Category Archives: Futurism

Unnatural Causes

100 percent of global warming over the past century has been caused by humans. In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report stated a clear expert consensus that: It is extremely likely [defined as 95-100% certainty] that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic [human-caused] increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.

Then in 2014, research in the journal Climate Risk Management using rigorous statistical techniques revealed an objective link between global temperature increases and human activity, with a probability exceeding 99.999 percent. In fact, according to a Skeptical Science review of studies on human and natural contributions to global warming:

The overwhelming majority of scientistsabout 97 percentagree not only that climate change is happening, but that it is caused by humans. Nevertheless, most people dont agree:they tend to disbelieve these kinds of statistics, or see climate change denial as an equally valid, alternative point of view.

Despite clear evidence that global warming is caused by humans, many people believe natural processes are playing a major role: only 43 percent of people in the U.K., 49 percent of Germans, 34 percent of Norwegians, and 55 percent of the French believe that climate change is mostly or completely caused by humans. Even fewer peopleonly about one-third of all people in these four countriesbelieve that more than 80 percent of scientists agree that climate change is a real, human-caused phenomenon.

In the U.S., Pew data shows that about 48 percent of all adults believe climate change is caused by humans, but about 31 percent believe that global warming is the result of natural causes. A full 20 percent believe that it doesnt exist at all. Only about 40 percent of Americans expect global warming will have harmful effects on wildlife, weather patterns, and shorelines. When it comes to that figure citing almost all climate scientists agreeing that global warming is caused by humans, only 27 percent of Americans believe thats true. As for everyone else? 35 percent saying more than half, of global warming is caused by humans, 20 percent saying about half, is and 15 percent believefewer than half or almost none.

Although these differences in opinion exist along political lines in the U.S. in particular, it is critically important to drive conversations about climate change. Forcing policy changes in the current political climate isnt easy, and without public pressure and widespread support, its near impossible. This is why helping people understand the facts about climate change is so important. Species are already dying, and extreme, climate change-induced weather is already killing people. This is terrible news, but it does mean that the facts will be harder and harder to ignore. Maybe then the conversations will be easier to have.

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Humans Caused 100% of the Past Century's Global Warming - Futurism

The Cars of the Future

The cars of the future will run on renewable energy. Or, at the very least, will be hybrids. At the annual Geneva International Motor Show, the world was given a preview of the some of the most futuristic cars (or car concepts) in the works. Weve already shared the details onSedric, Volkswagens autonomous lounge on wheels,and Pop.Up, Airbus and Italdesigns car-drone hybrid, but here are five others from the total of 118 that are just as impressive.

Hyundais FE (short for Future Eco) Fuel Cell, slated for 2018, aims to be the future of SUVs. It will run on Hyundais improved hydrogen fuel cell technology and is a zero-emission vehicle, promising 30 percent greater energy density than the Tucson Fuel Cell. This futuristic-looking SUV is designed with a clean, flowing look thats inspired by water, according to Hyundai. On the inside, it has internal air humidifiers that can recycle some of its water emissions within the cabins atmosphere. Plus, it has a trunk that can stow and charge an electric scooter.

This onesa comeback concept. Initially unveiled by Bentley at the 2014 Geneva Motor Show, the EXP 12 Speed 6e is probably one of the fanciest EV concepts out there. Thats to be expected with British manufacturer Bentley, of course. This elegant two-seater has a better battery than its predecessor, cameras for side mirrors, and no roof making it perfect for a grand touring experience.

Heres another luxurious-looking sedan. Though not an electric car, the 2018 Lexus LS 500h makes the case for a hybrid large sedan, which is cleaner but packs the same powertrain found in the 2018 LC 500h sports coupe. It can run on pure electric power for a considerable distance.

Theres the regular Zoe, and then theres the E-Sport. Both are EVs from Renault, but the E-Sport is built to wow your racing genes. It has 460 bhp courtesy of its monstrous 450 kg battery, boosting this four-wheel drive EVs performance. To keep its weight down to 1,400 kg (3,086 lb), the E-Sport has a carbonfiber body. This working concept is intended to maintain Renaults commitment to the ongoing development of electric vehicles.

The GT by Mercedes-AMG is another high-performance hybrid car concept. The renowned car manufacturer is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a concept car that has a Formula 1-derived 805-hp hybrid powertrain.With the Mercedes-AMG GT concept, we are giving a preview of our third completely autonomously developed sports car, Tobias Moers, chairman of Mercedes-AMG, said during the unveiling. With our AMG GT concept, that means a combination of an ultramodern V8 petrol engine and a high-performance electric motor.

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Five of the Most Futuristic Cars Unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show - Futurism

Giving Machines a Voice

Last year, Google successfully gave a machine the ability to generate human-like speech through its voice synthesis program called WaveNet. Powered by Googles DeepMind artificial intelligence (AI) deep neural network, WaveNet produced synthetic speech using given texts. Now, Chinese internet search company Baidu has developed the most advanced speech synthesis program ever, and its called Deep Voice.

Developed in Baidus AI research lab based in Silicon Valley, Deep Voice presents a big breakthrough in speech synthesis technology by largely doing away with the behind-the-scenes fine-tuning typically necessary for suchprograms. As such, Deep Voice can learn how to talk in a matter of a few hours and with virtually no help from humans.

Deep Voice uses a relatively simple method: through deep-learning techniques, Deep Voice broke down texts into phonemes which is sound at its smallest perceptually distinct units. A speech synthesis network then reproduced these sounds. The need for any fine-tuning was greatly reduced because every stage of the process relied on deep-learning techniques all researches needed to dowas train the algorithm.

For the audio synthesis model, we implement a variant of WaveNet that requires fewer parameters and trains faster than the original, the Baidu researchers wrote in a study published online. By using a neural network for each component, our system is simpler and more flexible than traditional text-to-speech systems, where each component requires laborious feature engineering and extensive domain expertise.

Text-to-speech systems arent entirely new. Theyre present in many of the worlds modern gadgets and devices.From simpler ones like talking clocks and answering systems in phones to more complex versions, like those in navigation apps. These, however, have been made using large databases of speech recordings. As such, the speech generated by these traditional text-to-speech systems dont flowas seamless as actual human speech.

Baidus work on Deep Voice is a step towards achieving human-like speech synthesis in real time, without using pre-recorded responses. Baidus Deep Voice puts together phonemes in such a way that it sounds like actual human speech. We optimize inference to faster-than-real-time speeds, showing that these techniques can be applied to generate audio in real-time in a streaming fashion, their researchers said.

However, there are still certain variables that their new system cannot yet control: the stresses on phonemes and the duration and natural frequency of each sound. Once perfected, control of these variables would allow Baidu to change the voice of the speaker and, possibly, the emotions conveyed by a word.

At the very least, this would be computationally demanding, limiting just how much Deep Voice can be used in real-time speech synthesis in the real world. As thethe Baidu researchersexplained:

In the future, better synthesized speech systems can be used to improvethe assistant features found in smartphones and smart home devices. At the very least, it wouldmake talking to your devices feel more real.

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A Groundbreaking New AI Taught Itself to Speak in Just a Few Hours - Futurism

In Brief

True to the sprit of humanitys early settlers, cultivating the land will probably be the best way to provide food for the Red Planets early colonists. But just how possible is it to plant seeds from Earth and grow them as Martian crops? To figure this out, the International Potato Center (CIP) yes, its a real institution launched an initiative last February called the Potatoes on Mars Project.

The effort is reminiscent of the scene from the movie The Martian in whichMatt Damons character plants potatoes to survive on Mars. Turns out, the sci-fi film may actually have been onto something. The CIP worked in tandem with NASAs Ames Research Center (NASA ARC) to discover if potatoes could be grown under Mars atmospheric conditions.

A tuber was planted in a CubeSat-contained environment that was especially designed by engineers from the University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Lima. Soil taken from the Pampas de La Joya Desert in southern Peru, described as the most Mars-like soil found on Earth, was placed inside a hermetically sealed container that was installed in the satellite. To simulate the radiation found on Mars surface, the researchers used an LED. They built controls to alter the temperature to reflect Mars day and night cycles, as well as for adjusting air pressure, oxygen, and carbon dioxide levels.

Now, a month after the first tuber was planted, preliminary results have been positive.It was a pleasant surprise to see that potatoes weve bred to tolerate abiotic stress were able to produce tubers in this soil, said CIPs potato breeder Walter Amoros.

However, the CIPs experiment does more than just let us know that the Earths first Martian colonists may be snacking on potatoes when they reach the Red Planetin the next decade or so. It also helped us figure out if potatoes could survive in extreme conditions on Earth.This [research] could have a direct technological benefit on Earth and a direct biological benefit on Earth, says Chris McKay of NASA ARCin a press release.

By proving that potatoes can be cultivated under the harshest environments on Earth, the study could help the estimatedone in nine people on the planet suffering from chronic undernourishment. That problem is likely to get worse considering modern stressors on our environment. The results indicate that our efforts to breed varieties with high potential for strengthening food security in areas that are affected, or will be affected, by climate change are working, said Amoros.

All in all, potatoes may turn out to bea super food both in space and here on Earth.

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Scientists: Potatoes Can Grow on Mars - Futurism

In Brief Take a trip to the newest star system discovered by NASA from the comfort of your own home. Downloading the TRappist-1 update to the Space Engine simulator will allow you to visit estimations of the planets.

You dont have to wait to explore the seven Earth-sized exoplanetsrecently discovered in the TRAPPIST-1 system. You can do it right now.

Hours after the announcement on Wednesday, Vladimir Romanyuk released a downloadable pack for his universe simulator Space Engine, which contains all seven planets. All you have to do is download Space Engine, then the TRAPPIST-1 pack, then add the file to the addons/ folder. Once youve done that you can load up the simulator and get up close with each of the seven planets.

It should be noted that no one yet knows what the surface of these planets truly look like. NASA drew up an illustration with some scientific predictions but thats all we have right now. As Space Engine is a simulator, it has also authored its own vision of these planets, based on their bulk density.

Space Engine renders the first planets as warm terras while the rest are cool deserts. A couple have oceans, many of them have huge cyclones rampaging across their rocky surfaces, but whats missing are any signs of life.

Three of the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system are in the habitable zone, which means they could support life. Lets hope Space Engine is off the mark there. In fact, its simulation of these planets is way off at the moment, to the point that Romanyuk is considering some manual tweaks. They would include increasing the temperature of the star and correcting the planet orientation in relation to the sun so they are no longer tidally locked.

If youre unable to visit the planets for yourself in Space Engine then you can check out Imgur user DRMirage809s photo gallery of their own trip to TRAPPIST-1. YouTuber Anton Petrov also gives a tour in his video, however, he hasnt installed the new planet pack, so it only includes the three planets that were discovered previously and not the four new ones.

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See 7 Earth-Like Planets Recently Discovered by NASA - Futurism

Really Strange and Really Real

Its confirmed. Time crystals can exist. Two teams of researchers, one from Harvard University and the other from the University of Maryland, had their peer-reviewed work on time crystals published todayin the journal Nature.The Harvard-based team used an experimental setup that created an artificial lattice in a synthetic diamond. The Maryland team, on the other hand, continued on their previous work using a chain of charged particles called ytterbium ions.

Both studies built off of time crystal theories developed from Princeton University. Our work discovered the essential physics of how time crystals function, said Princetons Shivaji Sondhi. What is more, this discovery builds on a set of developments at Princeton that gets at the issue of how we understand complex systems in and out of equilibrium, which is centrally important to how physicists explain the nature of the everyday world.

Unlike other, more conventional crystals, time crystals are lattices that repeat not just in space but also in time, breaking what is known as time-translation symmetry. A time crystal is a quantum phenomenon that has movement while remaining in its ground, or lowest energy, state. In other words, it moves without spending energy and does not settle into a thermal equilibrium. Its one of the first examples of a non-equilibrium phase of matter.

Sondhi used the analogy of periodically squeezing a sponge to explain the system: When you release the sponge, you expect it to resume its shape. Imagine now that it only resumes its shape after every second squeeze even though you are applying the same force each time. That is what our system does.

This strange matter,first proposed in 2012 by physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, was only considered theoretically possible after considerable debate in September of 2016. Then, the first-ever time crystal was made just a month later in October. By then, it seemed very clear that time crystals are real.

Weve known since earlier this year thatthese two teamswere developing ways to actuallycreate time crystals. Their published works further confirm that time crystals can, indeed, exist, and one possible application for this new phase of matter is in quantum computing. Because the quantum behavior in a time crystal isnt affected by outside forces, researchers see it as a potential tool for protecting information in quantum computers.

Thats all still far off. For now, work on time crystals is focused on helping us better understand physics. Although any applications for this work are far in the future, these experiments help us learn something about the inner workings of this very complex quantum state, said Chris Monroe, who led the Maryland team.

This opens the door to a whole new world of nonequilibrium phases, Andrew Potter, who was part of the Maryland team, told Science Daily. Weve taken these theoretical ideas that weve been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory. Hopefully, this is just the first example of these, with many more to come.

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Physicists: Time Crystals Exist, and We Can Create Them - Futurism