Category: Futurism, Fads, and Follies

https://thenextweb.com/eu/2017/06/02/amsterdam-paris-connected-hyperloop-2021/#.tnw_ea50JDIT
The company has already set itself an ambitious goal of linking the cities of Amsterdam and Paris by 2021. If realized, this would be huge. Hyperloop can theoretically travel at 1,126 km/h. The distance between the Dutch and French capitals is about 510 km. Do the math. Or if you’re lazy, it’ll take about half an hour from city to city.
For context, flying between the two cities usually takes an hour, although when you factor in security, it takes much longer. If you take the Thalys fast train, the journey takes 3 hours and 17 minutes.
Hyperloop would offer an affordable, low-carbon, and super-fast alternative to the current systems of transportation. It also seems ideally suited to Europe, which is a small continent with dozens of large urban centers.
It’s looking less like a moonshot pipe dream, too. Other forward-thinking European countries, namely the Czech Republic and Slovakia, are serious looking at creating their own systems.
And next week, Hyperloop One, yet another hyperloop company, will host an event in Amsterdam, where it’ll showcase its technology, and its ambitions for an intra-European hyperloop network.
The future is now. We’re living it.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/1/15725516/intel-7-trillion-dollar-self-driving-autonomous-cars

http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/imaging/ai-designers-find-inspiration-in-rat-brains

https://singularityhub.com/2017/05/30/7-big-tech-trends-that-are-changing-the-way-we-make-things/

How AI Can Keep Accelerating After Moore’s Law – MIT Technology Review https://apple.news/A4Rxkgl8lN-WmsspWrttgtQ
The sudden thirst for new power to drive AI comes at a time when the computing industry is adjusting to the loss of two things it has relied on for 50 years to keep chips getting more powerful. One is Moore’s Law, which forecast that the number of transistors that could be fitted into a given area of a chip would double every two years. The other is a phenomenon called Dennard scaling, which describes how the amount of power that transistors use scales down as they shrink.

In the longer term, more radical changes in how computer chips work will be required to keep AI getting more powerful. Creating chips that don’t add accurately is one option. Prototypes have shown that they can make computers more efficient without undermining the accuracy of results from machine-learning software (see “Why a Chip That’s Bad at Math Could Help Computers Tackle Harder Problems”).
Chip designs that directly copy from biology could also be crucial. IBM and others have built prototype chips that compute using spikes of current, similar to how our neurons fire (see “Thinking in Silicon”). Even simple animals, Burger points out, use little energy to do things beyond what today’s robots and software can accomplish—evidence that computers have much further to go.
“Look at the computation a cockroach does,” he says. “There are existence proofs that show many more orders of magnitude of performance and efficiency are available. We can have decades of scaling left in AI.”

“It’s unbelievable. A miracle material,” says Z. Valy Vardeny, distinguished professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy and co-author of the study, whose lab studies perovskite solar cells. “In just a few years, solar cells based on this material are at 22 percent efficiency. And now it has this spin lifetime property. It’s fantastic.”
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-05-electronics-miracle-material-field-spintronics.html#jCp

However, well over a dozen potential battery technologies are vying for the title of the Next Big Thing. Some of these technologies, such as the urine battery and the portabella mushroom battery, aren’t reaching for the mass market. But the one (or more) have the potential to be used by those who need to spark up their cell phone, laptop computer, or electric car—in short, almost everyone.
Suffice to say, whoever captures even a sliver of this market will be printing money. Real money, like pounds before Brexit, instead of watered-down money, like pounds after Brexit.
Want to see what’s coming? These potential energy solutions aren’t ready for production systems yet, but they show lots of promise.

https://insights.hpe.com/articles/three-batteries-that-could-power-our-future-1705.html

http://www.cbs8.com/story/35459179/siwa-therapeutics-takes-a-key-step-forward-in-novel-efforts-to-treat-cancer-by-removing-senescent-cells

If you’re going to be a yachting billionaire, be cool like Brin. Forget ocean yachts, build an air yacht. 

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/may/26/google-sergey-brin-building-largest-aircraft