March 2020 – Page 6

DaVinci Institute, Futurist, Science & Technology News, Tom Frey

What the future will look like for work, colleges

March 12, 2020

For more than a century, automotive engineers have focused much of their attention on making vehicles as comfortable, safe and convenient as possible for drivers.

They’ve perfected the positioning of the steering wheel and gas pedal. Experimented with the best way to arrange knobs and controls. Determined the optimum placement of mirrors and other accessories.

What happens to all of this knowledge as cars become driverless? More important, how will an automotive engineer’s job change — and what new skills and knowledge will become essential to performing it?

This excerpt comes from an article in the upcoming issue of Community College Journal, which should be reaching your mailbox soon.

Futurist Thomas Frey uses this example to show how technology is fundamentally altering everything we thought we knew. This includes the nature of many long-standing occupations — and even the college experience.

“The world is changing rapidly,” says Frey, who is founder and executive director of the Colorado-based DaVinci Institute. “Ten years from now, education is going to look radically different. It might not feel like it, but we’re in the midst of a huge transition.”

Continue reading… “What the future will look like for work, colleges”

Engineering, new technology, quantum computing, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

Honeywell says it will soon launch the world’s most powerful quantum computer

March 11, 2020

“The best-kept secret in quantum computing.” That’s what Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) CEO Ilyas Khan called Honeywell‘s efforts in building the world’s most powerful quantum computer. In a race where most of the major players are vying for attention, Honeywell has quietly worked on its efforts for the last few years (and under strict NDA’s, it seems). But today, the company announced a major breakthrough that it claims will allow it to launch the world’s most powerful quantum computer within the next three months.

In addition, Honeywell also today announced that it has made strategic investments in CQC and Zapata Computing, both of which focus on the software side of quantum computing. The company has also partnered with JPMorgan Chase to develop quantum algorithms using Honeywell’s quantum computer. The company also recently announced a partnership with Microsoft.

Continue reading… “Honeywell says it will soon launch the world’s most powerful quantum computer”

Elon Musk, NASA, Science & Technology News, Space

Terraforming Mars might be impossible… for now

March 11, 2020

Making Mars more Earth-like would be a gargantuan task. From giant mirrors to tiny microbes, here’s the thinking behind making Mars habitable for humans.

This story is part of Welcome to Mars, our series exploring the red planet.

At the end of 1990’s sci-fi adventure Total Recall, all it takes is the push of a button. In a matter of minutes, Mars’ sky transforms from a hellish red to an Earth-like blue. After nearly suffocating on the Martian surface just moments before, Arnold Schwarzenegger takes in lungfuls and lungfuls of that sweet, sweet breathable Martian air.

This is terraforming, the concept of making a planet more hospitable to humans, and it’s been cropping up in pop culture since the early 1900s, everywhere from books to movies to video games. Once upon a time, the idea of turning Mars into Earth 2.0 might have been merely a fanciful notion, as theoretical as actually going to the planet at all.

But in 2020, Mars is very much on the agenda. NASA, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic — they all want to put space boots on the ground, and in some cases as soon as the 2030s. But as scientists work toward blastoff, the concept of terraforming will most likely be a case of “failure to launch.”

Continue reading… “Terraforming Mars might be impossible… for now”

Big Problems, Corporate Manipulation, Environment, Science & Technology News

Planet Plastic : How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades

March 10, 2020

Every human on Earth is ingesting nearly 2,000 particles of plastic a week. These tiny pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap water, food, and even the air, according to an alarming academic study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, dosing us with five grams of plastics, many cut with chemicals linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays. Since the paper’s publication last year, Sen. Tom Udall, a plain-spoken New Mexico Democrat with a fondness for white cowboy hats and turquoise bolo ties, has been trumpeting the risk: “We are consuming a credit card’s worth of plastic each week,” Udall says. At events with constituents, he will brandish a Visa from his wallet and declare, “You’re eating this, folks!”

With new legislation, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2020, Udall is attempting to marshal Washington into a confrontation with the plastics industry, and to force companies that profit from plastics to take accountability for the waste they create. Unveiled in February, the bill would ban many single-use plastics and force corporations to finance “end of life” programs to keep plastic out of the environment. “We’re going back to that principle,” the senator tells Rolling Stone. “The polluter pays.”

The battle pits Udall and his allies in Congress against some of the most powerful corporate interests on the planet, including the oil majors and chemical giants that produce the building blocks for our modern plastic world — think Exxon, Dow, and Shell — and consumer giants like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Unilever that package their products in the stuff. Big Plastic isn’t a single entity. It’s more like a corporate supergroup: Big Oil meets Big Soda — with a puff of Big Tobacco, responsible for trillions of plastic cigarette butts in the environment every year. And it combines the lobbying and public-relations might of all three.

Continue reading… “Planet Plastic : How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades”

Electric Vehicles, Energy, Green Friendly, Science & Technology News, Transportation

Silent Yachts debuts a new triple-deck version of its dead-quiet solar-powered catamaran

March 10, 2020

Silent 80 Tri Deck Silent Yachts

It’s been touted as the builder’s “most spacious model to date.”

After making a major splash in the marine world earlier this year, Silent Yachts is doubling down—or tripling, perhaps—on its groundbreaking solar-powered catamaran. The Austrian-based builder has just unveiled a brand-new tri-deck version of its flagship Silent 80 series.

Touted as the marque’s “most spacious model to date,” the triple-decker boasts an epic panoramic air-conditioned saloon on the flybridge—a feature which sets it apart from its predecessor. The layout can be arranged with either a sweeping skylounge on the top deck or an expansive 295-square-foot fly deck—whatever the owner desires.

“We thought we can make another step forward with the new model,” Silent Yachts founder and chief executive Michael Köhler said. “The additional sky lounge is a very convenient space and helps stretch out the period of using the boat. The extra space on top extends social areas onboard, while offering new opportunities in terms of layout.”

Continue reading… “Silent Yachts debuts a new triple-deck version of its dead-quiet solar-powered catamaran”

Aviation, drones, Elon Musk, military drones, Science & Technology News, Weapons

Elon Musk: ‘F-35 fighter jets would have no chance against drones’

March 10, 2020

Elon Musk has suggested Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II fighter jets, which are a key part of the Morrison government’s $200 billion investment in defence, would “have no chance” against an autonomous drone in the battlefield.

“The fighter jet era has passed,” Mr Musk said at the US Air Force’s Air Warfare Symposium in Florida.

“Drone warfare is where the future will be. It’s not that I want the future to be this – it’s just, this is what the future will be.”

Continue reading… “Elon Musk: ‘F-35 fighter jets would have no chance against drones’”

Automobiles, Driverless vehicles, Electric Vehicles, Green Friendly, Science & Technology News, Transportation

The Gruzovikus self-driving freight tractor is almost too beautiful for words

March 9, 2020

Art Lebedev Studio’s Gruzovikus concept truck: fully electric, fully autonomous, extremely beautiful

You don’t normally think of freight tractors in terms of visual appeal: they are enormous machines meant to haul stuff all across the world, so whether they’re pretty or not is of no consequence.

But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be pretty, though. When it comes to good looks, this concept from Art Lebedev Studio takes the crown: there is simply no prettier truck cab out there, real or only in concept stage. This is no coincidence, either: the design team specifically set out to show the world that you can have both brawn and beauty in a single truck cab. And brains, to boot.

Meet Gruzovikus (which literally means truck in Russian), the electric, self-driving truck cab that hauls merchandise from point A to point B, and looking fabulous while doing it. It’s the result of 43 days’ of work for the team at Art Lebedev Studio, and it remains the most startling and impressive concept to this day, a few good months after it was made public.

Clearly, the future of transport is electric and autonomous. This truck has them both, with a good dose of good looks to go. It’s incredibly slim, to the point where it forms an L shape when viewed from the side. It has no windows or doors, because it doesn’t need any. All it has is a giant computer screen that houses the computer, the sensors and the cameras, and everything else needed to make long-distance travels safe.

Continue reading… “The Gruzovikus self-driving freight tractor is almost too beautiful for words”

Google, IBM, quantum computing, Science & Technology News

Inside the race to build the best quantum computer on Earth

March 9, 2020

IBM thinks quantum supremacy is not the milestone we should care about.

Google’s most advanced computer isn’t at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, nor anywhere in the febrile sprawl of Silicon Valley. It’s a few hours’ drive south in Santa Barbara, in a flat, soulless office park inhabited mostly by technology firms you’ve never heard of.

An open-plan office holds several dozen desks. There’s an indoor bicycle rack and designated “surfboard parking,” with boards resting on brackets that jut out from the wall. Wide double doors lead into a lab the size of a large classroom. There, amidst computer racks and jumbles of instrumentation, a handful of cylindrical vessels—each a little bigger than an oil drum—hang from vibration-damping rigs like enormous steel pupae.

On one of them, the outer vessel has been removed to expose a multi-tiered tangle of steel and brass innards known as “the chandelier.” It’s basically a supercharged refrigerator that gets colder with each layer down. At the bottom, kept in a vacuum a hair’s breadth above absolute zero, is what looks to the naked eye like an ordinary silicon chip. But rather than transistors, it’s etched with tiny superconducting circuits that, at these low temperatures, behave as if they were single atoms obeying the laws of quantum physics. Each one is a quantum bit, or qubit—the basic information–storage unit of a quantum computer.

Late last October, Google announced that one of those chips, called Sycamore, had become the first to demonstrate “quantum supremacy” by performing a task that would be practically impossible on a classical machine. With just 53 qubits, Sycamore had completed a calculation in a few minutes that, according to Google, would have taken the world’s most powerful existing supercomputer, Summit, 10,000 years. Google touted this as a major breakthrough, comparing it to the launch of Sputnik or the first flight by the Wright brothers—the threshold of a new era of machines that would make today’s mightiest computer look like an abacus.

Continue reading… “Inside the race to build the best quantum computer on Earth”

Automobiles, Electric Vehicles, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

Citroën launches $6,000 electric car that a 14-year-old can drive

March 10, 2020

Citroën is launching the Ami, a new ~$6,000 mini electric car that can cost just $20 per month and it can be legally driven by a 14-year-old can in France.

We call it an electric car because it looks like a small city car, like a smart, but Citroën is calling Ami a “light quadricycle.”

It’s accessible to people from 14 years old in France, though the French automaker says that only 16-year-olds on average are going to be allowed to drive in most European countries. Another advantage (or risk depending on how you look at it) is that in some places, you won’t even need a driver’s license to get behind the wheel of an Ami.

Continue reading… “Citroën launches $6,000 electric car that a 14-year-old can drive”

Employment, Health & Fitness, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

How smoking could make you unemployable

March 8, 2020

Intrusive ‘wellness’ policies and rules on off-duty behavior are becoming widespread.

Nearly a decade after she stopped smoking, Mabel Battle still has the last pack of cigarettes she ever bought. She keeps it as a reminder of all the gray Ohio winter workdays she spent standing outside her office with the other shivering smokers getting a nicotine fix.

The cigarette pack is a testament to her willpower, she says: after countless failed attempts, she finally quit. However, her success at giving up is also a striking result of a contentious corporate experiment. What finally prodded her into her decision was a fear that her habit might threaten her employment. “I wanted to keep my job more than I wanted to smoke cigarettes,” says Battle.

The Cleveland Clinic, where Battle works as a health unit coordinator, has been a leader in corporate anti-smoking initiatives. It first banned smoking on its 170-acre campus in 2008, and followed that up with a new policy to chemically screen job applicants for nicotine and refuse employment to those who test positive. Workers such as Battle who were on staff before the ban would not be fired for smoking in their free time, but she could see the culture changing.

Continue reading… “How smoking could make you unemployable”

Latest News, New Discoveries, new technology, quantum computing, Science & Technology News

Quantum researchers able to split one photon into three

March 8, 2020

Researchers from the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo report the first occurrence of directly splitting one photon into three.

The occurrence, the first of its kind, used the spontaneous parametric down-conversion method (SPDC) in quantum optics and created what quantum optics researchers call a non-Gaussian state of light. A non-Gaussian state of light is considered a critical ingredient to gain a quantum advantage.

“It was understood that there were limits to the type of entanglement generated with the two-photon version, but these results form the basis of an exciting new paradigm of three-photon quantum optics,” said Chris Wilson, a principle investigator at IQC faculty member and a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Waterloo.

“Given that this research brings us past the known ability to split one photon into two entangled daughter photons, we’re optimistic that we’ve opened up a new area of exploration.”

Continue reading… “Quantum researchers able to split one photon into three”

Bitcoin, Blockchain, Money Talk, Science & Technology News

Bitcoin’s guardian angel : Inside Coinable billionaire Brian Armstrong’s plan to make crypto safe for all

March 8, 2020

Near the foot of San Francisco’s California Street stand the august stone pillars of a bank dating to the 19th century. A few paces away sit the offices of Coinbase, the largest American exchange for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. It’s a beehive of software engineers and young marketing executives. There, the worlds of by-the-books banking and crypto-anarchism collide.

In style and philosophy, Brian Armstrong, the 37-year-old billionaire cofounder and CEO of Coinbase, is in the camp of the financial anarchists. He sits, jammed alongside lieutenants, in a row of tiny desks resembling library carrels. He wears a black T-shirt, black pants and shiny white sneakers. He talks about a brave new world in which we are liberated from the shackles of giant banks and government-controlled money supplies. During an expansive interview, this usually reserved and press-shy entrepreneur declares why he got into this business: “I wanted the world to have a global, open financial system that drove innovation and freedom.”

Continue reading… “Bitcoin’s guardian angel : Inside Coinable billionaire Brian Armstrong’s plan to make crypto safe for all”