via The Observer

A man who claims to have developed a free energy technology which could power everything from mobile phones to cars has received more than 400 applications from scientists to test it.

Sean McCarthy says that no one was more sceptical than he when Steorn, his small hi-tech firm in Dublin, hit upon a way of generating clean, free and constant energy from the interaction of magnetic fields. ‘It wasn’t so much a Eureka moment as a get-back-in-there-and-check-your-instruments moment, although in far more colourful language,’ said McCarthy. But when he attempted to share his findings, he says, scientists either put the phone down on him or refused to endorse him publicly in case they damaged their academic reputations. So last week he took out a full-page advert in the Economist magazine, challenging the scientific community to examine his technology.

McCarthy claims it provides five times the amount of energy a mobile phone battery generates for the same size, and does not have to be recharged. Within 36 hours of his advert appearing he had been contacted by 420 scientists in Europe, America and Australia, and a further 4,606 people had registered to receive the results.

Samantha Bee interviews Ray Kurzweil and Mikey Sklar and explores the future of cyborgs, nanobots and sexbots.

Robots! Part 1
Robots! Part 2

Irish company challenges scientists to test ‘free energy’ technology

An Irish company has thrown down the gauntlet to the worldwide scientific community to test a technology it has developed that it claims produces free energy.

The company, Steorn, says its discovery is based on the interaction of magnetic fields and allows the production of clean, free and constant energy — a concept that challenges one of the basic rules of physics.

It claims the technology can be used to supply energy for virtually all devices, from mobile phones to cars.

Steorn issued its challenge through an advertisement in the Economist magazine this week quoting Ireland’s Nobel prize-winning author George Bernard Shaw who said that “all great truths begin as blasphemies”.

Sean McCarthy, Steorn’s chief executive officer, said they had issued the challenge for 12 physicists to rigorously test the technology so it can be developed.

“What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy,” McCarthy said.

“The energy isn’t being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It’s literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy,” he told Ireland’s RTE radio.

Also see Steorn’s Overview Video

The City from the Sea

From the September, 1997 issue of Popular Mechanics

via The Korea Times

via The Sunday Times

THE race is on to keep humans one step ahead of robots: an international team of scientists and academics is to publish a “code of ethics” for machines as they become more and more sophisticated.

Although the nightmare vision of a Terminator world controlled by machines may seem fanciful, scientists believe the boundaries for human-robot interaction must be set now — before super-intelligent robots develop beyond our control.

…“Scientists must start analysing these kinds of questions and seeing if laws or regulations are needed to protect the citizen,” said Verruggio. “Robots will develop strong intelligence, and in some ways it will be better than human intelligence.

“But it will be alien intelligence; I would prefer to give priority to humans.”

…“My guess is that we’ll have conscious machines before 2020,” said Ian Pearson, futurologist-in-residence at BT. “If we put that in a robot, it’s an android. That is an enormous ethical change.”

To critics who scoff that intelligent robots are a long way off, the roboticists easily riposte that machines can already exert surprising influence over our lives — think about the influence of the internet.

Keeping control

New robo-ethics recommendations
# Safety Ensure human control of robot
# Security Prevent wrong or illegal use
# Privacy Protect data held by robot o Traceability Record robot’s activity
# Identifiability Give unique ID to each robot

Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics
# Robot may not injure human or, through inaction, allow human to come to harm
# Robot must obey human orders, unless they conflict with first law
# Robot must protect itself if this does not conflict with other laws

An essay by Marshall Brain

Mociology is defined as the study of human behaviour in a mobile world and the study of mobile device/phone lifestyles.

This is the direct by-product of how mobile phones and mobility in modern life and modern lifestyles are affecting and changing human inter-action, behaviour and consumption in the 21st century. Mociology and it’s financial and economic sub-set, “Mocio-Economics”, is the fast-emerging discipline and accumulating body of research, knowledge and science, that studies the impact and effect that mobile phones, mobile technology and mobile lifestyles are having upon every layer of modern urban societies, cities and human endeavour.

via BBC

Trace the web’s explosion from a tool for physicists to a part of everyday life.

via KurzweilAI.net
by David Brin

Options for a coming singularity include self-destruction of civilization, a positive singularity, a negative singularity (machines take over), and retreat into tradition. Our urgent goal: find (and avoid) failure modes, using anticipation (thought experiments) and resiliency — establishing robust systems that can deal with almost any problem as it arises.

via Biosingularity

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have found that sirtuins, a family of enzymes linked to a longer life span and healthier aging in humans, may orchestrate the activity of other enzymes involved in metabolic processes in the body.
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study is the first to show that sirtuins directly control specific metabolic enzymes - called AceCSs - in mammalian cells.

via Wired

They can steal your smartcard, lift your passport, jack your car, even clone the chip in your arm. And you won’t feel a thing. 5 tales from the RFID-hacking underground.

Tiny robotlike brains would safeguard ship

If American astronauts fly to Mars in the next few decades, they might be chaperoned by NASA’s version of “thinking machines” — electronic brains that will run the spaceship largely without human aid and make lightning-fast decisions to guard the crew against danger.