Israeli scientists/activists bring green power to West Bank village Susya, South Hebron Mountains Residents of a West Bank village with no electricity have been helped out of the darkness by unlikely benefactors – a group of Israelis who installed solar panels and wind turbines to illuminate the Palestinians' makeshift homes. The villagers of Susya live in tents and caves with power lines darting right above their dwellings, connecting a nearby Jewish settlement to the power grid while bypassing them entirely. It was this lack of basic services that drew the physicists from Comet-ME, a group of pro-peace Israeli scientists and activists, to this dusty, desolate area. Now the entire village of 300 people has access to power that is reliable, free and green.
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The Sea of Energy in Which the Earth Floats text by Jerry Decker --------A NEW ERA IN ENERGY: Power from the cosmos and the earth. Dr. Nikola Tesla said over sixty years ago, "Before many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe...throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic? If static our hopes are in vain, if kinetic - and this we know it is, for certain - then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature." Nikola Tesla was not referring to atomic or nuclear energy, but to the energy which is continually bombarding the earth from outer space. Enough energy is coming to the earth to light over 1.5 million (1,693,600) 100 Watt lamps for every human being on the earth today. No fuel of any kind need be taken as a dead load as this energy can be picked up directly by ocean liners, railroads, airplanes, automobiles, or any form of transportation. Heat, light and power can be made available for use in all kinds of building and for all kinds of machinery.
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The Lightning Foundry project - Wireless power transmission systems The Lightning Foundry is a project based on 20 years of development. Lightning is electricity, but operates very differently from electrical discharges at the human scale. As lightning forms, it breaks through the air up to ten times easier than small-scale electric arcs, using tricks we don’t yet understand. The problem of understanding "lightning initiation" still confounds world experts in the field. However, recent theories and a bizarre experimental accident suggest that laboratory-scale electric arcs start to gain lightning-like abilities once they grow past about 200ft in length.
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M.C. Escher for Real Gershon Elber .................. The work of M.C. Escher needs no introduction. We have all learned to appreciate the impossibilities that this master of illusion's artwork presents to the layman's eye. Nevertheless, it may come as a surprise for some, but many of the so-called 'impossible' drawings of M. C. Escher can be realized as actual physical objects. These objects will resemble the Escher's drawing, of the same name, from a certain viewing direction. This work below presents some of these three-dimensional models that were designed and built using geometric modeling and computer graphics tools.
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Pioneering Thames Hub in bid to rejuvenate UK's outdated infrastructure network Concept designs have been released for a groundbreaking new infrastructure system stretching the length of Great Britain. The self-funded study by architects Foster + Partners, infrastructure consultants Halcrow, and economists Volterra Partners offers a sustainable alternative to travel and communication in the UK, integrating various transport networks into a comprehensive infrastructure system. Founder of the architecture practice behind the concept, Lord Norman Foster explains: “If we are to establish a modern transport and energy infrastructure in Britain for this century and beyond, we need to recapture the foresight and political courage of our 19th century forebears and draw on our traditions of engineering, design and landscape. If we don’t then we are denying future generations to come.”
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Neuroscience vs philosophy: free will is an illusion vs think again The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes's outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters1. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.
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IBMs Cognitive Computing Chips - designed to emulate the brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition Computing has been essentially the same for over sixty years. An input signal is processed by a device, a switch, an amplifier, a logic gate etc, and then passed onto another device where it is processed again eventually producing some kind of output which could be a flashing light or the information you are reading now. Of course things have moved on from the early days where replacing burned out vacuum tubes was a major task, but despite advances in power and speed driven by better control over device and material parameters, the basic Von Neumann architecture has remained essentially the same. Of course nature has invented far better ways of doing things, the human brain stands at the pinnacle of evolutionary information architecture engineering, and DNA stores information at a higher density and with greater persistence than anything ever invented – we can see bits of our genetic code reaching back almost to the first life, whereas I bet the collection of DVDs in my living room will be as unreadable as video tapes or floppy disks within ten years.
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Lingodroid Project - Robots taught to invent own language In science fiction movies, when robots talk to one another it's not really a "language" as much as a stream of beeps or long strings of binary. Even so, one group of Australian researchers have managed to teach robots to do something that, until now, was the reserve of humans and a few other animals: they've taught them how to invent and use spoken language. The goal of the research is to understand how language evolves and develops naturally over time. Since it's impossible to find two humans who have no language and experiment with them to see how they invent one, the University of Queensland and the Queensland University of Technology researchers decided to use robots instead. The robots, called LingoDroids, are equipped with microphones, speakers, cameras, range finders, and sonar that they use to map their surroundings and speak to one another.
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Mind-Controlling Parasites Mind control by parasite sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but not only have scientists revealed that it is real across a range of animals — including perhaps humans — they now even have fossil evidence suggesting it has taken place for millions of years. An unnerving variety of parasites have evolved the ability to control the brains of victims to help the parasites spread. For instance, the protozoan known as Toxoplasma gondii makes rats love cat urine so that it can spread among its feline hosts — and it may influence human culture as well, making people more prone to certain forms of neuroticism. Another case of parasite mind control involves the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which essentially turns ants into zombies. It maneuvers the insects into biting down on the major veins of the undersides of leaves just before they die — the fungus then rapidly grows a stalk from their victims' heads, releasing spores to infect more ants.
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science
