futurist Edit)
Download: http://on.fb.me/1BJ3tUC https://soundcloud.com/futuristmusic/my-house Trap percussion edit of "My House (The Empty Room Sessions)" by PVRIS. Follow...

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PVRIS - My House (Futurist Edit) - Video

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International Space Station Timelapse for Wed, 4th February 2015 UTC – Video

Posted: February 28, 2015 at 10:45 am


International Space Station Timelapse for Wed, 4th February 2015 UTC
This is a image taken from the live feed from the International Space Station.

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International Space Station Timelapse for Wed, 4th February 2015 UTC - Video

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Apple Motion 5: Space Station Tutorial Part 3 – Video

Posted: at 10:45 am


Apple Motion 5: Space Station Tutorial Part 3
Third and final part of this epic tutorial that shows many different techniques for building a complex 3D environment in Motion. Project file here: http://to...

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Apple Motion 5: Space Station Tutorial Part 3 - Video

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International Space Station Timelapse for Thu, 12th February 2015 UTC – Video

Posted: at 10:45 am


International Space Station Timelapse for Thu, 12th February 2015 UTC
This is a image taken from the live feed from the International Space Station.

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International Space Station Timelapse for Thu, 12th February 2015 UTC - Video

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Northern Lights / Aurora: Night-time Time-lapse Video From the International Space Station / NASA – Video

Posted: at 10:45 am


Northern Lights / Aurora: Night-time Time-lapse Video From the International Space Station / NASA
OVer 20000 individual photos taken by astronauts on board the ISS have created this night time time-lapse video Bringing you the BEST Space and Astronomy vi...

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Space Station 13 (No Commentary): Wizards, Smizards – Video

Posted: at 10:45 am


Space Station 13 (No Commentary): Wizards, Smizards
Turn on your speaker. Asshats.

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Space station astronauts cleared for third spacewalk

Posted: at 10:45 am

Expedition 42 commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore, wearing a green shirt, and Terry Virts chatted with reporters Thursday from the space station's Quest airlock module. NASA managers Friday cleared them for a third spacewalk Sunday to complete initial preparations for dockings by commercial crew capsules. NASA TV

International Space Station managers Friday cleared astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Terry Virts to proceed with a third spacewalk Sunday, as originally planned, after concluding a small amount of water in Virts' space helmet after an EVA Wednesday was an understood condition and not a threat to crew safety.

The six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk is scheduled to begin around 7:10 a.m. EST Sunday when the astronauts switch their spacesuits to battery power and exit the station's airlock. The spacewalkers plan to install four antennas, laser reflectors and cabling to permit communications with approaching and departing commercial crew capsules being built by Boeing and SpaceX.

"We're going to lay down over 400 feet of cable," Virts told a reporter Thursday. "These cables are going to attach to some antennas that are going to be used for the future American vehicles that are going to be docking, bringing crew to the space station starting in a few years.

"So we need to put these antennas and the cables there for them, and also some reflectors so their on-board navigation systems that use lasers (to) know where the station is and what orientation it's in and will be able to dock properly. There's a lot of moving from one end to the other on the station and a lot of equipment and hardware that we're going to be bringing out there."

During spacewalks last Saturday and Wednesday, Wilmore and Virts laid out some 340 feet of power and data lines needed by two new docking mechanisms what will be installed later this year and made preparations to relocate a storage module and a docking port extension. Virts also lubricated the grapple mechanisms on the end of the station's robot arm.

During airlock repressurization Wednesday, Virts noticed a small blob of water floating in his helmet and reported that a water absorption pad at the back of his helmet was damp, indicating seepage through the helmet's air duct.

During a spacewalk in July 2013, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano endured a potentially catastrophic water leak that forced him to make a quick retreat to the safety of the airlock. That leak was blamed on a clogged filter inside the suit's water cooling system.

But in Virts' case, the water intrusion occurred after the spacesuit had been reconnected to a station umbilical and after airlock repressurization had begun. As it turns out that same spacesuit experienced similar incidents after seven previous spacewalks, the result of condensation in the suit's cooling system after airlock repressurization.

"When you connect to the umbilical, you have a lot of cold air that's going past the cooling system of the suit and this air will often condense," Alex Kanelakos, a NASA spacewalk officer, said Friday. "And as we repress, we have high-density gas that's flowing past this condensed water that can often move the water over the crew member's helmet."

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Space station astronauts cleared for third spacewalk

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Astronauts to go ahead with spacewalk Sunday

Posted: at 10:45 am

Astronauts on the International Space Station will make a spacewalk Sunday despite the appearance of water inside an astronaut's helmet after a spacewalk earlier this week, NASA reported Friday on its website.

NASA said the suit worn by NASA astronaut Terry Virts has a history of "sublimator water carryover." Water in the sublimator cooling component can condense when the suit is repressurized after a spacewalk, causing a small amount of water to push into the helmet, NASA said.

NASA said International Space Station managers had "a high degree of confidence" in the suit.

On the upcoming spacewalk, Virts and Barry Wilmore will install antennas to provide data to visiting vehicles and deploy 400 feet of cable along the edge of the station.

Virts said he first noticed traces of fluid and dampness in his helmet Wednesday while he was waiting for the crew lock cabin to repressurize in the International Space Station.

He and Wilmore had been outside the space station for nearly seven hours working on the station's robotic arm and performing some maintenance.

Virts immediately alerted fellow astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti about the water and she alerted Mission Control in Houston.

Cristoforetti helped Virts out of his helmet and examined it. She confirmed the presence of moisture, mostly in the helmet absorption pad, or HAP, describing it as "wet and cold."

At the request of Mission Control, Anton Shkaplerov used a syringe to draw as much water as he could from the top of the helmet. Water had collected in the white plastic at the top and around both ear cups. Shkaplerov estimated there was 15 milliliters of water in the helmet.

That's a far cry from the amount of water that accumulated in Luca Parmitano's suit during a spacewalk in July 2013. Between 1 and 1.5 liters of water backed up in the suit and helmet, prompting fears Parmitano could drown in his own helmet. The spacewalk was cut short and NASA implemented some changes to its suits, including the addition of absorbent padding in helmets.

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