time travel, parallel universes, and other useful illusions
On February 23, 2019, the Kodaiji temple in Kyoto, Japan unveiled Mindar, the Android Kannon. The robot, its head and hands covered in something resembling human skin but otherwise machine-like, was fashioned after Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy.
One in ten participants of a newly released study were found to have had a confirmed near-death experience, or NDE. Researchers, led by Dr. Daniel Kondziella, used an online crowdsourcing platform to “investigate the prevalence of near-death experiences and self-reported REM sleep intrusions.”
Is the truth really out there? I’m beginning to wonder. In the above video, you can get a real and perhaps mildly terrifying look at the latest incarnation of so-called deepfakes, those uncanny videos of peoples’ faces doing things they never actually did, or plopped onto other people’s bodies. This, however, is much more advanced. …
Continue reading “The Future Is Deeply Fake: Living Portraits and Learned Talking Heads”
“SMALL ASTEROID TO IMPACT OVER NEW YORK CITY’S CENTRAL PARK IN 10 DAYS” So reads the fake press release for day five of the fictional impact event at this year’s Planetary Defense Conference.
The mad scientists over at Yale University recently published some exciting terrifying research in Nature about reviving dead pig brains.
Last week, NASA unveiled the first ever image of a black hole. It looks like an orange donut, a mysterious eye in the dark vacuum of space. But the question has never been what does a black hole look like? The real question is how are aliens involved in all this?
The above video from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology highlights a “particle robotics system,” which consists of many smaller robots working together to accomplish goals.
Robots might not be self aware yet, but given some recent headlines, I have a feeling that once they do wake up, they’re going to be a bit agitated. Consider the following…
Synesthesia is a fascinating phenomenon of the mind, occurring when multiple senses seemingly “join” together. One of the more common forms is grapheme-color synesthesia, in which people see letters and numbers as having their own colors. For example, a person may see the number one as red, or seven as oddly chartreuse.
Neuroengineers at Columbia University have successfully converted human neural activity into synthesized speech. Led by Dr. Nima Mesgarani, their method involved training a deep-learning algorithm to interpret and synthesize the neural patterns of test subjects. Doing so, they were able to “reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity.”
First: I just want to make a quick note here that the world did not end after this week’s Super Blood Wolf Moon. I gave it a few days just to be sure. It is what it is. But you know what else hasn’t blown up Earth? CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
We’re only a week into 2019, and already we’ve seen two pretty amazing events in space exploration: New Horizons’ visit to Ultima Thule, and China’s landing on the far side of the Moon.
In 1984, The Terminator promised me a robot apocalypse circa 2029. And yet, we haven’t quite reached our inevitable obliteration via some Skynet-esque artificial intelligence.