Lifeboat Foundation

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In this video, we’ll sit down in our time machine and go forward a few millenniums into the future, to see where we would be progressing as a civilization.

Continue reading “The Future of Human Civilization (2022 — 3355 AD)” »

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have discovered that the safe operation of a negative pressure room—a space in a hospital or biological research laboratory designed to protect outside areas from exposure to deadly pathogens—can be disrupted by an attacker armed with little more than a smartphone.

According to UCI cyber-physical systems security experts, who shared their findings with attendees at the Association for Computing Machinery’s recent Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Los Angeles, mechanisms that control airflow in and out of biocontainment facilities can be tricked into functioning irregularly by a sound of a particular frequency, possibly tucked surreptitiously into a popular song.

“Someone could play a piece of music loaded on their smartphone or get it to transmit from a television or other audio device in or near a negative pressure room,” said senior co-author Mohammad Al Faruque, UCI professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “If that music is embedded with a tone that matches the resonant frequency of the pressure controls of one of these spaces, it could cause a malfunction and a leak of deadly microbes.”

A trip deep into the far future, to the End of Earth.
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For most of human history, the end of Earth, the Universe, and Time itself were all identical, now we know the world will end in 4 billion years, long before the Universe begins to wind down. Today we will ask how we can extend that, and keep Earth around for far longer.

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Cover Art by Jakub Grygier: https://www.artstation.com/artist/jakub_grygier.

Continue reading “Civilizations at the End of Time: Dying Earth” »

It’s not really a Star Wars story unless there’s a lovable or memorable droid stealing the spotlight. But, when you really stop and think about it, there’s also something profoundly tragic about the role artificial lifeforms play in the Star Wars universe.

PATREON
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Continue reading “The Tragedy of Droids in Star Wars” »

Posthumanuniversity.com Now streaming https://ditto.fm/hypermodern-magic

Videos, books, e-books, games software, nu music.

Rats love to dance 🕺:3

The team had two alternate hypotheses: The first was that the optimal music tempo for beat synchronicity would be determined by the time constant of the body. This is different between species and much faster for small animals compared to humans (think of how quickly a rat can scuttle). The second was that the optimal tempo would instead be determined by the time constant of the brain, which is surprisingly similar across species.

“After conducting our research with 20 human participants and 10 rats, our results suggest that the optimal tempo for beat synchronization depends on the time constant in the brain,” said Takahashi. “This demonstrates that the animal brain can be useful in elucidating the perceptual mechanisms of music.”

Continue reading “Rats bopping to the beat in video demonstrate innate beat synchronization in animals for the first time” »

Making room for optimism.

2bsirius video about:
Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three “laws” of prediction:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
For Shermer:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=shermers-last-law.
Full text of Shermers article:
http://www.michaelshermer.com/2002/01/shermers-last-law/

Continue reading “Arthur Clark’s Laws of Prediction & Shermer’s Final Law” »

With mathematical modeling, a research team has now succeeded in better understanding how the optimal working state of the human brain, called criticality, is achieved. Their results mean an important step toward biologically-inspired information processing and new, highly efficient computer technologies and have been published in Scientific Reports.

“In particular tasks, supercomputers are better than humans, for example in the field of artificial intelligence. But they can’t manage the variety of tasks in everyday life —driving a car first, then making music and telling a story at a get-together in the evening,” explains Hermann Kohlstedt, professor of nanoelectronics. Moreover, today’s computers and smartphones still consume an enormous amount of energy.

“These are no sustainable technologies—while our brain consumes just 25 watts in everyday life,” Kohlstedt continues. The aim of their interdisciplinary research network, “Neurotronics: Bio-inspired Information Pathways,” is therefore to develop new electronic components for more energy-efficient computer architectures. For this purpose, the alliance of engineering, life and natural sciences investigates how the human brain is working and how that has developed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inpTY8mnwos

Music in this video:
Creator: Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio.
Title: Melancholic Synthwave *No Beat* — Dreams of 1984
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpPI4xiMCD8&list=RDkpPI4xiMCD8&start_radio=1
Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteBatAudio.

Carl Sagan: Pale Blue Dot (1994) — Wanderers: An Introduction.