Category Archives: Futurism

Emma doesn't look so great.

Her legs are puffy and covered in varicose veins. Her eyes are flat and dead, and her back looks like she spends her days ringing the bell at Notre-Dame Cathedral.

It's harsh but true. Emma is a life-sized doll depicting what the team think an average office worker in the United Kingdom could look like in 20 years if changes aren't made to the workplace environment.

For a new report titled The Work Colleague of The Future, a team of health experts led by behavioral futurist William Higham looked at survey data submitted by more than 3,000 office workers in France, Germany, and the UK.

The percentages of UK office workers who said they already suffered from sore eyes (50 percent), sore backs (48 percent), and headaches (48 percent) as a direct result of their work environment informed the design of the sickly Emma, who also suffers from stress-related eczema, excess weight, and swollen limbs.

If we don't majorly shake-up the standard office environment, according to Higham, we're headed toward a future rife with Emmas.

"Unless we make radical changes to our working lives, such as moving more, addressing our posture at our desks, taking regular walking breaks, or considering improving our workstation setup, our offices are going to make us very sick," he said, according to The Independent.

Of course, this isn't a peer-reviewed study, and Fellowes the office furniture company which commissioned the report is undoubtedly trying to promote its own products here. But it's still an interesting concept looking into exactly what our office spaces could be doing to our bodies.

This article was originally published by Futurism. Read the original article.

Read the original here:
This Creepy Life-Sized Doll Is a Warning About What Office Life Is Doing to Us - ScienceAlert

Ghostly Face

Even NASA is getting into the Halloween spirit.

On Tuesday, the agency released an image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and it depicts what looks like a ghostly face with glowing spiral eyes.

Obviously, thereisnt really a giant face staring us down from 704 million light-years away. But what were actually seeing in the new Hubble image is just about as wild: a collision between two galaxies.

Each eye is the bright core of a galaxy, the result of one galaxy slamming into another, NASA wrote in a news release. The outline of the face is a ring of young blue stars. Other clumps of new stars form a nose and mouth.

This isnt the first time NASA has bridged the gap between the scientific and the spooky.

For Halloween 2018, the agency released Hubble images of a glowing ghost nebulaand a bat shadow formed by a young star. Four years prior to that, it shared an image of the Sun that looked remarkably like a flaming jack-o-lantern.

READ MORE: Hubble Captures Galaxies Ghostly Gaze [NASA]

More on Halloween: AI Dreamed up These Nightmare Fuel Halloween Masks

Excerpt from:
Colliding Galaxies Look Like the Glowing Eyes of a Ghostly Face - Futurism

It almost seems like astronomers are in a race to unveil the biggest black holes they can find. Most recently, a team of German astronomers claimed to have discovered a black hole 40 billion times the mass of the Sun.

But what if there are also black holes many magnitudes smaller?

In a study published today in the prestigious journal Science, a team of astronomers from Ohio State University claim to have discovered an entirely new and previously missing class of black holes.

Were showing this hint that there is another population out there that we have yet to really probe in the search for black holes, lead author Todd Thompson said in a statement.

If confirmed, current theories would have to take intoaccount an entirely new class of black hole forcing us to rethink how we understand the way stars and other kinds of celestial objects are born and die.

Thompson and his team were puzzled by the huge gap between the size of the biggest neutron stars extremely dense and relatively small stars that form after larger stars implode after a supernova and the smallest black holes we know of.

Neutron stars are fairly small two to three times the mass of the Sun but stars any larger than that tend to collapse in on themselves and form black holes.

Their smoking gun: a giant red star that was orbiting something that at first appeared to be too small to be a black hole in the Milky Way, but that was much bigger than the neutron stars we know of.

The black hole it was orbiting turned out to be only 3.3 times the mass of the Sun usually the black holes weve found in the past are at least five times the Suns mass or much, much larger.

The discovery could redefine the way we look at the lifecycle of a star.

If we could reveal a new population of black holes, it would tell us more about which stars explode, which dont, which form black holes, which form neutron stars, said Thompson. It opens up a new area of study.

READ MORE: Scientists may have discovered whole new class of black holes [The Ohio State University]

More on black holes: Astronomers Just Spotted One of the Biggest Black Holes Ever

Read the rest here:
Scientists Discover New Class of Tiny Black Holes - Futurism

Emma doesnt look so great.

Her legs are puffy and covered in varicose veins. Her eyes are flat and dead, and her backlooks like she spends her days ringing the bell at Notre-Dame Cathedral.

Its harsh but true. Emma is a life-sized doll depicting what the average office worker in the United Kingdom could look like in 20 years if changes arent made to the workplace environment.

For a new report titled The Work Colleague of The Future, a team of health experts led by behavioral futurist William Higham looked at survey data submitted by more than 3,000 office workers in France, Germany, and the U.K.

The percentages of U.K. office workers who said they already suffered from sore eyes (50 percent), sore backs (48 percent), and headaches (48 percent) as a direct result of their work environment informed the design of the sickly Emma, who also suffers from stress-related eczema, excess weight, and swollen limbs.

If we dont majorly shake-up the standard office environment, according to Higham, were headed toward a future rife with Emmas.

Unless we make radical changes to our working lives, such as moving more, addressing our posture at our desks, taking regular walking breaks, or considering improving our workstation setup, our offices are going to make us very sick, he said, according to The Independent.

Read more:
Here's How 20 Years of Office Work Will Disfigure the Human Body - Futurism

Internet Milestone

In honor of the 50-year-anniversary of the first computer-to-computer message the precursor,arguably, to todays internet Pew Research Center and Elon University asked hundreds of tech experts to imagine how the internet might evolve over the next 50 years.

And one of those experts envisions a future in which software has gained personhood.

Jerry Michalski is a former tech analyst who went on to found the Relationship Economy Expedition, a private think tank focused on the future economy.

He told the surveyors he could imagine software having rights, personality, and limited responsibility by the year 2069 and we can already see examples of this future taking shape.

In 2017, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia granted Sophie, an artificially intelligent robot, citizenship. That same year, European Union lawmakers began arguing that robots should be given some legal form of digital personhood.

Still, as Michalski pointed out in his response to Pew, half a century is a long time, so its hard to say for sure what shape our relationship with the digital world could take.

He doesnt even go so far as to say he thinks his vision is the most likely scenario, calling it just one of many possible futures and really, could anyone have perfectly predicted todays internet based on that first computer-to-computer message in 1969?

READ MORE: Experts Optimistic About the Next 50 Years of Digital Life [Pew Research Center]

More on digital personhood: Lawmakers Want You to Be Able to Sue Robots

See more here:
Expert: Software Could Have "Personhood" by 2069 - Futurism

X-Ray Observations

Scientists just released the first-ever images taken with the German space agencys X-ray telescope eROSITA, at an event at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

The new images could give us invaluable insight into the nature of dark energy the mysterious form of unknown energy that accounts for roughly 68 percent of the known universe by mapping the structure of the cosmos in new ways.

Visible light shows the structure of a galaxy traced by its stars, but the X-rays are dominated by supermassive black holes growing at their centres, Kirpal Nandra, director of High Energy astrophysics at the Max Planck Institute. And where we see clusters of galaxies with optical telescopes, X-rays reveal the huge reservoirs of gas filling the space between them and tracing out the dark matter structure of the Universe.

The two X-ray exposures were taken by eROSITAs seven mirrors, which launched as part of the Russian-German Spektr-RG space observatory back in July. One shows our neighbor galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, and the other shows two galaxy clusters 800 million light years away.

Scientists believe X-ray observations can provide new data about the existence and nature of dark energy. Since it can only be observed by its effects on other objects and never directly, the eROSITA team will be examining galaxy clusters that emit substantial amounts of X-rays.

We now know that eROSITA can deliver on its promise and create a map of the whole X-ray sky with unprecedented depth and detail, said eROSITA project scientist Andrea Merloni.

The potential for new discoveries is immense, Predehl added. Now we can start reaping the fruits of more than ten years of work.

READ MORE: German X-Ray Telescope Takes First Images of Universe. Here They Are! [Space.com]

More on X-ray observations: Three Supermassive Black Holes Are About to Collide

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Here Are The First-Ever Images From the Dark Matter Telescope - Futurism