Pejman Yousefzadeh

This amazing advance in technology—which makes all of our lives immensely easier, by the way—is brought to you by capitalism and the free markets it makes possible.

(Source: symphocta)

trendd:

A Russian billionaire, Dmitry Itskov, wants to bring the Avatar movie to real life by 2045. Allowing us to transfer our minds into a hologram body..

We might get to see some pretty crazy stuff in our lifetime.

“Scientists have already developed video game controllers that give players the ability to control on-screen movement with their brain waves, paralyzed patients can control a robot’s movements with just their thoughts via brain implants, and in Israel, a test subject was recently able to effectively direct the movements of a robot located nearly 1800 miles away.

In the 2045 Initiative, Itskov proposes the idea that humans can achieve immortality by 2045 through a series of advancing technological innovations.

• Year 2020: Humans will be able to remotely control robotic avatars through brain-computer interaction.
• Year 2025: Humans will be able to continue living after their physical bodies have given out by transplanting their brains into robotic avatars; this ‘autonomous life-support system’ will enable humans to continue to have an active life.
• Year 2035: The human brain and consciousness will be recreated via computer model and transferred to an avatar to enable humans to keep living after ‘death.’
• Year 2045: Immortality arrives in the form of a holographic avatar; the human brain and consciousnesses has been fully transferred to the artificial form.”

(via Humans Achieve Immortality As Holographic Avatars - PSFK)

I might live forever, and I might write a script for my life that is better than anything James Cameron might come up with. Sounds like a good deal to me.

kqedscience:

Swarms of robotic bees could pollinate the flowers of the future

“With the bee population in distressing decline, Harvard roboticists have been looking into an artificial solution for pollinating plants. That solution: Robobees, tiny winged robots that the team hopes will autonomously fly from flower to flower, spreading the pollen around. But these creepy little beauties may do more than pollinate — and they may be more insect-like than we ever imagined.”

Read more from io9.

wired:

Creating a powerful new input device for computers is hard, but not as hard as convincing people to ditch the mouse for something entirely new. Like, say, waving your hands in the air. You can either hand them out on street corner (bad idea), or bundle them with a computer maker. Leap Motion is doing the latter.

Getting rid of a mouse might help alleviate repetitive motion syndrome; yet another reason to further perfect and popularize this technology.

laughingsquid:

Mailbox, A New Mobile App That Plans To Conquer Email

I need this in the worst possible way.

Google Maps has returned to the iPhone. And there was much rejoicing in the land.

mashable:

Pretty much.

mashable:

Could Google Maps be coming back to the iPhone? The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is distributing a test version of its mapping app to people outside the company. A Google rep told The WSJ: “We believe Google Maps are the most comprehensive, accurate and easy-to-use maps in the world. Our goal is to make Google Maps available to everyone who wants to use it, regardless of device, browser, or operating system.”

Please tell me that this will happen. Soon. And enough with the Apple-Google wars, by the way; the companies are at their best when they innovate and force the other company to be better.

chumunculus:

A Computer Built in 1784

longreads:

A classic game is being undermined by technology, allowing players to come up with elaborate cheating schemes:

In the 2006 World Open in Philadelphia, the most moneyed tournament in the land — this year’s event, which concluded in July, had a kitty of $250,000 — tournament director Mike Atkins got bad feelings about a competitor named Steve Rosenberg, entered in the 2000-and-under division (a category for competent but non-master players). Rosenberg came into the tournament having won 18 matches in a row. Then Rosenberg kept his winning streak going against superior competition in the early rounds of the World Open, all the while wearing several layers of clothing in the heat of the Northeastern summer and playing each game with his hands cupped over his ears. Atkins eventually surmised the oddball get-up was part of a scheme, and that Rosenberg was somehow getting moves fed to him. With Rosenberg undefeated heading into the late rounds of the tournament and one win away from taking home the $18,000 first prize, Atkins confronted him about his suspicions, and during the interrogation a tiny electronic device was discovered in Rosenberg’s ear. The player claimed it was a hearing aid; Atkins hopped on his laptop and from Internet research quickly found that the gadget, called a Phonito, was in fact a radio receiver that could be used to relay information from a third party, and, in this case, was likely a third party accessing Fritz or some other chess engine. (The $270 Phonito was manufactured by Phonak, a Swiss electronics firm that at that time was in the news as the sponsor of Floyd Landis during his Tour de France cheating episode.) Rosenberg declined to answer Atkins’s questions; given what was at stake, the tournament director took the non-answers as a confession and booted him out of the tournament.

“Rooked.” — Dave McKenna, Grantland

More from Grantland

This is genuinely depressing to read.

discoverynews:

This could be revolutionary for non-signers, but there are so many differences between verbal language and signing if you understand both.

Gloves Turn Gestures into Speech

A set of sensors in these gloves, including an accelerometer, compass, gyroscope and flex sensors in the fingers, translate movement into signals that a computer converts into speech.

So far, the system can only read a dozen or so movements, but the potential is there.

The project, called EnableTalk, was a winner of the software design category at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup contest, where students from around the world showcase technology projects.

can you hear me…