živimo SF

[Meho Krljic]

Meni je to dovoljno - ne moram ja stvarno da budem u pravu sve dok se svi ponašaju kao da jesam. 

[scallop]

To i Vučić očekuje.

[Meho Krljic]

Živimo SF: aktuelni nemački prvak u skoku u dalj, Markus Rehm - nema desnu nogu. Umesto toga ima zgodnu protezu i skače kao zmaj. Naravno, to ne deluje baš kaoigranje po istim pravilima kako i ostali takmičari, ali barem kul izgleda:

Markus Rehm - 8.24 m - German Champion Long Jump 2014


http://www.parasport-news.com/germanys-markus-rehm-sets-world-record-in-the-long-jump/1628/

Yesterday at the  Ulm German Athletics Championships, Markus Rehm set a world record in the F44 long jump, with a jump of 8.24 meters on his fourth attempt. He was the first amputee athlete to compete at the championships.

His jump also secured him a first place finish, and qualified him for the European athletics championships which take place in Zurich, Switzerland from August 12 to 18.  Former European champion Christian Reif finished second with a jump of 8.2 meters.  Following the race, the twenty-five year old jumper was quoted by n-tv.de the as saying, "I still have heart palpitations.  There are simply jumps you meet perfectly - and so it was today."   On Facebook, he said, "I AM SPEECHLESS ... and can not believe it, 8.24 m and thus German Champion! Perfect conditions and an excellent audience ... now I have to come down again! made ​​short finish and there you go to Mainz to the Current."

Not everyone is happy with the result.   Rehm runs and jumps with a specially designed blade that is 15 inches longer than his other leg.  Reif accused Rehm of basically cheating as a result.   There are allegations that it gives him an unfair competitive advantage when jumping. German Athletics Federation head coach  Idriss Gonschinska is quoted by  n-tv.de as saying in response to this allegation, "It takes complex analysis in order to answer this question."

Rehm competed at the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London, where he also set a world record in the long jump with a  7.35 meter jump for 1,093 points. He competes for TSV Bayer 04 Leverkusen.

[Meho Krljic]

Južnokorejski svemirski program stavljen na led nakon što je jedina njihova astronautkinja rešila da prekine da se bavi time:


Why South Korea's Only Astronaut Quit

She went from astronaut to an astro-not.
Yi So-yeon, South Korea's first and only astronaut quit her job this week, ending the country's manned space program.
The Korea Aerospace Research Institute said Yi sent a resignation letter by mail that explained she would be stepping down from her position due to personal reasons, according to local reports.



Yi beat out more than 36,000 South Koreans who applied to become the first Korean astronaut. The government paid $20 million to Russia for her ticket to space, something that has been called a "matter of national pride."
She made history on April 8, 2008, when she boarded a Soyuz spacecraft bound for the International Space Station, becoming the first Korean and the 49th woman to visit space.
During her 11 days at the ISS, Yi conducted science experiments and even hosted a traditional kimchi dinner in honor of the first Russian in space, Yuri Gagarin.
The 29-year-old bio-engineering student's space flight was celebrated across the country and a crowd of thousands convened in front of Seoul City Hall to mark the occasion. Gwang Ju Science High School, Yi's alma mater, also held a rally to cheer on its famous alumna.
Her return to Earth wasn't so smooth. The space capsule, which was carrying two other astronauts, veered off course and landed 260 miles away, near some shepherds in Kazakhstan.
"They thought at first we were aliens," Yi said in an interview.
Since her stint in space, Yi has worked on research from the ground, given speeches about her time in space and participated in educational programs to inspire students. In 2010, she began a new journey as an MBA student at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business to pursue more down-to-earth endeavors in the private sector.
Reflecting on why she was chosen for the trip of a lifetime, Yi said: "I think they felt I was open minded and would easily reach out to the public."

[Meho Krljic]

Japan je poznat po tome što tamo neke od najinovativnijih tehnologija na planeti idu ruku pod ruku sa izrazito retro rešenjima. Na primer, kod njih je keš i dalje veoma prisutno sredstvo isplaćivanja plata a telefaks se koristi i u poslovanju velikih firmi. Ultrabizarno, telegrafija u Japanu trenutno cveta:
Telegram not dead STOP Alive, evolving in Japan STOP

Throughout Japan, an army of workers stands ready to ensure important messages are delivered as quickly as possible. But they don't work in data centers maintaining email servers. They deliver telegrams.

Staff from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), one of the world's largest telecom companies, still drive around big cities and even board ships to remote Japanese islands hand-delivering telegrams from friends, loved ones and business partners.

The couriers are continuing a 145-year-old tradition, from 1869, when a government agency that preceded NTT began telegraphy services between Tokyo and the port of Yokohama.

Japan is one of the last countries in the world where telegrams are still widely used. A combination of traditional manners, market liberalization and innovation has kept alive this age-old form of messaging, first commercialized in the mid-19th century by Samuel Morse and others.

While they're not exactly practical, telegrams today are easy to send in Japan. They can be ordered via the Internet or by phone, simply by dialing 115. (Telegram Day is observed on the corresponding calendar date, Nov. 5.)

Companies affiliated with the country's three mobile carriers, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank, offer telegrams, which are sent via modern server networks instead of the dedicated electrical wires of the past (Morse telegraphy hasn't been used since 1962), and then printed out with modern printers instead of tape glued on paper.

But customers are still charged according to the length of the message, which is delivered within three hours. A basic NTT telegram up to 25 characters long can be sent for ¥440 ($4.30) when ordered online.

That the medium has endured so long takes many by surprise, and there have been premature reports about the death of the telegram at the hands of email, SMS and other modern communications.

But the telegram is alive and well in Japan. In fact, it's enjoying something of a renaissance.

The catalog of telegram services for NTT East, serving Tokyo and eastern and northern Japan, is 33 pages long. It showcases one of the main attractions for today's telegram writers: gifts. People can choose from a range of presents to accompany a heartfelt message, from Hello Kitty dolls to lacquered accessory boxes and bouquets of preserved flowers.

There's even a telegram that comes with incense sticks to burn at family altars or graves for Japan's Obon holiday in August, in which ancestors are remembered.

Indeed, another part of the appeal of telegrams is the fact that they often play a role in traditional customs and etiquette, which remains strong among older generations and in maintaining inter-company relationships.

"In Japan, there's still the custom, related to manners, of sending telegrams on occasions such as weddings and funerals," said Naoto Takumi, a spokesman for NTT East's TelWel, which handles telegrams. "It's like the New Year greetings cards that Japanese send at the end of the year."

Enrollments, graduations and new job positions also call for congratulations, so the beginning of the academic and fiscal year in April sees a flurry of wires, Takumi added.

While the number of telegrams sent by NTT peaked roughly 50 years ago, customers still wrote over 10 million of them in 2012.

The tally falls by about 10% a year, but there's a growing number of smaller companies offering telegrams and other delivery services in Japan.

That's because Japan liberalized some mail and messaging services about 10 years ago when it launched plans to privatize Japan Post, a government corporation that controls trillions of dollars' worth of customer savings.

Postal privatization eventually sputtered, but the new entrants have gone from sending 420,000 telegrams and other kinds of messages in 2004 to nearly 4 million in 2012.

In July, Sagawa Express, a long-established courier company, began offering telegrams presented in stylish cards from ¥1,382. Another company offers novelty "Marshmallow Telegrams" -- boxes of marshmallows made with edible characters that spell out a message.

"Some companies are trying to compete with NTT on price and offerings," says Takeo Kiyokawa, a general manager at PS Communications, a SoftBank group company set up a few years ago to offer domestic telegrams.

The firm's Hot Denpo service includes fancy gifts by fashion designers such as Junko Koshino, who created a gold and brown plastic clutch purse to enclose telegrams. It's priced at ¥8,000.

It's surprisingly stylish given that about 90% of PS Communications customers are businesses and 70% of the telegrams it sends are condolences. Yet Hot Denpo users are slowly increasing, Kiyokawa says.

"The telegram culture is continuing," he said, "but I'm not sure what will happen 10 years from now."

Younger Japanese may be unfamiliar with the medium, but gift cartoon characters are bridging the gap.

"I sent my mother a Doraemon telegram," a 27-year-old Japanese model wrote on her blog for Mother's Day, referring to the famous robot cat from manga and anime. The stuffed toy comes with a prerecorded greeting and thanks the recipient for working hard.

"She was thrilled! Thank you (Mom) for raising me."

[Father Jape]

Ja ću iskoristiti priliku da kažem da je pronalazač bio Amerikanac prezimena Mors, a da smo ga mi prozvali Morze verovatno pod uticajem nemačkog. Trebalo je dakle da imamo Morsovu azbuku.

[Mica Milovanovic]

Telegraf ili telegram?

[Meho Krljic]

Pa, telegram, ali ovde sam više mislio "telegraf" kao usluga a ne kao sprava.

[Meho Krljic]

Obnovljiva energija može da zadovolji sve naše potvrde, tvrde, a pritom nam čak i ne treba neki veliki sistem za skladištenje jer možemo da koristimo pametan softver za predviđanje potrošnje... Uistinu, živimo SF, mada je ovo više idealizovana slika koja ignoriše mnoge inženjerske zbiljnosti:



Is Storage Necessary for Renewable Energy?

[Meho Krljic]

Naravno, "potvrde" = "potrebe", imao sam brain fart.

[scallop]

Obnovljiva energija može da zadovolji sve naše potrebe, tvrde, a pritom nam čak i ne treba neki veliki sistem za skladištenje jer možemo da koristimo pametan softver za predviđanje potrošnje... Uistinu, živimo SF, mada je ovo više idealizovana slika koja ignoriše mnoge inženjerske zbiljnosti:

Pametan softver? Mene, manijaka neophodnosti skladištenja energije, ovakva razmišljanja uvek vuku u više pravaca. Pa, kako je topik Živimo SF, evo nekih:


Najpre iz moje daleke prošlosti. Poznato je da bi energija Sunca, kad bismo umeli da je spakujemo u sanduke i kutijice, samo iz Sahare, mogla da zadovolji sve naše potrebe na Zemlji. Manji problem su kolektori energije, a daleko veći sistem transporta, ako zanemarimo Tesline ideje. Međutim, postoji i sistem kondenzovanja i pakovanja energije koji bi sve pretvorio u robu. Tu je meni pala na um priča o briketima aktivnog uglja, čak sam i napisao jednu SF priču, ali sam se zapleo u teorije zavere. Naime, ti briketi su reusable (što bi ti rekao), kondenzovana energija se aktivira običnom vodom, a regeneracija se postiže ponovnim izlaganjem Suncu. Jedino je neophodno prvi put razviti aktivnu površinu reda veličine deset ari po gramu uglja. Ko se malo razume u fizičku hemiju i adsorpciju пис оф каке. Nešto kao karbo animalis ili zeolit povećane sorpcione moći. Kao što sam već napomenuo, postavilo bi se pitanje posedovanja Sahare i izlišnosti današnjih potrošača neobnovljivih resurs, a to je opet pucačina.


Drugo razmišljanje se povezuje na fatalnu privlačnost softvera. Nikada ne pomislite na to da može i da zakaže. Da padnu komunikacioni sateliti, da neko zlonameran sve hakuje i slično. Virtualizacija stvarnosti je daleko ranjivija nego što izgleda da jeste.


Na trećem mestu, a možda i na prvom, je priča o tome kako je zlato prestalo da bude podloga svetskog monetarnog sistema, pa su sad sve države dužne, a niko ne zna gde su pare. Ustvari, one i ne postoje osim kao podloga za besomučno kockanje svetom kao da je prćija na buvljaku. Tako bi i taj famozni softver za uparvljanje energijom postao virtuelan više nego što moj ukus može da podnese.

[Meho Krljic]

Da, da, zato sam gore i napisao da je ovo više idealizovana slika koja ignoriše inženjerske zbiljnosti, računajući tu između ostalog i na to da "pametan" softver ovog tipa svakako još ne postoji u nekoj ozbijnoj formi, kao i da je oslanjanje na pametnu predikciju potrošnje koja bi eliminisala potrebu za skladištenjem naprosto matematički ideal koji u stvarnosti teško damože da bude ostvaren zbog velikog broja faktora - a neki od njih su svakako ti koje ti pominješ - nebezbednost softvera, nepredviđene fluktuacije potrošnje koje su posledica kojekakvih efekata leptirovih krila itd. No, zavodljiva je ta priča o obnovljivim izvorima energije koji u teoriji mogu da zadovolje sve zemaljske energetske potrebe. Nemačka je imala taj neki momenat pre par meseci kada je 75% sve energije potrošene u zemlji bilo iz obnovljivih izvora. A da ne pominjemo kad se tehnologija spusti na nivo pojedinca u nekoj većoj meri (naravno u onim geografski oblastima gde je to izvodljivo). Već sada imamo primere kako disruptivno može da bude decentralizovanje energetskog snabdevanja a zamisli ako "svi" budemo u nekom momentu u mogućnosti da proizvodimo dovoljno energije za svoja domaćinstva koristeći solarne panele, turbine za vetar i, šta ja znam, geotermanlne električne generatore... Prosto ne mogu da pojmim kakva će tu promena socijalne i političke (i ekonomske, dakako) paradigme nastati, kad energija koju prave veliki proizvođači bude namenjena samo industriji... I da li će to biti na bolje ili na gore, naravno. 

[scallop]

Pa, mi i sada možemo da živimo od obnovljivih izvora energije, ali se ne isplati. Crko bi biznis.

[Meho Krljic]

Apsolutno je to jedan od elemenata jednačine - energetske firme jesu među najmoćnijima u svetu, ali kao što Tesla automobili polako osvajaju tržište uprkos opstrukcijama od strane klasične automobilske industrije tako je zamislivo da će se nešto slično dešavati i u domenu energetskog snabdevanja za individualna domaćinstva.

[Mica Milovanovic]

E, moj Meho. Zavodljiva je, ali neostvariva, bar ne za veći deo čovečanstva, još dugo... dugo...


Pogledaj, molim te, koliko košta tih 50-60 procenata, koji ponekad narastu na 70tak.


http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Electricity_and_natural_gas_price_statistics


Za dve godine im je cena energije porasla sa 0,25 na 0,29 € - preko 14%.
Već sada pomažu svoju industriju tako što ima je cena za industriju dvostruko manja nego za stanovništvo.


Cena energije za stanovništvo u Nemačkoj je 5,5 puta veća nego kod nas.
A mi smo negde na svetskom proseku, po parama.


Bojim se da ni kod njih to nije održivo i da će se na ponovo na našim grbačama slomiti njihovi zeleni štapovi...

[Meho Krljic]

Da, gadno ih šamaraju (pogotovo su im porezi na to povisoki). No, hajde, da vidimo kuda sve to vodi. Pretpostavljam da im porez koji naplate od industrijskog prometa robe nadoknadi tu dotiranu cenu struje i da imaju neku računicu, ali koliko je ona održiva na duže staze, pojma nemam...

[scallop]

Sve vodi u ćorsokak dokle god filozofija marketinga bude počivala na premisi: brže i više, uz raubovanje ključnog dela - bolje.

[PTY]

Moguće da je Meho već negde okačio ovu vest, ali meni je skroz nova i impresivna, tako da moram...











This new type of transparent solar cell can be used to cover windows, buildings or smartphone screens to produce solar energy.








http://69.175.86.51/news/20142108-26048.html

[Meho Krljic]

Nisam. Zaista deluje revolucionarno.

[PTY]

Dopada mi se mogućnost da ova neupadljivost tehnološke spravice upravo prevagne u eskiviranju opstrukcija koje pominješ, to u nekom skoro polulegalnom domenu kojim bi se mi mali miševi rado osvetili industrijskom monopolu koji nam tako lako i uspešno diktira energetsku politiku. Nešto kao andergraund civil disobidijenc!

[Meho Krljic]

Nego, ovo je BAŠ za rubriku "Živimo SF". Mladi ljudi bez očiglednih "radnih sposobnosti" zarađuju hiljade funti kačeći šestosekundne video-snimke na Vine a u kojima pominju kojekakve brendove koji ih za to plaćaju. Tekst je iz Telegrafa pa bar pola mora da se baci u vodu. Ipak, ako je ovo sve poluizmišljeno, i dalje stoji da smo na ivici zaista naučnofantastične zbilje:



Britain's social media stars making £2,000 a second

Twitter's video platform Vine has been an unexpected money spinner for these Britons who gave up their jobs to make a living from their smartphone

For 21-year-old Ben Phillips, a £12,000 windfall is less than a minute away six seconds, to be precise.
All he needs to do is upload a clip filmed on his smartphone to the social media platform Vine. If he mentions a product or brand, that company will pay him thousands of pounds.
Now the Cardiff local gets paid up to £2,000 for each second of promoted video he uploads.
Mr Phillips' comedy clips include playing pranks and acting sketches with his friends not high budget television ads which have earned him the ear of advertisers.
But it's not his homemade videos that brands are interested in. They are queuing up to get a mention in the hope that his 1.2 million followers will buy their products.
From shoe shop to shooting videos
Mr Phillips is one of a growing group of young British "Viners" a small clique of smartphone users who upload six-second home videos for anyone to watch.
His newfound internet stardom is a far cry from his job in a shoe shop in South Wales, when last July he was working and began uploading Vines in his spare time.
"I saw some lads in America were getting loads of interest on this website, so I began with some comedy scenes," he said.
He said he had no idea that a chance encounter with the website would turn into a lucrative business.
"I was working at my mum's shop and hadn't a clue what Vine would turn into, no one was on it in the UK."
Mr Phillips began by filming spots with his then-girlfriend's three-year-old son, Harley. He began a "Dr Harley" series in which the toddler would give spoof medical advice. One instalment - If you've got a boo boo, wash it, kiss it and plaster it! has been watched by more than six million people.
A clip of the pair mooing while seated in the back of a car received two million views ("loops," Mr Phillips calls them, explaining the Vine lingo).
A video of Harley tidying his room to the riff of the White Stripes' Seven Nation Army also surpassed the two million loop mark.


Ben Phillips: 'We don't have celebrity status'
Mr Phillips said the pair's popularity rocketed over night. "About two months after I started doing Vines with my ex's little boy Harley, we got around one million followers."
At that point, advertisers began knocking on his door. Car makers, clothing brands, mobile networks, and food and drink producers were all keen to get a mention in his videos.
"I had companies saying 'we want to pay you to promote our product' and management teams contacting me out of the blue."
Mr Phillips said he preferred to go it alone, and began picking which brands to promote. "I'd only really promote products that I would use. But it works when I do because we don't have that 'celebrity' status we're just ordinary people."


He said he would continue to create videos on Vine but to make people laugh, not to make cash. "The money side of it doesn't really phase me because my sole intention is to show people skills and cheer them up.
"Six seconds is enough to make someone smile. People at work, if they're really bored, can watch a couple of videos and then get back on with the day."
Mr Phillips recently returned from a trip to Venice. "Just yesterday I was recording on my phone from a gondola I'm trying to upload videos from landmarks across the world."
His product coverage is eclectic, ranging from covering up graffiti on his white car with Tipp-Ex (complete with hashtag #TipexThursdays) to creating a promotional video for Nokia.
£2,000 a second: how?
For each video, Mr Phillips says that advertisers will pay around £6,000 to £12,000 per vine.
A rate of £2,000 a second is hefty even for large advertisers but Mr Phillips says it offers good value. "I can guarantee a company one to seven million loops within 24 hours. What magazine could offer that? I'm giving people phenomenal marketing."
The key to getting an advertising deal is simple: get more followers.
This is a market where individuals can be picked up and dropped instantly. Rob Fishman, founder of social media company Niche, said: "Whatever the media platform, anyone with a few thousand followers is valuable to companies."
But as soon as their popularity wanes, advertisers will look towards the next big fad.
Lon Safko, author of the Social Media Bible, said: "It's all about the eyes. As a sponsor that's all I care about."
Mr Safko said the platform might not be lasting. "Someone might be hot now, but a year from now, people will be bored and move on to the next shiny object.
"It's a fad that changes often," he said.
Daz Black: 'One day they'll get bored'
East Sussex builder Daz Black recently abandoned construction to concentrate on Vine full-time once he reached the one million follower mark.
Mr Black, 29, said he was careful about advertising products he wouldn't buy himself. "I've got offers coming in from all directions, but if I promote something that's a con it will come back to haunt me," he said.
"If you blatantly advertise that gets really annoying, but if you play it down people can enjoy the videos and not notice the advertising is there."
Mr Black, whose recent video, How guys asked the father to marry their daughter, received 3.5m views, began using Vine by "playing around and making stupid faces."


He said: "Ideas just come to me most just randomly - I'm not sure if it's talent or something I should be worried about!"
Mr Black, from Staplecross, said he was pursuing a career in comedy TV in case Vine lost popularity. "Vine's getting bigger and bigger but advertising may have a potential to kill it off.
"I know how the internet is I'm only going to get older - maybe one day they'll get bored of me."
Black in ' Classic mum sayings ' (3.2 million views). He hopes to be a TV comedy actor.
How to cash in on social media popularity
As a ballpark, Mr Safko said that anyone with a few hundred thousand followers could get cash for promoting a product in their videos.
He said: "You have to accumulate a staggering amount of followers to make your video have any impact and be worth anything to a sponsor."
Companies approach popular posters, but wannabe social media 'stars' can be proactive by joining a go-between like Niche.co or GrapeStory.
But Darren Barefoot, co-author of A Social Media Marketing Handbook, said there was no guarantee that Vine would stick around as a popular medium. "Right now it appeals to 18 to 25 year-olds, which is a user base that's valuable to advertisers but is also very volatile," he said.
Mr Barefoot said that, for now, the down-to-earth humour of Vine users kept them popular. "These people have a raw and honest sense of humour that they can get across in six seconds. It's enough time for one good joke."
But not everybody can amass millions of followers over night. "All of the people who are making money now didn't set it up to make an income - it was an accident," Mr Barefoot said.
Free trip to NYC...
However, even people with a few thousand followers get attention from brands - with freebies and trips up for grabs for those who are followed.
Holly Graham, a compliance officer from Edinburgh, uses Vine in her spare time and has amassed 17,600 followers from her spoof Game of Thrones videos.


She said that although she would not rule out making a career out of her "Lady Holly" account, she was happy to keep it a hobby.
"I can go two months without making a vine and then spend a night making 5 in a row," she said.
Ms Graham has been offered various freebies from brands including concert tickets and a free trip to New York. She said: "I've been contacted by a few companies to advertise certain things in my Vine, mainly apps, but I haven't done so yet as I haven't found one that I'm particularly interested in."

[дејан]

јавио ио9



Conscious Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans Using Non-Invasive Technologies


баја у индији рекао баји у француској 'здраво' а овај му узвратио истом мером


сажвакана варијанта

[Meho Krljic]

  Oumajgad!!!!!

[Meho Krljic]

Čvrsta svetlost, usporavanje fotona, ništa ja tu ne razumem osim da sve što sam kao dijete čitao u Spajdermenu postaje stvarnost:

'Solid' light could compute previously unsolvable problems

Researchers at Princeton University have begun crystallizing light as part of an effort to answer fundamental questions about the physics of matter.

The researchers are not shining light through crystal – they are transforming light into crystal. As part of an effort to develop exotic materials such as room-temperature superconductors, the researchers have locked together photons, the basic element of light, so that they become fixed in place.
"It's something that we have never seen before," said Andrew Houck, an associate professor of electrical engineering and one of the researchers. "This is a new behavior for light."
The results raise intriguing possibilities for a variety of future materials. But the researchers also intend to use the method to address questions about the fundamental study of matter, a field called condensed matter physics.
"We are interested in exploring – and ultimately controlling and directing – the flow of energy at the atomic level," said Hakan Türeci, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and a member of the research team. "The goal is to better understand current materials and processes and to evaluate materials that we cannot yet create."
The team's findings, reported online on Sept. 8 in the journal Physical Review X, are part of an effort to answer fundamental questions about atomic behavior by creating a device that can simulate the behavior of subatomic particles. Such a tool could be an invaluable method for answering questions about atoms and molecules that are not answerable even with today's most advanced computers.
In part, that is because current computers operate under the rules of classical mechanics, which is a system that describes the everyday world containing things like bowling balls and planets. But the world of atoms and photons obeys the rules of quantum mechanics, which include a number of strange and very counterintuitive features. One of these odd properties is called "entanglement" in which multiple particles become linked and can affect each other over long distances.

The difference between the quantum and classical rules limits a standard computer's ability to efficiently study quantum systems. Because the computer operates under classical rules, it simply cannot grapple with many of the features of the quantum world. Scientists have long believed that a computer based on the rules of quantum mechanics could allow them to crack problems that are currently unsolvable. Such a computer could answer the questions about materials that the Princeton team is pursuing, but building a general-purpose quantum computer has proven to be incredibly difficult and requires further research.
Another approach, which the Princeton team is taking, is to build a system that directly simulates the desired quantum behavior. Although each machine is limited to a single task, it would allow researchers to answer important questions without having to solve some of the more difficult problems involved in creating a general-purpose quantum computer. In a way, it is like answering questions about airplane design by studying a model airplane in a wind tunnel – solving problems with a physical simulation rather than a digital computer.
In addition to answering questions about currently existing material, the device also could allow physicists to explore fundamental questions about the behavior of matter by mimicking materials that only exist in physicists' imaginations.
To build their machine, the researchers created a structure made of superconducting materials that contains 100 billion atoms engineered to act as a single "artificial atom." They placed the artificial atom close to a superconducting wire containing photons.
By the rules of quantum mechanics, the photons on the wire inherit some of the properties of the artificial atom – in a sense linking them. Normally photons do not interact with each other, but in this system the researchers are able to create new behavior in which the photons begin to interact in some ways like particles.
"We have used this blending together of the photons and the atom to artificially devise strong interactions among the photons," said Darius Sadri, a postdoctoral researcher and one of the authors. "These interactions then lead to completely new collective behavior for light – akin to the phases of matter, like liquids and crystals, studied in condensed matter physics."
Türeci said that scientists have explored the nature of light for centuries; discovering that sometimes light behaves like a wave and other times like a particle. In the lab at Princeton, the researchers have engineered a new behavior.
"Here we set up a situation where light effectively behaves like a particle in the sense that two photons can interact very strongly," he said. "In one mode of operation, light sloshes back and forth like a liquid; in the other, it freezes."
The current device is relatively small, with only two sites where an artificial atom is paired with a superconducting wire. But the researchers say that by expanding the device and the number of interactions, they can increase their ability to simulate more complex systems – growing from the simulation of a single molecule to that of an entire material. In the future, the team plans to build devices with hundreds of sites with which they hope to observe exotic phases of light such as superfluids and insulators.
"There is a lot of new physics that can be done even with these small systems," said James Raftery, a graduate student in electrical engineering and one of the authors. "But as we scale up, we will be able to tackle some really interesting questions."

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-solid-previously-unsolvable-problems.html#jCp Researchers at Princeton University have begun crystallizing light as part of an effort to answer fundamental questions about the physics of matter.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-solid-previously-unsolvable-problems.html#jCp Researchers at Princeton University have begun crystallizing light as part of an effort to answer fundamental questions about the physics of matter.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-solid-previously-unsolvable-problems.html#jCp Researchers at Princeton University have begun crystallizing light as part of an effort to answer fundamental questions about the physics of matter.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-solid-previously-unsolvable-problems.html#jCp

[scallop]

Očigledno da si imao dobro polaznu literaturu.

[Meho Krljic]

Koje me nažalost ne priprema dovoljno (kao ni moje oskudno koketiranje sa akademskim obrazovanjem) da uopšte pratim ovakav tekst niti shvatim implikacije onog što se u njemu iznosi. Vidim da u komentarima jedan veli "Evo, vidite da relativnost nikada nije ni važila, samo nam je bilo zgodno da se pozivamo na nju", a je nemam pojma ni šta TO znači 

[scallop]

Nemo se ždereš, ko ti kaže da je razumeo laže ko pas. Ja ne smem ni da čitam. Lepše je u iluzijama.

[Meho Krljic]

Have Jedi created a new 'religion'?

Followers of Jediism are aiming to build a belief system that goes beyond the Star Wars films. But does it amount to a new religion?
It began as a joke at the expense of statisticians. In the UK's 2001 Census, 390,127 people - or 0.7% of the population - described themselves as Jedi. A question on religious belief had been asked for the first time in a census and Jedi - from the cloak-wearing, lightsaber swishing rebels in the Star Wars films - was a tongue-in-cheek response.
It was a post-modernist Star Wars joke by atheists. Or so many assumed. But for some the force was strong.
An ideas festival at Cambridge University this weekend will look at how new "religious movements", such as Jediism, the Indigo Children and Wicca, have expanded online. And in the case of Jedi, how they have developed ever-more complex doctrines and scriptures.
What might have started as an intellectual exercise by fans adding to the movies and filling in the gaps, has become an attempt to build a coherent religious code.
Beth Singler, a researcher in the Divinity Faculty of Cambridge University, estimates that there are about 2,000 people in the UK who are "very genuine" about being Jedi. That's roughly the same number as the Church of Scientology, she says. Jediism is not a joke for them but an inspiration. They don't believe in "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...", says Singler quoting the opening text that fills the screen of Star Wars. "It's somewhere between metaphor and literal truth."



"Feel the force" has become a rather tired cliche. But behind it is a New Age mysticism similar to many of the "holistic" ideas that emerged in the 1960s and 70s. "The Force is what gives a Jedi his power," says Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by Alec Guinness, who initiates young men into Jedi tradition. "It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together."


The Jedi belief system is a patchwork quilt of Taoism, Buddhism, Catholicism and Samurai, says Singler. Often the ideas offer a simple dualism of good and evil, light and dark. "Fear is the path to the dark side," Yoda tells Anakin Skywalker. "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you."
Star Wars creator George Lucas never intended to start a "religion", she says. "Most Jedi don't see him as a guru in the same way that L Ron Hubbard is in Scientology."
Many Jedi have moved away from the Star Wars stories. The Temple of the Jedi Order in the US has three tenets - focus, knowledge and wisdom. "The philosophical and theological considerations of Jediism are not so much from Star Wars as from the inspirations behind Star Wars," says "Akkarin" aka Michael Kitchen, of the Temple of the Jedi Order, a spokesman for the Temple. Star Wars was based on the mythological ideas put forward by the writer Joseph Campbell, who in turn was influenced by thinkers such as Carl Jung, Alan Watts, and Jiddu Krishnamurti. "None of them is given any sort of reverential treatment as saints," Kitchen says. "We study only their ideas, not the person themselves."


How many Jedi are there?

   
• Australia - 65,000
• Canada - 9,000
• Czech Republic - 15,070
• England and Wales - 176,632

Source: 2011 census data




Patrick Day-Childs, a 21-year-old video games journalist in Southampton, is a council member of the UK's Church of Jediism. The Church has 200,000 people around the world who are active online, he says, although not all are necessarily believers. Day-Childs first joined when he was 14 for a joke but he says the more he looked into it, the more it made sense. "I use it every single day of my life," he says. It is both calming and inspiring.
Jediism permits people to have more than one religion. But Day-Childs having spent time looking at other faiths found Jediism was the only one that fitted him. "It's an actual religion, not just about fandom. At its absolute core it's about helping people." Unlike many older faiths, there is no divine being. He feels that the ancient religions are losing relevance. But because Jediism embraces technology and science it appeals to a new audience. The Church's founder, Daniel Jones, has written scriptures that go beyond Star Wars, instead dealing with how a Jedi should live. The doctrine has occasionally proved controversial. In 2009 Jones was thrown out of a Tesco store for refusing to remove his Jedi hood. He said he felt humiliated. At that time the hood was required in public places.
But Jedi doctrine has since changed so that children can no longer demand it's their right to wear the hood at school. Education is too important to Jedi for that, Day-Childs says. However the hood can still be useful for young Jedis who are anxious in public, he says.



People who join must learn key tenets of the faith. The Church has a code made up of five statements, one of which reads: "There is no Passion there is Serenity - We can like things but we must not become materialistic and obsessed by them."
There are no physical Jedi temples. So why join what is essentially a big online forum? George D Chryssides, author of The Study of Religion, compares it to the reason why people join different political parties. In the end it comes down to community.
For Mark Vernon, a former priest, psychotherapist and writer, the Jedi story has real power. "The reason it's so powerful and universal is that we have to find ourselves. It's by losing ourselves and identifying with something greater like the Jedi myth that we find a fuller life."


The Anglican Bishop of Manchester, the Right Reverend David Walker, says Jediism is another way that people look to give meaning to their lives. Unlike the metaphysical religions, which have an element of God "and speak to something beyond", other faiths, like Jediism, are a code for living,. Like a lot of codes for living, he suspects that Jediism is about people living happier, more fulfilling lives, while also containing an element of altruism.
One of the central questions is, at what point does a belief system become a religion? For Bishop Walker it is a "very difficult question" but he puts forward a few hunches. It has to be about bettering society and altruism, he says. There needs to be a significant number of adherents, and, crucially, it will need to have been around for a long time. "We'd want to look at the Jedi for quite some decades before accepting them, [as a religion]" he says. But he admits that there are no hard-and-fast rules.
Naysayers should perhaps pause for thought: "If you strike me down," Obi Kenobi tells Darth Vader, "I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

[zakk]

Najkorisnija stvar koju videh u skorije vreme

New Technology for the Blood Service

[scallop]

Šta vredi kad ne znaju da ubodu?

[mac]

In other news, Scallopovo ime ulazi u anale mikro robotike:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/medical-robots/robotic-microscallops-can-swim-through-your-eyeballs

[scallop]

I NASA ima mini podmornicu za kontrolu nasada scallopsa. Vidi na topiku Opet Amerika.

[Meho Krljic]

Novi, supreprecizni atomski časovnik redefiniše način na koji shvatamo merenje vremena:


New Clock May End Time As We Know It

"My own personal opinion is that time is a human construct," says Tom O'Brian. O'Brian has thought a lot about this over the years. He is America's official timekeeper at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado.
To him, days, hours, minutes and seconds are a way for humanity to "put some order in this very fascinating and complex universe around us."
We bring that order using clocks, and O'Brian oversees America's master clock. It's one of the most accurate clocks on the planet: an atomic clock that uses oscillations in the element cesium to count out 0.0000000000000001 second at a time. If the clock had been started 300 million years ago, before the age of dinosaurs began, it would still be keeping time — down to the second. But the crazy thing is, despite knowing the time better than almost anyone on Earth, O'Brian can't explain time.
"We can measure time much better than the weight of something or an electrical current," he says, "but what time really is, is a question that I can't answer for you."
Maybe its because we don't understand time, that we keep trying to measure it more accurately. But that desire to pin down the elusive ticking of the clock may soon be the undoing of time as we know it: The next generation of clocks will not tell time in a way that most people understand.
The New Clock
At the nearby University of Colorado Boulder is a clock even more precise than the one O'Brian watches over. The basement lab that holds it is pure chaos: Wires hang from the ceilings and sprawl across lab tables. Binder clips keep the lines bunched together.
In fact, this knot of wires and lasers actually is the clock. It's spread out on a giant table, parts of it wrapped in what appears to be tinfoil. Tinfoil?
"That's research grade tinfoil," says Travis Nicholson, a graduate student here at the JILA, a joint institute between NIST and CU-Boulder. Nicholson and his fellow graduate students run the clock day to day. Most of their time is spent fixing misbehaving lasers and dealing with the rats' nest of wires. ("I think half of them go nowhere," says graduate student Sara Campbell.)
At the heart of this new clock is the element strontium. Inside a small chamber, the strontium atoms are suspended in a lattice of crisscrossing laser beams. Researchers then give them a little ping, like ringing a bell. The strontium vibrates at an incredibly fast frequency. It's a natural atomic metronome ticking out teeny, teeny fractions of a second.
This new clock can keep perfect time for 5 billion years.
"It's about the whole, entire age of the earth," says Jun Ye, the scientist here at JILA who built this clock. "Our aim is that we'll have a clock that, during the entire age of the universe, would not have lost a second."
But this new clock has run into a big problem: This thing we call time doesn't tick at the same rate everywhere in the universe. Or even on our planet.
Time Undone
Right now, on the top of Mount Everest, time is passing just a little bit faster than it is in Death Valley. That's because speed at which time passes depends on the strength of gravity. Einstein himself discovered this dependence as part of his theory of relativity, and it is a very real effect.
The relative nature of time isn't just something seen in the extreme. If you take a clock off the floor, and hang it on the wall, Ye says, "the time will speed up by about one part in 10¹⁶."
    i     The world's most precise atomic clock is a mess to look at. But it can tick for billions of years without losing a second.
   Ye group and Baxley/JILA/Flickr    That is a sliver of a second. But this isn't some effect of gravity on the clock's machinery. Time itself is flowing more quickly on the wall than on the floor. These differences didn't really matter until now. But this new clock is so sensitive, little changes in height throw it way off. Lift it just a couple of centimeters, Ye says, "and you will start to see that difference."
This new clock can sense the pace of time speeding up as it moves inch by inch away from the earth's core.
That's a problem, because to actually use time, you need different clocks to agree on the time. Think about it: If I say, 'let's meet at 3:30,' we use our watches. But imagine a world in which your watch starts to tick faster, because you're working on the floor above me. Your 3:30 happens earlier than mine, and we miss our appointment.
This clock works like that. Tiny shifts in the earth's crust can throw it off, even when it's sitting still. Even if two of them are synchronized, their different rates of ticking mean they will soon be out of synch. They will never agree.
The world's current time is coordinated between atomic clocks all over the planet. But that can't happen with the new one.
"At this level, maintaining absolute time scale on earth is in fact turning into nightmare," Ye says. This clock they've built doesn't just look chaotic. It is turning our sense of time into chaos.
Ye suspects the only way we will be able to keep time in the future is to send these new clocks into space. Far from the earth's surface, the clocks would be better able to stay in synch, and perhaps our unified sense of time could be preserved.
But the NIST's chief timekeeper, Tom O'Brian, isn't worried about all this. As confusing as these clocks are, they're going to be really useful.
"Scientists can make these clocks into exquisite devices for sensing a whole bunch of different things," O'Brian says. Their extraordinary sensitivity to gravity might allow them to map the interior of the earth, or help scientists find water and other resources underground.
A network of clocks in space might be used to detect gravitational waves from black holes and exploding stars.
They could change our view of the universe.
They just may not be able to tell us the time.

[scallop]

Jebeš tačnost. Mnogo je bolja ova:


Ne brojim vreme na sate,
ni po vrelom sunčevom hodu.
Dan mi je kad tvoje oči se vrate,
a noć kad ponovo od mene odu.

[Meho Krljic]

Hihihih, u Njemačkoj bi neki da se greju - na servere:



Germans get free heating from the cloud

The idea of cloud heating won't go away. Germany now has a company, Cloud&Heat, which offers free hot water from a distributed data center installed in your office.
   Cloud&Heat places servers on remote premises (potentially your office). They process data for Cloud&Heat's data customers, and heat your building with the waste heat. Cloud customers get cheap pay-as-you-go cloud compute, block storage and object storage, based on OpenStack. Heat customers (the people who host the server cabinets) get free heating.
   It's a similar deal to Qarnot, the French outfit we mentioned a couple of weeks back. But where Qarnot is planning to offer domestic heating with a wall-mounted four-processor radiator, Cloud&Heat is pitching a bigger unit. Its site says it could work for single-family dwelings, but the pictures show a  sizeable cabinet that would be more at home on business premises.


Cloud Exchange offering
It also appears that the Germans may be ahead in implementation - Cloud&Heat's site offers a free trial of the cloud services provided by its distributed data center, and the site proclaims that these services are available on the Deutsche Börse Cloud Exchange (DBCE). Presumably, as all cloud services are based on standardisation, the company's cloud offering looks more or less like what you get from other operators.
   The heating side of the equation is more interesting. You pay up front to have a fire-proof cabinet installed. The installation cost is about the same as a conventional heating system, the company says, and it then provides hot water and room heating free of charge. Cloud&Heat pays the Internet and electricity bills for the unit.
   Cloud heat has a problem of matching supply and demand: data processing isn't necessarily needed at the same time as heat is required. Cloud&Heat's units have a buffering tank to store the hot water till it is needed.
   The system can be used in conjunction with other heating systems. And the unit is also arranged to vent excess heat outside in summer when no heating is required.
   Essentially, Cloud&Heat is eliminating its real-estate costs and some of its hardware expenses. The servers in the cabinets operate unattended - though they may need upgrading every three years or so. So Cloud&Heat will have to take on some service calls and truck rolls to keep the system going.


Cloud sans frontieres?
Security is an interesting aspect. Cloud&Heat nods to data sovereignty by assuring data customers that all their data is kept within German borders. However, I assume you won't know where your data is kept - because it could be assigned to any of the company's heat customers.
   Your data is not on a secure site, but it is encrypted, and Cloud&Heat says only its own employees can get into the cabinets. But without the reliable power and network infrastructure provided in data centers, cloud customers will need a lot of reassurance that the distributed system can re-route and restore servers if there is any problem with network or power to the heat customer's location.


As always, I'm left with some questions. How real is this? How many heat customers does the company have, and does it have any arrangements with other cloud providers to supply extra capacity if there is a mismatch between heat and cloud demands?
   I've yet to hear anything directly form the company, but a a few photos on a website produced by the government of Saxony suggest the comany's cabinets conceal a fairly non-standard configuration (left) - it looks like an array of individual servers wired together, instead of a conventional rack.
   I'm hoping to hear more form the company in due course.
   But I have to admit, despite all the questions I am warming to the idea of cloud heating..
   A version of this article appeared on Green Datacenter News.

[scallop]

Nije smešno. Znaš li koliko se para potroši na lađenje servera?

[Meho Krljic]

Ne, ne, jasno je meni da je ovo zdrava ideja. Zimi. Ali šta leti?

[scallop]

Za roštilj.

[Albedo 0]

kad Putin zavrne slavinu biće il' server il' smederevac

[Meho Krljic]

Autistične osobe generalno teže nalaze zaposlenje iz nekoliko razloga. Više od osamdesetpet procenata autističnih osoba u SAD je nezaposleno. I, iako te osobe nisu baš SVE redom kao Dastin Hofman u Rejnmenu, stoji da su statistički često prikraćene za socijalne veštine ali obdarene u domenu prepoznavanja obrazaca i matematičkih operacija. Organizacija u SAD, Meticulon, ih obučava i pomaže u pronalaženju posla u oblasti testiranja softvera:



http://sdtimes.com/autistic-advantage-software-testing/

[Meho Krljic]

http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/welcome-to-the-fuetch?bffb

[Albedo 0]

http://yugopapir.blogspot.ru/2013/12/emisija-jugoslavija-godine-2000-te.html

[PTY]

How Intel Gave Stephen Hawking a Voice

[Meho Krljic]

Veoma zanimljivo. I još jednom podseća da je Stiven Hoking u suštini holivudski scenario koji diše, ide unaokolo i promišlja stvarnost.

[Meho Krljic]

A Elon Musk bi da nam podari - svermirski internet!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Elon Musk's $10B Space Internet Venture Would Link With Future Mars Colony

[size=0pt]You have to hand it to Tony Stark, err, I mean Elon Musk. The man helped to co-found PayPal and he's the CEO of Tesla Motors, which has brought us wonderful electric vehicles like the Roadster and the outrageous Model S P85D. Musk also helms SpaceX, which just recently made its fifth successful trip the International Space Station (ISS) to deliver supplies via the Dragon capsule. The secondary mission of the latest ISS launch resulted in the "successful failure" of the Falcon 9 rocket, which Musk described as a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD) event.[/size]

[size=0pt]And let's not forget that Musk is also the chairman of [/size][size=0pt]SolarCity[/size][size=0pt], which produces commercial- and consumer-grade solar panels. You would think that Musk already has enough on his plate, but you'd be dead wrong. In addition to his [/size][size=0pt]Hyperloop[/size][size=0pt] side project, Musk is eyeing a space-based Internet network that would be comprised of hundred of micro satellites orbiting roughly 750 miles above Earth. [/size]
[size=0pt]The so-called "Space Internet" would provide faster data speeds than traditional communications satellites that have a geosynchronous orbit of roughly 22,000 miles. "Our focus is on creating a global communications system that would be larger than anything that has been talked about to date," said Musk. He hopes that the service will eventually grow to become "a giant global Internet service provider," reaching over three billion people who are currently either without Internet service or only have access to low-speed connections. [/size]

[size=0pt]And this wouldn't be a Musk venture without reaching for some overly ambitious goal. The satellite network would truly become a "Space Internet" platform, as it would form the basis for a direct communications link between Earth and Mars. "I think this needs to be done, and I don't see anyone else doing it," Musk told [/size][size=0pt]Bloomberg Businessweek.[/size]
[size=0pt]Musk's endgame is to help establish a colony on Mars and all of the pieces of the puzzle (including SpaceX's rapidly-reusable Falcon rockets) are slowly coming together. "The reason SpaceX was created was to accelerate development of rocket technology, all for the goal of establishing a self-sustaining, permanent base on Mars," said Musk at the 33rd annual International Space Development Conference in May of last year. "And I think we're making some progress in that direction — not as fast as I'd like."[/size]

[size=0pt]Space Internet would also help to fund Musk's efforts to establish a colony on Mars; well, that and the half billion price tag for a private citizen to make the trip according to his calculations. [/size]

Edit: e, do kurca i ovo formatiranje... Ništa, kliknite na link...

[Meho Krljic]

New amazing metal is so hydrophobic it makes water bounce like magic

[Meho Krljic]

Oumajgad, a šta kad ovaj robot počne da gleda anime i ratne filmove?


Military-funded robots can learn by watching YouTube

So far, the robots are only teaching themselves to cook

Those fearing the rise of an all-powerful artificial intelligence like Skynet, take note: Robots are now learning by watching YouTube.
Depending on your views of the video-sharing service, that can be hilarious or frightening. But so far, the machines are just watching cooking videos, according to researchers backed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA).
The computer scientists from the University of Maryland have succeeded in getting humanoid robots to reproduce what they see in a set of YouTube cooking clips, including recognizing, grabbing and using the right kitchen tools.
Part of DARPA's Mathematics of Sensing, Exploitation and Execution program, the research involves getting the machines to understand what's happening in a scene, not just recognizing objects within it.
More significantly, the machines were able to autonomously decide the most efficient combination of motions they observe to accomplish the task at hand.
"Cooking is complex in terms of manipulation, the steps involved and the tools you use," University of Maryland Computer Lab director Yiannis Aloimonos said in a posting on the University's website. "If you want to cut a cucumber, for example, you need to grab the knife, move it into place, make the cut and observe the results to make sure you did them properly."


For lower-level tasks involved in the cooking experiment, the team used convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are learning frameworks based on biological models, to process the visual data. One CNN was for classifying hand grasp motions while another CNN was for object recognition.
On top of these, the robots classified the individual actions they saw into what the researchers describe as words in a sentence. The machines were then able to put the individual vocabulary units together into goal-oriented sentences.
The researchers recorded recognition accuracy of 79 percent on objects, 91 percent on grasping types and 83 percent on predicted actions, according to their paper on the experiment.
"The ability to learn actions from human demonstrations is one of the major challenges for the development of intelligent systems," Aloimonos and colleagues, including a researcher from the National Information Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence in Australia (NICTA), wrote in the paper, which doesn't discuss whether the robots reached the stage of actually being able to cook and whether their cooking is edible or not.
"Our ultimate goal is to build a self-learning robot that is able to enrich its knowledge about fine-grained manipulation actions by 'watching' demo videos."
The work was presented this week at a meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Austin, Texas.

[дејан]

нешто старији чланак (сеп.2014) о новим технологијама из прошле године од којих неке изгледају као да су директно пренете из СФ-а (виа њорлд економик форум)

све у свему, верујем да је чарли брукер прочитао ово и очекујем бар једну интересантну епизоду блек мирора

Technology has become perhaps the greatest agent of change in the modern world. While never without risk, positive technological breakthroughs promise innovative solutions to the most pressing global challenges of our time, from resource scarcity to global environmental change. However, a lack of appropriate investment, outdated regulatory frameworks and gaps in public understanding prevent many promising technologies from achieving their potential.

The World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies identifies recent key trends in technological change in its annual list of Top 10 Emerging Technologies. By highlighting the most important technological breakthroughs, the Council aims to raise awareness of their potential and contribute to closing gaps in investment, regulation and public understanding. For 2014, the Council identified ten new technologies that could reshape our society in the future.

The 2014 list is:

Body-adapted Wearable Electronics
Nanostructured Carbon Composites
Mining Metals from Desalination Brine
Grid-scale Electricity Storage
Nanowire Lithium-ion Batteries
Screenless Display
Human Microbiome Therapeutics
RNA-based Therapeutics
Quantified Self (Predictive Analytics)
Brain-computer Interfaces

Body-adapted Wearable Electronics
Jogger runs around Chestnut Hill Reservoir in BostonFrom Google Glass to the Fitbit wristband, wearable technology has generated significant attention over the past year, with most existing devices helping people to better understand their personal health and fitness by monitoring exercise, heart rate, sleep patterns, and so on. The sector is shifting beyond external wearables like wristbands or clip-on devices to "body-adapted" electronics that further push the ever-shifting boundary between humans and technology.
The new generation of wearables is designed to adapt to the human body's shape at the place of deployment. These wearables are typically tiny, packed with a wide range of sensors and a feedback system, and camouflaged to make their use less intrusive and more socially acceptable. These virtually invisible devices include earbuds that monitor heart rate, sensors worn under clothes to track posture, a temporary tattoo that tracks health vitals and haptic shoe soles that communicate GPS directions through vibration alerts felt by the feet. The applications are many and varied: haptic shoes are currently proposed for helping blind people navigate, while Google Glass has already been worn by oncologists to assist in surgery via medical records and other visual information accessed by voice commands.
Technology analysts consider that success factors for wearable products include device size, non-invasiveness, and the ability to measure multiple parameters and provide real-time feedback that improves user behaviour. However, increased uptake also depends on social acceptability as regards privacy. For example, concerns have been raised about wearable devices that use cameras for facial recognition and memory assistance. Assuming these challenges can be managed, analysts project hundreds of millions of devices in use by 2016.

Nanostructured Carbon Composites
A car drives into a heavily secured downtown the first day of the G20 Summit in PittsburghEmissions from the world's rapidly-growing fleet of vehicles are an environmental concern, and raising the operating efficiency of transport is a promising way to reduce its overall impact. New techniques to nanostructure carbon fibres for novel composites are showing the potential in vehicle manufacture to reduce the weight of cars by 10% or more. Lighter cars need less fuel to operate, increasing the efficiency of moving people and goods and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
However, efficiency is only one concern – another of equal importance is improving passenger safety. To increase the strength and toughness of new composites, the interface between carbon fibres and the surrounding polymer matrix is engineered at the nanoscale to improve anchoring – using carbon nanotubes, for example. In the event of an accident, these surfaces are designed to absorb impact without tearing, distributing the force and protecting passengers inside the vehicle.
A third challenge, which may now be closer to a solution, is that of recycling carbon fibre composites – something which has held back the widespread deployment of the technology. New techniques involve engineering cleavable "release points" into the material at the interface between the polymer and the fibre so that the bonds can be broken in a controlled fashion and the components that make up the composite can be recovered separately and reused. Taken together, these three elements could have a major impact by bringing forward the potential for manufacturing lightweight, super-safe and recyclable composite vehicles to a mass scale.

Mining Metals from Desalination Brine
Waves crash against a lighthouse during storms that battered Britain and where a 14-year-old boy was swept away to sea, at Newhaven in South East EnglandAs the global population continues to grow and developing countries emerge from poverty, freshwater is at risk of becoming one of the Earth's most limited natural resources. In addition to water for drinking, sanitation and industry in human settlements, a significant proportion of the world's agricultural production comes from irrigated crops grown in arid areas. With rivers like the Colorado, the Murray-Darling and the Yellow River no longer reaching the sea for long periods of time, the attraction of desalinating seawater as a new source of freshwater can only increase.
Desalination has serious drawbacks, however. In addition to high energy use (a topic covered in last year's Top 10 Emerging Technologies), the process produces a reject-concentrated brine, which can have a serious impact on marine life when returned to the sea. Perhaps the most promising approach to solving this problem is to see the brine from desalination not as waste, but as a resource to be harvested for valuable materials. These include lithium, magnesium and uranium, as well as the more common sodium, calcium and potassium elements. Lithium and magnesium are valuable for use in high-performance batteries and lightweight alloys, for example, while rare earth elements used in electric motors and wind turbines – where potential shortages are already a strategic concern – may also be recovered.
New processes using catalyst-assisted chemistry raise the possibility of extracting these metals from reject desalination brine at a cost that may eventually become competitive with land-based mining of ores or lake deposits. This economic benefit may offset the overall cost of desalination, making it more viable on a large scale, in turn reducing the human pressures on freshwater ecosystems.

Grid-scale Electricity Storage
A tree stands near fog over the central Bosnian town of Vitez on the Lisac mountain range during sunsetElectricity cannot be directly stored, so electrical grid managers must constantly ensure that overall demand from consumers is exactly matched by an equal amount of power fed into the grid by generating stations. Because the chemical energy in coal and gas can be stored in relatively large quantities, conventional fossil-fuelled power stations offer dispatchable energy available on demand, making grid management a relatively simple task. However, fossil fuels also release greenhouse gases, causing climate change – and many countries now aim to replace carbon-based generators with a clean energy mix of renewable, nuclear or other non-fossil sources.
Clean energy sources, in particular wind and solar, can be highly intermittent; instead of producing electricity when consumers and grid managers want it, they generate uncontrollable quantities only when favourable weather conditions allow. A scaled-up nuclear sector might also present challenges due to its preferred operation as always-on baseload. Hence, the development of grid-scale electricity storage options has long been a "holy grail" for clean energy systems. To date, only pumped storage hydropower can claim a significant role, but it is expensive, environmentally challenging and totally dependent on favourable geography.
There are signs that a range of new technologies is getting closer to cracking this challenge. Some, such as flow batteries may, in the future, be able to store liquid chemical energy in large quantities analogous to the storage of coal and gas. Various solid battery options are also competing to store electricity in sufficiently energy-dense and cheaply available materials. Newly invented graphene supercapacitors offer the possibility of extremely rapid charging and discharging over many tens of thousands of cycles. Other options use kinetic potential energy such as large flywheels or the underground storage of compressed air.
A more novel option being explored at medium scale in Germany is CO2 methanation via hydrogen electrolysis, where surplus electricity is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, with the hydrogen later being reacted with waste carbon dioxide to form methane for later combustion – if necessary, to generate electricity. While the round-trip efficiency of this and other options may be relatively low, clearly storage potential will have high economic value in the future. It is too early to pick a winner, but it appears that the pace of technological development in this field is moving more rapidly than ever, in our assessment, bringing a fundamental breakthrough more likely in the near term.

Nanowire Lithium-ion Batteries
A vehicle trapped overnight by an ice storm sits abandoned on the Glenshane Pass in Northern IrelandAs stores of electrical charge, batteries are critically important in many aspects of modern life. Lithium-ion batteries, which offer good energy density (energy per weight or volume) are routinely packed into mobile phones, laptops and electric cars, to name just a few common uses. However, to increase the range of electric cars to match that of petrol-powered competitors – not to mention the battery lifetime between charges of mobile phones and laptops – battery energy density needs to be improved dramatically.
Batteries are typically composed of two electrodes, a positive terminal known as a cathode, and a negative terminal known as an anode, with an electrolyte in between. This electrolyte allows ions to move between the electrodes to produce current. In lithium-ion batteries, the anode is composed of graphite, which is relatively cheap and durable. However, researchers have begun to experiment with silicon anodes, which would offer much greater power capacity.
One engineering challenge is that silicon anodes tend to suffer structural failure from swelling and shrinking during charge-discharge cycle. Over the last year, researchers have developed possible solutions that involve the creation of silicon nanowires or nanoparticles, which seem to solve the problems associated with silicon's volume expansion when it reacts with lithium. The larger surface area associated with nanoparticles and nanowires further increases the battery's power density, allowing for fast charging and current delivery.
Able to fully charge more quickly, and produce 30%-40% more electricity than today's lithium-ion batteries, this next generation of batteries could help transform the electric car market and allow the storage of solar electricity at the household scale. Initially, silicon-anode batteries are expected to begin to ship in smartphones within the next two years.

Screenless Display
An illustration picture shows a woman looking at the Facebook website on a computer in MunichOne of the more frustrating aspects of modern communications technology is that, as devices have miniaturized, they have become more difficult to interact with – no one would type out a novel on a smartphone, for example. The lack of space on screen-based displays provides a clear opportunity for screenless displays to fill the gap. Full-sized keyboards can already be projected onto a surface for users to interact with, without concern over whether it will fit into their pocket. Perhaps evoking memories of the early Star Wars films, holographic images can now be generated in three dimensions; in 2013, MIT's Media Lab reported a prototype inexpensive holographic colour video display with the resolution of a standard TV.
Screenless display may also be achieved by projecting images directly onto a person's retina, not only avoiding the need for weighty hardware, but also promising to safeguard privacy by allowing people to interact with computers without others sharing the same view. By January 2014, one start-up company had already raised a substantial sum via Kickstarter with the aim of commercializing a personal gaming and cinema device using retinal display. In the longer term, technology may allow synaptic interfaces that bypass the eye altogether, transmitting "visual" information directly to the brain.
This field saw rapid progress in 2013 and appears set for imminent breakthroughs of scalable deployment of screenless display. Various companies have made significant breakthroughs in the field, including virtual reality headsets, bionic contact lenses, the development of mobile phones for the elderly and partially blind people, and hologram-like videos without the need for moving parts or glasses.

Human Microbiome Therapeutics
MRSA bacteria strain is seen in a petri dish in a microbiological laboratory in BerlinThe human body is perhaps more properly described as an ecosystem than as a single organism: microbial cells typically outnumber human cells by 10 to one. This human microbiome has been the subject of intensifying research in the past few years, with the Human Microbiome Project in 2012 reporting results generated from 80 collaborating scientific institutions. They found that more than 10,000 microbial species occupy the human ecosystem, comprising trillions of cells and making up 1%-3% of the body's mass.
Through advanced DNA sequencing, bioinformatics and culturing technologies, the diverse microbe species that cohabitate with the human body are being identified and characterized, with differences in their abundance correlated with disease and health.
It is increasingly understood that this plethora of microbes plays an important role in our survival: bacteria in the gut, for example, allow humans to digest foods and absorb important nutrients that their bodies would otherwise not be able to access. On the other hand, pathogens that are ubiquitous in humans can sometimes turn virulent and cause sickness or even death.
Attention is being focused on the gut microbiome and its role in diseases ranging from infections to obesity, diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease. It is increasingly understood that antibiotic treatments that destroy gut flora can result in complications such as Clostridium difficile infections, which can in rare cases lead to life-threatening complications. On the other hand, a new generation of therapeutics comprising a subset of microbes found in healthy gut are under clinical development with a view to improving medical treatments. Advances in human microbiome technologies clearly represent an unprecedented way to develop new treatments for serious diseases and to improve general healthcare outcomes in our species.

RNA-based Therapeutics
Handout image of structures found in the HIV RNA genome as identified by UNC researchersRNA is an essential molecule in cellular biology, translating genetic instructions encoded in DNA into the production of the proteins that enable cells to function. However, as protein production is also a central factor in most human diseases and disorders, RNA-based therapeutics have long been thought to hold the potential to treat a range of problems where conventional drug-based treatments cannot offer much help. The field has been slow to develop, however, with initial high hopes being dented by the sheer complexity of the effort and the need to better understand the variability of gene expression in cells.
Over the past year, there has been a resurgence of interest in this new field of biotech healthcare, with two RNA-based treatments approved as human therapeutics as of 2014. RNA-based drugs for a range of conditions including genetic disorders, cancer and infectious disease are being developed based on the mechanism of RNA interference, which is used to silence the expression of defective or overexpressed genes.
Extending the repertoire of RNA-based therapeutics, an even newer platform based on messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules is now emerging. Specific mRNA sequences injected intramuscularly or intravenously can act as therapeutic agents through the patient's own cells, translating them into the corresponding proteins that deliver the therapeutic effect. Unlike treatments aimed at changing DNA directly, RNA-based therapeutics do not cause permanent changes to the cell's genome and so can be increased or discontinued as necessary.
Advances in basic RNA science, synthesis technology and in vivo delivery are combining to enable a new generation of RNA-based drugs that can attenuate the abundance of natural proteins, or allow for the in vivo production of optimized, therapeutic proteins. Working in collaboration with large pharmaceutical companies and academia, several private companies that aim to offer RNA-based treatments have been launched. We expect this field of healthcare to increasingly challenge conventional pharmaceuticals in forging new treatments for difficult diseases in the next few years.

Quantified Self (Predictive Analytics)
A woman speaks on her iPhone as she walks on a busy street in downtown ShanghaiThe quantified-self movement has existed for many years as a collaboration of people collecting continual data on their everyday activities in order to make better choices about their health and behaviour. But, with today's Internet of Things, the movement has begun to come into its own and have a wider impact.
Smartphones contain a rich record of people's activities, including who they know (contact lists, social networking apps), who they talk to (call logs, text logs, e-mails), where they go (GPS, Wi-Fi, and geotagged photos) and what they do (apps we use, accelerometer data). Using this data, and specialized machine-learning algorithms, detailed and predictive models about people and their behaviours can be built to help with urban planning, personalized medicine, sustainability and medical diagnosis.
For example, a team at Carnegie Mellon University has been looking at how to use smartphone data to predict the onset of depression by modelling changes in sleep behaviours and social relationships over time. In another example, the Livehoods project, large quantities of geotagged data created by people's smartphones (using software such as Instagram and Foursquare) and crawled from the Web have allowed researchers to understand the patterns of movement through urban spaces.
In recent years, sensors have become cheap and increasingly ubiquitous as more manufacturers include them in their products to understand consumer behaviour and avoid the need for expensive market research. For example, cars can record every aspect of a person's driving habits, and this information can be shown in smartphone apps or used as big data in urban planning or traffic management. As the trend continues towards extensive data gathering to track every aspect of people's lives, the challenge becomes how to use this information optimally, and how to reconcile it with privacy and other social concerns.

Brain-computer Interfaces
Chilean software engineer Jorge Alviarez, places head sensors on Jenifer Astorga, who suffers from quadriplegia, during a training session for her in Valparaiso city.The ability to control a computer using only the power of the mind is closer than one might think. Brain-computer interfaces, where computers can read and interpret signals directly from the brain, have already achieved clinical success in allowing quadriplegics, those suffering "locked-in syndrome" or people who have had a stroke to move their own wheelchairs or even drink coffee from a cup by controlling the action of a robotic arm with their brain waves. In addition, direct brain implants have helped restore partial vision to people who have lost their sight.
Recent research has focused on the possibility of using brain-computer interfaces to connect different brains together directly. Researchers at Duke University last year reported successfully connecting the brains of two mice over the Internet (into what was termed a "brain net") where mice in different countries were able to cooperate to perform simple tasks to generate a reward. Also in 2013, scientists at Harvard University reported that they were able to establish a functional link between the brains of a rat and a human with a non-invasive, computer-to-brain interface.
Other research projects have focused on manipulating or directly implanting memories from a computer into the brain. In mid-2013, MIT researchers reported having successfully implanted a false memory into the brain of a mouse. In humans, the ability to directly manipulate memories might have an application in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, while in the longer term, information may be uploaded into human brains in the manner of a computer file. Of course, numerous ethical issues are also clearly raised by this rapidly advancing field.
This list was compiled by the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies. Noubar Afeyan, Managing Partner, Flagship Ventures is the Council's Chair, as well as a Mentor for the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2014. Mark Lynas, Freelance Writer on Science, Technology and Climate Change, and Sir David King, Special Representative for Climate Change, Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom, are its Vice-chairs.

[дејан]

а о истом трошку иде и ова МИТ-ова листа технолошких пробоја 2014. (која, руку на срце, изгледа популистичка колико нека мит-ова листа може да буде)

Agricultural Drones
Relatively cheap drones with advanced sensors and imaging capabilities are giving farmers new ways to increase yields and reduce crop damage.
Ultraprivate Smartphones
New models built with security and privacy in mind reflect the Zeitgeist of the Snowden era.
Brain Mapping
A new map, a decade in the works, shows structures of the brain in far greater detail than ever before, providing neuroscientists with a guide to its immense complexity.
Neuromorphic Chips
Microprocessors configured more like brains than traditional chips could soon make computers far more astute about what's going on around them.
Genome Editing
The ability to create primates with intentional mutations could provide powerful new ways to study complex and genetically baffling brain disorders.
Microscale 3-D Printing
Inks made from different types of materials, precisely applied, are greatly expanding the kinds of things that can be printed.
Mobile Collaboration
The smartphone era is finally getting the productivity software it needs.
Oculus Rift
Thirty years after virtual-reality goggles and immersive virtual worlds made their debut, the technology finally seems poised for widespread use.
Agile Robots
Computer scientists have created machines that have the balance and agility to walk and run across rough and uneven terrain, making them far more useful in navigating human environments.
Smart Wind and Solar Power
Big data and artificial intelligence are producing ultra-accurate forecasts that will make it feasible to integrate much more renewable energy into the grid.

[Meho Krljic]

Robert Hajnlin se smeje iz groba:



Exclusive - The FAA: regulating business on the moon

(Reuters) - The United States government has taken a new, though preliminary, step to encourage commercial development of the moon.


According to documents obtained by Reuters, U.S. companies can stake claims to lunar territory through an existing licensing process for space launches.The Federal Aviation Administration, in a previously undisclosed late-December letter to Bigelow Aerospace, said the agency intends to "leverage the FAA's existing launch licensing authority to encourage private sector investments in space systems by ensuring that commercial activities can be conducted on a non-interference basis." In other words, experts said, Bigelow could set up one of its proposed inflatable habitats on the moon, and expect to have exclusive rights to that territory - as well as related areas that might be tapped for mining, exploration and other activities. However, the FAA letter noted a concern flagged by the U.S. State Department that "the national regulatory framework, in its present form, is ill-equipped to enable the U.S. government to fulfill its obligations" under a 1967 United Nations treaty, which, in part, governs activities on the moon.  The United Nations Outer Space treaty, in part, requires countries to authorize and supervise activities of non-government entities that are operating in space, including the moon. It also bans nuclear weapons in space, prohibits national claims to celestial bodies and stipulates that space exploration and development should benefit all countries.    "We didn't give (Bigelow Aerospace) a license to land on the moon. We're talking about a payload review that would potentially be part of a future launch license request. But it served a purpose of documenting a serious proposal for a U.S. company to engage in this activity that has high-level policy implications," said the FAA letter's author, George Nield, associate administrator for the FAA's Office of Commercial Transportation."We recognize the private sector's need to protect its assets and personnel on the moon or on other celestial bodies," the FAA wrote in the December letter to Bigelow Aerospace. The company, based in Nevada, is developing the inflatable space habitats. Bigelow requested the policy statement from the FAA, which oversees commercial space transportation in the U.S. The letter was coordinated with U.S. departments of State, Defense, Commerce, as well as NASA and other agencies involved in space operations. It expands the FAA's scope from launch licensing to U.S. companies' planned activities on the moon, a region currently governed only by the nearly 50-year old UN space treaty.  But the letter also points to more legal and diplomatic work that will have to be done to govern potential commercial development of the moon or other extraterrestrial bodies."It's very much a wild west kind of mentality and approach right now," said John Thornton, chief executive of private owned Astrobotic, a startup lunar transportation and services firm competing in a $30 million Google-backed moon exploration XPrize contest. Among the pending issues is lunar property and mineral rights, a topic that was discussed and tabled in the 1970s in a sister UN proposal called the Moon Treaty. It was signed by just nine countries, including France, but not the United States."It is important to remember that many space-faring nations have national companies that engage in commercial space activities. They will definitely want to be part of the rule making process," said Joanne Gabrynowicz, a professor of space law at University of Mississippi .    Bigelow Aerospace is expected to begin testing a space habitat aboard the International Space Station this year. The company intends to then operate free-flying orbital outposts for paying customers, including government agencies, research organizations, businesses and even tourists. That would be followed by a series of bases on the moon beginning around 2025, a project estimated to cost about $12 billion. Company founder Robert Bigelow said he intends to invest $300 million of his own funds, about $2.5 billion in hardware and services from Bigelow Aerospace and raise the rest from private investors. The FAA's decision "doesn't mean that there's ownership of the moon," Bigelow told Reuters. "It just means that somebody else isn't licensed to land on top of you or land on top of where exploration and prospecting activities are going on, which may be quite a distance from the lunar station." Other companies could soon be testing rights to own what they bring back from the moon. Moon Express, another aspiring lunar transportation company, and also an XPrize contender, intends to return moon dust or rocks on its third mission."The company does not see anything, including the Outer Space Treaty, as being a barrier to our initial operations on the moon," said Moon Express co-founder and president Bob Richards. That includes "the right to bring stuff off the moon and call it ours."  (Reporting Irene Klotz; Editing by Joe White, Hank Gilman and Andrew Hay)