Lifeboat Foundation

In this short inspiring movie, Ben Franklin explains what it means to be a Freemason.

The internet has transformed most areas of our lives over the last few decades, and the technology keeps improving: researchers just set a new record for data transmission rates, logging an incredible speed of 178 terabits per second (Tbps).

That’s around a fifth faster than the previous record, set by a team of researchers in Japan, and roughly twice as fast as the best internet available today.

With 4K movies about 15GB in size, you could download about 1,500 of them in a single second at the new speed.

Chinese film authorities issued a new document outlining policy measures to boost the country’s production of science fiction movies.

Entitled “Several Opinions on Promoting the Development of Science Fiction Films,” the document highlights how the sci-fi genre fits into the ruling Communist Party’s broader ideological and technological goals. It was released earlier this month by China’s National Film Administration and the China Association for Science and Technology, a professional organization.

The document focuses on domestically developing pro-China science fiction film content and high-tech production capability. It comes in the wake of the country’s first VFX-heavy sci-fi blockbuster hit, “The Wandering Earth,” which remains the third highest grossing film of all time in the territory with a local box office of $691 million.

A team of researchers at Stanford University has created an artificial intelligence-based player called the Vid2Player that is capable of generating startlingly realistic tennis matches—featuring real professional players. They have written a paper describing their work and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server. They have also uploaded a YouTube video demonstrating their player.

Video game companies have put a lot of time and effort into making their games look realistic, but thus far, have found it tough going when depicting human beings. In this new effort, the researchers have taken a different approach to the task—instead of trying to create human-looking characters from scratch, they use sprites, which are characters based on video of real people. The sprites are then pushed into action by a computer using artificial intelligence to mimic the ways a human being moves while playing tennis. The researchers trained their AI system using video of real tennis professionals performing; the footage also provided imagery for the creation of sprites. The result is an interactive player that depicts real professional tennis players such as Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Novak Jovovich and Rafael Nadal in action. Perhaps most importantly, the simulated gameplay is virtually indistinguishable from a televised tennis match.

Continue reading “AI player creates strikingly realistic virtual tennis matches based on real players” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmLVLB9_QNg&feature=youtu.be

Tow-in session Nazaré 28th Oct 2013
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Starring:
Carlos Burle, Sylvio Mancusi, Rodrigo Koxa, Maya Gabeira, Felipe “Gordo” Cesarano, Hugo Vau, Eric Rebiere, Pedro Scooby, Andrew Cotton and Garrett Macnamara
Shoot with Canon 7D and canon lens 300mm f.4
A film by Hélio Valentim
http://www.heliovalentim.com

Continue reading “Nazaré Blow Up — 28 October 2013 — Biggest Wave ever Surfed?” »

Aside from tracking asteroids that could endanger the planet, the telescope played a major role in the “SETI” program — the search for intelligent life. It was notably used by astronomer Carl Sagan to send an interstellar message.

Earlier this week, the facility was forced to close down after a cable supporting a metal platform above the telescope fell, tearing a 100-foot gash in its giant reflector dish.

“The cable didn’t really break in the sense of a cable kind of snapping, but it just sort of slipped from its socket, which is you know, an even weirder condition,” Arecibo Observatory Director Francisco Cordova told CBS News’ Jeff Glor.

Just like a nostalgic grandparent flipping through old photo albums, our brains constantly replay memories from past events in our lives as we sleep.

It may seem overly sentimental at first, but our minds aren’t just looking to reminisce and remember the good times. All of that brain activity while dreaming serves to strengthen and preserve existing memories, all while simultaneously finding some room for any new memories we may have made over the previous day.

Those are the main findings from a fascinating new study just released by the University of California, San Diego that investigated neural activity during sleep. The research team at UCSD says that no memory is set in stone within our minds; any memory can be lost, and sleep is when our minds rejuvenate old memories via replay and refine/make room for new memories.

In research published in Science Advances, a group led by scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) have used the principle of magneto-rotation coupling to suppress the transmission of sound waves on the surface of a film in one direction while allowing them to travel in the other. This could lead to the development of acoustic rectifiers—devices that allow waves to propagate preferentially in one direction, with potential applications in communications technology.

Devices known as rectifiers are extremely important in technology development. The best known are electronic diodes, which are used to convert AC into DC electricity, essentially making electrification possible.

In the current study, the group examined the movement of acoustic surface waves—movements of sound like the propagation of earthquakes over the surface of the Earth—in a magnetic film. There is interplay between the surface acoustic waves and spin waves, disturbances in magnetic fields within the material that can move through the material.

Can a Quantum Strategy Help Bring Down the House?

In some versions of the game blackjack, one way to win against the house is for players at the table to work as a team to keep track of and covertly communicate amongst each other the cards they have been dealt. With that knowledge, they can then estimate the cards still in the deck, and those most likely to be dealt out next, all to help each player decide how to place their bets, and as a team, gain an advantage over the dealer.

This calculating strategy, known as card-counting, was made famous by the MIT Blackjack Team, a group of students from MIT, Harvard University, and Caltech, who for several decades starting in 1979, optimized card-counting and other techniques to successfully beat casinos at blackjack around the world — a story that later inspired the book “Bringing Down the House.”