Tag: technology

“INTELLIGENT LIQUID” CREATED BY HARVARD SCIENTISTS REPRESENTS STRANGE “NEW CLASS OF FLUID”

Harvard researchers say they have developed a programmable metafluid they are calling an ‘intelligent liquid’  that contains tunable springiness, adjustable optical properties, variable viscosity, and even the seemingly magical ability to shift between a Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid.

The team’s exact formula is still a secret as they explore potential commercial applications. However, the researchers believe their intelligent liquid could be used in anything from programmable robots to intelligent shock absorbers or even optical devices that can shift between transparent and opaque states.

“We are just scratching the surface of what is possible with this new class of fluid,” said Adel Djellouli, a Research Associate in Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the first author of the paper. “With this one platform, you could do so many different things in so many different fields.”

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Scientists Put Tardigrade Proteins Into Human Cells. Here’s What Happened.

Freeze ’em, heat ’em, blast them into empty space; with survival skills unlike any other organism on the planet, those hardy critters known as tardigrades will only come back for more.

While it’s clear their ability to withstand stress is in part due to their ability to turn their insides into gel, the mechanisms behind this act of metabolic preservation haven’t yet been made clear.

A new study led by researchers from the University of Wyoming found that expressing key tardigrade proteins in human cells slowed metabolism, providing critical insights into how these virtually indestructible invertebrates can survive under the most extreme conditions.

The team focused on a particular protein called CAHS D, already known to protect against extreme drying (desiccation). Through a variety of methods, the researchers showed how CAHS D transformed into a gel-like state when under stress, keeping molecules protected and protecting against drying.

“This study provides insight into how tardigrades, and potentially other desiccation-tolerant organisms, survive drying by making use of biomolecular condensation,” write the researchers in their published paper.

“Beyond stress tolerance, our findings provide an avenue for pursuing technologies centered around the induction of biostasis in cells and even whole organisms to slow aging and enhance storage and stability.”

Tardigrades have already shown they can survive hot and cold temperatures and high levels of radiation that would be fatal to human beings, and long periods without any water – normally so essential to life. They can even survive in space.

Previous research has revealed an impressive number of tricks that tardigrades use to stay alive, built up over hundreds of millions of years. Essentially, they’re very good at slowing the processes of life right down with the help of CAHS D, and that could be useful in human cells too.

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HOLOGRAPHIC BREAKTHROUGH: SCIENTISTS CREATE FULL-COLOR 3D HOLOGRAPHIC DISPLAYS WITH ORDINARY SMARTPHONE SCREEN

A team of scientists from the University of Tokyo has revealed a major breakthrough that allows them to create realistic 3D holographic displays using an ordinary iPhone screen.

While conventional approaches to holography involve complex and expensive laser emitters that have limited their practical use, the researchers behind this novel approach say their work could lead to dramatic improvements in holographic displays for virtual reality applications, including gaming, training, and even advanced military applications.

3D HOLOGRAPHIC DISPLAYS LIMITED BY COST AND COMPLEXITY

In science fiction, holograms are used for anything from basic communications to advanced military weaponry. In the real world, 3D holographic displays have yet to break through to everyday products and devices. That’s because creating holograms that look real and have significant fidelity requires laser emitters or other advanced pieces of optical equipment. This situation has stymied commercial development, as these components are complex and expensive.

More recently, research scientists were able to create realistic 3D holographic images without lasers by using a white chip-on-board light-emitting diode. Unfortunately, that method required two spatial light modulators to control the wave fronts of the emitted light, adding a prohibitive amount of complexity and cost.

Now, those same scientists say they have created a simpler, more cost-effective way to create realistic-looking 3D holographic displays using only one spatial light modulator and new software algorithms. The result is a simpler and cheaper method for creating holograms that an everyday technology like a smartphone screen can emit.

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Korean Fusion Reactor Breaks Record, Staying 7 Times Hotter Than The Sun’s Core

Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research, or KSTAR, is one of the most advanced test fusion reactors on the planet. Nicknamed the Korean artificial sun, it has now demonstrated sustained fusion temperature for almost a minute and the ability to contain extremely hot plasma for over 100 seconds.

Fusion is what powers stars, but in stars, it happens at lower temperatures than we need to do it here on Earth. That’s because gravity is keeping everything packed together so fusion is more likely to happen. So the temperature required on Earth for a Tokamak system – which is a donut-shaped reactor – is about seven times the temperature at the core of the Sun: 100 million °C (180 million °F).

KSTAR first reached this threshold in 2018 but only for 1.5 seconds. A year later, they were able to keep the plasma that hot for 8 seconds, increasing it to 20 seconds in 2020. The last record was in 2021, when the plasma was kept that hot for half a minute. Since then, the team at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) has upgraded the device by building a new tungsten divertor environment and they have pushed the temperature for longer.

Now, KSTAR can sustain 100 million °C for 48 seconds – and it can keep hot plasma in the high-confinement mode (also known as H-mode) for 102 seconds. The goal is to achieve 300 seconds of burning plasma by the end of 2026. 

“Despite being the first experiment run in the environment of the new tungsten divertors, thorough hardware testing and campaign preparation enabled us to achieve results surpassing those of previous KSTAR records in a short period,” Dr Si-Woo Yoon, Director of the KSTAR Research Center, said in a statement.

“To achieve the ultimate goal of KSTAR operation, we plan to sequentially enhance the performance of heating and current drive devices and also secure the core technologies required for long-pulse high performance plasma operations.”

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Facebook let Netflix see user DMs to help them tailor content as part of a close collaboration between the two tech giants, new court documents claims

Facebook‘s parent company Meta allegedly allowed Netflix to peer at its user DMs ‘for nearly a decade’ to help the streaming giant better tailor content for its own users, an explosive lawsuit has alleged. 

Court documents unsealed on March 23 that were filed last April as part of a major anti-trust lawsuit against Meta appear to have exposed the intricate relationship between two of Silicon Valley’s biggest players. 

The class-action lawsuit, filed by two US citizens, Maximilian Klein and Sarah Grabert, alleged Netflix and Facebook ‘enjoyed a special relationship’, with the social media platform giving the streaming site ‘bespoke access’ to user data. 

The two Silicon Valley players also agreed to ‘custom partnerships and integrations that helped supercharge Facebook’s ad targeting and ranking models’ from at least 2011, thanks to the personal relationship between Netflix’s co-founder Reed Hastings and Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg. 

Lawyers alleged that ‘within a month’ of Hastings joining Facebook’s board of directors, the two companies signed an ‘Inbox API’ (Application Programming Interface) agreement that ‘allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s user’s private message inboxes.’

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Major League Baseball’s biometric ticketing collects 6K opening day hits

Fans entered a stadium with biometrics during the opening day of the 2024 Major League Baseball (MLB) season, one of four ballparks to deploy the technology, and the league has high hopes for the touchless access program.

The Washington Nationals added biometric ticketing to their opening day lineup through MLB’s Go-Ahead Entry. The introduction of Go-Ahead Entry allows fans attending Nationals games to use the MLB Ballpark app for touchless entry at gates equipped with dedicated hardware.

Fans using the optional service register their biometrics with a selfie and then use facial authentication to enter at full walking speed through dedicated gates. Four lanes have been deployed at Nationals Park in D.C. Two of those are on the west end of the Park’s center field gates, another in center field, and one more on the first-base side of the stadium.

The rollout in Washington follows trials last year at Citizens Bank Ballpark in Philadelphia last year. Those trials showed the biometric lines moving 68 percent faster, and 2.5 times more people passing through them than the fastest lane using physical or smartphone-based tickets, reports the Fredericksburg Free Press. The Phillies have taken their deployment stadium-wide for the 2024 season.

Prior to that, face biometrics were used for entry to New York Mets games with Wicket technology, and to Cleveland Guardians games with Clear’s technology.

The facial recognition technology for MLB’s Go-Ahead Entry was developed by NEC, according to an April 1 ESPN report.

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8 Extremely Unusual Events That Will Happen During The Month Of April

When is the last time that there was so much buzz about one month?  As we enter April, there is so much anticipation in the air, and it isn’t just because of the Great American Eclipse on April 8th.  In recent days, I have heard from so many people that feel like something really big is about to happen.  I can feel it too.  It is almost as if we are all holding our breath as we wait for the next shoe to drop.  Chaos is threatening to erupt all over the globe, and meanwhile signs in the heavens are literally screaming at us to pay attention.  The following are 8 extremely unusual events that will happen during the month of April…

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Gavin Newsom Applauds Rollout Of AI Surveillance Network In California

If you’re not a criminal then you have nothing to hide, right?  This is the perpetual argument used in favor of state mass surveillance throughout history.  It’s the underlying justification at the birth of every surveillance agency from the Soviet Cheka to the German Stasi and beyond.  Don’t commit crimes and “you have nothing to worry about.”

Of course, this argument requires the public to overlook a simple and universal truth – That which is legal today can be made illegal tomorrow, and the people who make these decisions are often not good people.  With the ability to track and trace the behavior and movements of the citizenry in real time, the temptation to abuse that technology to increase government power is exponential.  That is to say, mass surveillance tends to inspire governments to abuse their authority and treat people like criminals even when they are innocent.

As we witnessed around the world during the pandemic lockdowns, authoritarianism can rear its ugly head without much warning and with incredible speed.  Some western countries (and even a few American states) aggressively sought to make resistance to covid restrictions criminal, to the point that authorities were legislating and even building “camps” designed to lock up covid offenders.  These plans were of course denied by political leaders even as they were putting the pieces in place to implement them. 

All of this was done in the name of a virus with a 99.8% survival rate.  What might they do when a legitimate crisis comes along?

We have seen how far our governments are willing to go to go to secure greater power over the populace; they have proven they’re not trustworthy enough to handle unilateral oversight. With real-time AI based surveillance in place the dangers are far greater.  Across the country there has been a quiet rollout of a new algorithm driven camera network from a company called Flock Safety.  

Flock offers AI integrated cameras with off-grid options (solar) that they say are meant primarily for license plate reading and vehicle identification.  California Governor Gavin Newsom recently applauded the creation of a new 480 camera network from Flock that will ostensibly focus on the Oakland metro area.

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Why L. Ron Hubbard Patented His E-Meter

To call L. Ron Hubbard a prolific writer is an extreme understatement. From 1934 to 1940, he regularly penned 70,000 to 100,000 words per month of pulp fiction under 15 different pseudonyms published in various magazines. Not to be constrained by genre, he wrote zombie mysteries, historical fiction, pirate adventure tales, and westerns.

But by the spring of 1938, Hubbard started honing his craft in science fiction. The publishers of Astounding Science Fiction approached Hubbard to write stories that focused on people, rather than robots and machines. His first story, “The Dangerous Dimension,” was a light-hearted tale about a professor who could teleport anywhere in the universe simply by thinking “Equation C.”

How Scientologists use the E-meter

Twelve years and more than a hundred stories later, Hubbard published a very different essay in the May 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction: “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science.” In the essay, Hubbard recounts his own journey to discover what he called the reactive mind and the “technology” to conquer it. The essay was the companion piece to his simultaneously released book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, which in turn became the foundation for a new religion: the Church of Scientology.

Marrying technology with spirituality, Hubbard introduced the electropsychometer, or E-meter, in the 1950s as a device to help his ministers measure the minds, bodies, and spirits of church members. According to church dogma, the minds of new initiates are impaired by “engrams”—lingering traces of traumas, including those from past lives. An auditor purportedly uses the E-meter to identify and eliminate the engrams, which leads eventually to the person’s reaching a state of being “clear.” Before reaching this desirable state, a church member is known as a “preclear.”

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Does wireless tech cause cancer or is it just another “coincidence” being propagated by tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists?

Do cell phones, Bluetooth devices, WiFi and other wireless tech cause cancer or is it just another “coincidence” that tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists are sharing on their smartphones?

Let me tell you about such a “coincidence” I witnessed firsthand…

Many years ago, I hired a young lady to help out around the apartment and in the office, as my wife was quite ill and I was already working seven days a week (still am, I guess). The new assistant came in six days a week for a few hours and completed a long list of items in record time. The whole time she’d be singing and was a joy to have around.

Until, after about six months, she began slowing down and making mistakes. I asked her what was up. She said she was having trouble getting to sleep and staying asleep at night.

I asked her a few questions about her sleeping arrangements. It turned out to be an EMF nightmare: She and her husband both slept in a small, loft room, upon a large futon on the floor with a tin roof above them. On either side of their bed, they each had their laptops and their smartphones active, recharging and certainly not in airplane mode. They also kept their WiFi blasting all night.

I suggested that maybe they should experiment and get all the tech out of their sleeping chamber and kill the WiFi at night.

She looked at me like I had suggested they move out to the wilderness and live in a cave.

I then told her about the $30 million, ten-year study the US Department of Health and Human Services conducted, exposing rats to 2G and 3G cellphone radiation. I believe the scientists were trying to prove that wireless tech was harmless.

Their experiment failed.

The study concluded “there is clear evidence that male rats exposed to high levels of radio frequency radiation (RFR) like that used in 2G and 3G cell phones developed cancerous heart tumors, according to final reports released today. There was also some evidence of tumors in the brain and adrenal gland of exposed male rats.”

She told me that she wasn’t worried about that and Jesus would heal her if she got cancer.

Well, you can’t argue with faith. So I didn’t mention it again.

Fast forward a few months and she’d become quite sick — throwing up and having to lie down after an hour of work. She had to quit.

A week later, she emailed to let us know that she had cancer and was beginning chemotherapy. The doctors found one tumour on her heart (just like the rats in the study) and the other in her neck.

Coincidence? Sure. Just like getting vaccinated and dying suddenly is a coincidence.

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