Elevating the Human Condition
You no longer need to contend with crowds, parking, lousy food, or noise to visit the halls of a conference center. EXPO21XX has created an online exhibition hall to showcase projects in more than 100 university robotics labs from around the world.
It’s not just the Japanese and Americans who are building humanoid robots. An ambitious coalition of researchers from German, French, and Italian universities and research labs recently met in Berlin to tackle the problem of how bots can autonomously learn and develop motor skills in open-ended environments.
Have you ever been beaten at the classic word game Scrabble by an 85-year-old grandmother? (I have, and I’m usually pretty good at wordsmithing.) Some elderly people with super-sharp memory don’t seem to suffer the memory loss that assails most people as they age. Why?
The memristor — the so-called “missing link of electronics” memory technology that can change its resistance in varying levels — has been around on paper for nearly 40 years.
What happens when a man is merged with a computer or a robot? This is the question that Professor Kevin Warwick and his team at the department of Cybernetics, University of Reading in the UK have been trying to answer for a number of years.
We asked several leading thinkers in the radical tech community the following question: Is there sex in the posthuman or singularitarian future? We invited them to pontificate in 400 words or less. These are the results.
Battlestar Galactica, with its dark meditations on prophecy, war and Cylon identity, is the shining recent example, but seemingly cornier fare can also provide candy-coated conundrums that bear rumination, and that almost sneak up on you with their significance.
"Four shots in my Americano, please. I’ve got a presentation due tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. and I haven’t started it yet. I’ll probably be up all night.”
For over a century, scientists have been using electrical stimulation to explore and treat the human brain.
In a new study, researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro), McGill University have found an important mechanism involved in setting up the vast communications network of connections in the brain.