Impact Lab – Page 437 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

Analysis, Big Problems, Brain, Science & Technology News, Trending

IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries and that doesn’t bode well for humanity

October 28, 2020

IQ rates are dropping and we’re too stupid to figure out why.

An intelligence crisis could undermine our problem-solving capacities and dim the prospects of the global economy.

IQ rates are falling across Western Europe, and experts are scratching their heads as to why.May 22, 2019, 2:31 AM MDT

People are getting dumber. That’s not a judgment; it’s a global fact. In a host of leading nations, IQ scores have started to decline.

Though there are legitimate questions about the relationship between IQ and intelligence, and broad recognition that success depends as much on other virtues like grit, IQ tests in use throughout the world today really do seem to capture something meaningful and durable. Decades of research have shown that individual IQ scores predict things such as educational achievement and longevity. More broadly, the average IQ score of a country is linked to economic growth and scientific innovation.

Continue reading… “IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries and that doesn’t bode well for humanity”

Batteries, Electric Vehicles, Science & Technology News, Tesla

Tesla battery researcher shows new test results pointing to batteries lasting over 2 million miles

October 27, 2020

A Tesla battery researcher showed updated test results pointing to batteries lasting over 15,000 cycles or the equivalent of over 2 million miles (3.5 million km) in an electric car.

Last year, we reported on Jeff Dahn and his lab, who is under contract to do battery research for Tesla, releasing a paper that shows how the latest Li-ion battery technology can produce batteries that would last 1 million miles in electric vehicles.

In a new presentation, Dahn discussed updated test results from this new battery, which he hopes becomes the new standard Li-ion battery against which new battery technologies benchmark themselves.

The scientist, who is widely recognized as a pioneer in Li-ion batteries, referenced our article from last year about their paper and said that it sparked a massive interest in this new battery chemistry and battery longevity.

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cutting edge, New Discoveries, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

Meet the zeptosecond, the shortest unit of time ever measured

October 27, 2020

ABOVE – A particle of light, called a photon (yellow arrow), produces electron waves out of an electron cloud (grey) of a hydrogen molecule (red: nucleus). The result of those interactions is what’s called an interference pattern (violet-white). The interference pattern is slightly skewed to the right, allowing researchers to calculate the time for the photon to get from one atom to the next.

Scientists have measured the shortest unit of time ever: the time it takes a light particle to cross a hydrogen molecule.

That time, for the record, is 247 zeptoseconds. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second, or a decimal point followed by 20 zeroes and a 1. Previously, researchers had dipped into the realm of zeptoseconds; in 2016, researchers reporting in the journal Nature Physics used lasers to measure time in increments down to 850 zeptoseconds. This accuracy is a huge leap from the 1999 Nobel Prize-winning work that first measured time in femtoseconds, which are millionths of a billionths of seconds.

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Bitcoin, Blockchain, Money Talk, Science & Technology News

How Blockchain will End Commercial Banks

October 26, 2020

Daniel Masters, CoinShares executive chairman

JP Morgan’s former global head of energy trading, Daniel Masters, was among the first traditional investors to get into bitcoin, helping craft the value proposition that many institutional investors now embrace. COINSHARES

As much as bitcoiners and crypto enthusiasts try to deny it, bringing in converts from traditional finance is the best way to legitimize and publicize the industry in the eyes of many investors.

One of the earliest executives to take the leap was CoinShares executive chairman Daniel Masters. After a long and distinguished career as a commodities trader with JP Morgan and elsewhere, he serendipitously stumbled upon bitcoin after the commodities supercycle ended following the global financial crisis. Masters immediately saw the potential of bitcoin and blockchain, and he realized that his background as a technologist and commodities trader was tailor-made to make him an ambassador for this new industry to a net set of individual and institutional investors.

At the same time, through building his crypto investment management company, he was able to look into the future of this industry and see what developments lie ahead, as well as upcoming clashes between crypto insurgents and entrenched financial incumbents. Forbes sat down with Masters to get his thoughts on the future of this industry.

Continue reading… “How Blockchain will End Commercial Banks”

Coronavirus, Economy, Employment, Housing, Science & Technology News, Trending

‘Zoom towns’ are exploding in the West

October 26, 2020

And many cities aren’t ready for the onslaught.

First, there were boomtowns. Now, there are Zoom towns.

The coronavirus pandemic is leading to a new phenomenon: a migration to “gateway communities,” or small towns near major public lands and ski resorts as people’s jobs increasingly become remote-friendly. This is straining the towns’ resources and putting pressure on them to adapt.

A new paper published in the Journal of the American Planning Association shows that populations in these communities were already growing before COVID-19 hit, leading to some problems traditionally thought of as urban issues, like lack of affordable housing, availability of public transit, congestion, and income inequality. And while COVID-19 has accelerated the friction, the study suggests that urban planners can help places adjust.

There has been a drastic increase in remote work since March, when the pandemic hit the U.S. Nearly 60% of employees are now working remotely full or part time, according to a recent Gallup poll. Nearly two-thirds of employees who have been working remotely would like to continue to do so, according to that same poll. That would seemingly give workers a lot more flexibility when it comes to where they call home.

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Coronavirus, Entertainment, Music, Science & Technology News

The Flaming Lips performed a concert with the band and fans encased in plastic bubbles

October 27, 2020

The Flaming Lips perform in plastic bubbles

It’s unclear whether The Flaming Lips are using jelly — or vaseline, for that matter — at their concerts these days. The rock band is, however, trying plastic bubbles.

The rock musicians from Oklahoma City are literally blowing up in 2020, using inflatable human-sized bubbles to defend themselves and fans against Covid-19 while finding a way to play live.

Performing at The Criterion in their hometown on Monday evening, The Flaming Lips placed themselves — and all attending fans — inside individual plastic spheres. The concert — which was part live show, part music video shoot — was born out of a sketch doodled by Wayne Coyne during the pandemic’s early days, the frontman told CNN.

“I did a little drawing… where I drew a picture of The Flaming Lips doing a show in 2019. And I’m the only person in the space bubble, and everybody else is just normal,” Coyne told CNN during a phone interview on Friday. “Then (I did another drawing with) The Flaming Lips playing a show in 2020. The exact same scenario, but I’m in a bubble, and so is everybody else.”

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Artificial Intelligence, Ecological Products, Environment, Science & Technology News, Space

Satellites are mapping out every tree on earth using artificial intelligence

October 26, 2020

Scientists have mapped 1.8 billion individual tree canopies across millions of kilometres of the Sahel and Sahara regions of West Africa. It is the first time ever that trees have been mapped in detail over such a large area.

So how was it possible? Researchers analysed a huge database of satellite images using artificial intelligence. They employed neural networks which are able to recognise objects, like trees, based on their shapes and colours.

To train it, the AI system was shown satellite images where trees had been manually traced. This involved lead author Martin Brandt going through the arduous process of identifying and labelling nearly 90,000 trees himself, beforehand.

From these images, the computer learnt what a tree looked like and could pick out individual canopies from the thousands of images in the database. Brandt says it would have taken millions of people years to identify the trees without the AI system.

In a review of the research, commissioned by Nature, scientists at New Mexico State University wrote that “it will soon be possible, with certain limitations, to map the location and size of every tree worldwide”

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AI, Healthcare, Human Behavior, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

Harnessing deep neural networks to predict future self-harm based on clinical notes

October 25, 2020

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S., with over 1.4 million suicide attempts recorded in 2018. Although effective treatments are available for those at risk, clinicians do not have a reliable way of predicting which patients are likely to make a suicide attempt.

Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina and University of South Florida report in JMIR Medical Informatics that they have taken important steps toward addressing the problem by creating an artificial intelligence algorithm that can automatically identify patients at high risk of intentional self-harm, based on the information in the clinical notes in the electronic health record.

The study was led by Jihad Obeid, M.D., co-director of the MUSC Biomedical Informatics Center, and Brian Bunnell, Ph.D., formerly at MUSC and currently an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at the University of South Florida.

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Automation, Automobiles, Driverless vehicles, Science & Technology News

GM to run robot cars in San Francisco without human backups

October 25, 2020

General Motors’ Cruise autonomous vehicle unit says it will pull the human backup drivers from its vehicles in San Francisco by the end of the year.

Cruise CEO Dan Ammann said in a statement that the company got a permit Thursday from California’s Department of Motor Vehicles to let the cars travel on their own.

The move follows last week’s announcement from Waymo that it would open its autonomous ride-hailing service to the public in the Phoenix area in vehicles without human drivers.

Waymo, a unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc., is hoping to eventually expand the service into California, where it already has a permit to run without human backups.

Cruise has reached the point where it’s confident that it can safely operate without humans in the cars, spokesman Ray Wert said. There’s no date for starting a ride service, which would require further government permission, he said.

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Entertainment, Film, Films, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News

Sony reveals Spatial Reality Display, a 4K screen with glasses-free 3D

October 25, 2020

Volumetric 3D displays are neither easy to produce nor common, as holographic imagery generally requires a mix of stereoscopic screen technology and unique optics, sometimes backed by high-speed eye tracking. Today, the display experts at Sony are throwing their hat into the ring with a new option called the ELF-SR1 — also known as the Spatial Reality Display — which is initially being targeted at professional users in content creation businesses, but with an eye towards future use in consumer-facing applications.

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Energy, Engineering, New Discoveries, new technology, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

Scientists create the world’s first room temperature superconductor

October 24, 2020

Superconducting materials typically require extremely cool temperatures to operate, which is demonstrated in this photo. But a new discovery could change that

Since its discovery more than a century ago, superconductivity has come to play a powerful role in many modern day technologies, such as maglev trains and MRI scans, but its utility has been limited by the need for extremely cool operating temperatures. Scientists are now claiming a big breakthrough in this area, creating what they say is the first material capable of superconductivity at room temperature.

The work was led by Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester, and aims to overcome one of the major roadblocks in expanding the uses of superconductive materials. These materials exhibit no electrical resistance and expel a magnetic field, but because they typically only function at temperatures below -140 °C (-220 °F), they require expensive equipment to maintain.

“Because of the limits of low temperature, materials with such extraordinary properties have not quite transformed the world in the way that many might have imagined,” says Dias. “However, our discovery will break down these barriers and open the door to many potential applications.”

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Automation, New Inventions, Robots, Science & Technology News

LA debuts first firefighting robot in the country, deploys it in downtown blaze

October 24, 2020

The Thermite RS3 is capable of spraying 2,500 gallons per minute

A firefighting robot got its first major test Tuesday in Los Angeles when it was put to use for the first time in the United States to battle a major blaze.

The Los Angeles Fire Department said the Thermite RS3 robot was supposed to have its official public introduction in the afternoon but got called into duty a few hours early due to a blaze downtown.

“It had already gotten dirty at an early morning major emergency commercial structure fire that morning – proving its value from the start,” the department said.

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