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Category: entertainment – Page 63

As of right now, Cortical’s mini-brains have less processing power than a dragonfly brain. The company is looking to get its mouse-neuron-powered chips to be capable of playing a game of “Pong,” as CEO Hon Weng Chong told Fortune, following the footsteps of AI company DeepMind, which used the game to test the power of its AI algorithms back in 2013.

“What we are trying to do is show we can shape the behavior of these neurons,” Chong told Fortune.

READ MORE: A startup is building computer chips using human neurons [Fortune].

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While many of us are still trying to figure out how to break up the monotony of self-isolation without spending countless hours in front of the television, perhaps some entertainment courtesy of Mother Nature herself might do the trick?

Aurora borealis (or Northern Lights) is one of nature’s most incredible phenomenons – and now you can livestream it directly into your living room.

Explore.org and Polar Bears International use footage from a camera located in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, which is situated underneath the aurora oval – thought to be one of the best places on earth to view the aurora borealis.

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Science fiction has always been a medium for futuristic imagination and while different colored aliens and intergalactic travel are yet to be discovered, there is an array of technologies that are no longer figments of the imagination thanks to the world of science fiction. Some of the creative inventions that have appeared in family-favorite movies like “Back to the Future” and “Total Recall,” are now at the forefront of modern technology. Here are a few of our favorite technologies that went from science fiction to reality.

These modern-day technologies appeared in science fiction decades before their time.

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On March 9, 2016, the worlds of Go and artificial intelligence collided in South Korea for an extraordinary best-of-five-game competition, coined The DeepMind Challenge Match. Hundreds of millions of people around the world watched as a legendary Go master took on an unproven AI challenger for the first time in history.

Directed by Greg Kohs with an original score by Academy Award nominee, Hauschka, AlphaGo chronicles a journey from the halls of Oxford, through the backstreets of Bordeaux, past the coding terminals of DeepMind in London, and ultimately, to the seven-day tournament in Seoul. As the drama unfolds, more questions emerge: What can artificial intelligence reveal about a 3000-year-old game? What can it teach us about humanity?

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All restaurants, cafés, cinemas and clubs in France will close at midnight in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus, the French prime minister Édouard Philippe said in a press conference.

He said the virus is spreading faster even though limitations on mass gatherings were imposed.

“People are still going to cafes and restaurants which is something that I would normally enjoy because this is the French way of living but not during these times,” he said.

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Foldit is crowdsourcing a cure and needs lots new players. All Transhumanist should participate.

The University of Washington is taking a novel approach to combat the spread of coronavirus around the world.

A new puzzle game from the university challenges scientists and the public alike to build a protein that could block the virus from infiltrating human cells. The game is on Foldit, a 12-year-old website created by the university’s Center for Game Science designed to crowdsource contributions to important protein research from more than 200,000 registered players.

The most promising ideas generated by the game will be tested and possibly manufactured by UW’s Institute for Protein Design in Seattle.

Continue reading “University of Washington coronavirus puzzle game aims to crowdsource a cure” | >

https://paper.li/e-1437691924

On October 4, 1923, the American composer George Antheil made his highly anticipated Paris debut at the Champs Elysées Theatre, in front of a rioting audience. A few minutes into the recital the crowd became unsettled; members of the audience started to protest the offensive nature of the music, others jumped to the musician’s defence, and before long the house was out of control. Unbeknownst to Antheil, the riot was in fact staged by his friends Marcel L’Herbier and Georgette Leblanc, who needed to film just such a scene for their upcoming movie, The Inhuman Woman. The ruse would only be revealed to him about a year after the incident. As he recalls:

I went to see a movie called L’Inhumaine, featuring Georgette LeBlanc. In this silent movie (still preserved by our New York Museum of Modern Art) you can if you wish see a vast rioting public… However, most curiously, this riot is no fake one. It is an actual riot, the same riot through which I played and lived that night. [1]

Antheil took the manipulative stunt well, recognizing that the disturbance made for great publicity, and that it served his reputation as an enfant terrible, a self-styled “bad boy” of contemporary music:

Continue reading “Three Articles of Posthuman Modernism: The Meta-Cinema of Marcel L’Herbier (and Friends)” | >

What I used to think was a basic suit for batman is anything but normal if it were true. It would cost about 1 million to make a real life one and the fabrics and materials might as well be alien because they are so exotic but look like fabric. If batman were real it would show how genius of science he truly is as his fabric technology is some of the most creative work any material scientist could ever dream of. Essentially it is like having a tank in a lightweight suit.

Happy Batman Day! DC Comics first created Batman Day for Batman’s 75th anniversary in 2014, and has continued to celebrate the Dark Knight on Sept. 23 each year since. While Harley Quinn has been trying to steal Batman’s thunder (happy 25th, Harls) this year, we still want to take a closer look at the guy who started it all.

A few years ago, MoneySupermarket.com put out an excellent infographic about the cost of being Batman. They used numbers based on The Dark Knight trilogy of films from Christopher Nolan, which means they were using modern technology (and values). But they only looked at base costs, not at ongoing numbers, and the base costs alone were astounding: $682 million just to become Batman. Based on those starting numbers, how much has Bruce Wayne spent on being Batman over the years? We’ll start with their numbers, and break it down based on the DC Comics sliding timeline; thanks to the New 52 reboot, where Bruce had been Batman for “about 7 years,” and assuming at least a year or two has passed since then, let’s go with nine years of Batman-ing.

batman-rebirth-batsuit.jpg

Continue reading “Batman Day: How much has Bruce Wayne spent on being Batman over the years?” | >

Sci-fi writer/director Alex Garland has some strong feelings about modern science and technology. If you haven’t yet seen his visually stunning and ideologically complex films, Ex-Machina and Annihilation, let’s just say he holds some skepticism about things that evolve beyond human control. But Garland evidently also has some feelings about dealing with film studios and production companies (many of which may not fancy the unflinching outcomes of his stories). So for his latest idea, he turned to the mini-series masters at FX to make his TV debut: Devs, an eight-part miniseries that seems to take Garland’s emerging mythos and apply it to the tech/research industry itself.

Ex-Machina scribe Alex Garland’s FX show continues his skepticism of things beyond control.

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