Free Republic

It’s worth noting that even in the Jetson’s future world of flying cars a driver was still required. That’s because the Jetsons lived in a world where technology may have advanced but the fundamental elements of human nature remained the same. Which is to say most humans like to be in control. Driving gives us that sense, we can’t control the other idiots on the road but we can control how we maneuver around their stupidity. And that may be why we may actually be closer to the flying car than the driverless car. Warning: the images in your rearview...

Robots have undergone impressive designs and engineering for social use, manifested in puppy-like robots with expressive, blinking eyes, to little space robots. These little pals and helpers appeal to the home-confined elderly and children. These are social robots designed to understand and respond to cues. Flip it. A research paper said, "not much research has gone into designing interactions with technology what would support behaviors of destruction and catharsis. This project focuses on objects that are designed to support negative expressions of emotion."The research project is derived from previous work that included a theoretical review of the historical and cultural...

May 8 (UPI) -- The study of a unique crystalline material, composed of aluminum and platinum atoms, has revealed a pair of electronic properties that have never been seen before. The atoms in the new materials are crystallized in a special pattern, with each row offset from the other. The pattern creates a spiral staircase of aluminum and platinum atoms. According to the new study, published this week in the journal Nature Physics, the material's unique crystalline structure produces Rarita-Schwinger fermions in its interior and extremely long quadruple topological Fermi arcs on its surface. Rarita-Schwinger fermions are a type of...

We’re in the midst of two tectonic demographic shifts in the workplace that, at first glance, seem to be at odds with each other. We’re living longer and working longer–either by choice or necessity (it’s hard to finance a 30-year retirement with a 40-year career). The fastest-growing age demographic of employees in the workplace is 65 and older, which has experienced a 35% jump in numbers over the past half-decade. In fact, nearly half of the age-demographic increase in the number of people participating in the U.S. labor force between 2016 and 2026 is attributable to those 60 and older....

A few years ago, Marriott debuted a new app at hotels in five cities that was supposed to save housekeepers time by telling them which rooms to clean. It was a disaster. Housekeepers ended up yo-yoing between rooms on different floors, ignoring messy rooms just down the hall. If anything, the cleaners felt that the app made them less efficient, and they worried about being disciplined by their bosses for failing to finish their work on time. “A wild-goose chase” is how Rachel Gumpert, a spokeswoman for Unite Here, the labor union that represents Marriott’s housekeepers, describes the episode. Several...

My grandmother cooked in her kitchen on a wood-burning stove until, at 92 years of age, she passed away. Wood stove technology is not as simple as some people think. We may have to learn it all over again. Here is why: I recently read an online article about something called 5G and became aware that this innovation will potentially enable any large government, our own or our adversaries, to spy, hack, sabotage or otherwise wreak havoc on the entire world infrastructure of communication and security. This is not hyperbole. It is as real as nuclear bombs, and if not...

For many years the United States has regarded itself as, and been, the world’s technological leader. One can easily make a long and impressive list of seminal discoveries and inventions coming from America, from the moon landings to the internet. It was an astonishing performance. The US maintains a lead, though usually a shrinking one, in many fields. But:China has risen explosively, from being clearly a “Third World” country forty years ago to become a very serious and rapidly advancing competitor to America. Anyone who has seen today’s China (I recently spent  two weeks there, traveling muchly) will have been ...

How long have humans brewed beer? Patrick McGovern, the world's foremost historian of ancient brews, hints in Ancient Brews (2017) that this activity has been around possibly at least for 11,000 years based on vessels from Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia (Turkey). How sophisticated was brewing in antiquity? Since the ancient artifact ca. 100 CE known as the "Baghdad Battery" was discovered in the 1930's, the purpose for which it was used has been a mystery. Wilhelm Koenig, a German curator of the Baghdad Museum, discovered it near Ctesiphon - the Sassanid capital and previously in the Parthian Empire around 1936...

Reports circulating the Internet said a robot named "Colossus" greatly assisted in Notre Dame's fire rescue efforts. The 1100 pound robot, created by the French company Shark Robotics, used a water cannon to shoot almost 700 gallons through the cathedral's most dangerous fire areas... Paris Fire Brigade commander Jean-Claude Gallet said Colossus "lowered temperatures" in the cathedral and "saved human lives amid the unfolding disaster."

Google has leased four office buildings in a vast north San Jose tech campus where it could employ 3,600 workers or more, and has bought a trio of old office buildings in north Mountain View for a quarter-billion dollars, marking eye-popping new expansions of the search giant’s Silicon Valley operations. The latest moves come as the search giant continues to plan for a huge San Jose complex that would dramatically expand its footprint in the Bay Area’s largest city. Google paid $250.2 million for the north Mountain View buildings, according to public documents filed on Tuesday with Santa Clara County....

The worst fears of privacy advocates were confirmed this week after a Bloomberg report noted that Amazon employs thousands of specialists to decipher private conversations picked up on different types of Echo speakers. Of course, these devices use an automated assistant named “Alexa” to respond to requests for information, to play music, to turn off the lights and perform countless other tasks. All of this interaction with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) device is supposed to make life easier, not allow for a sophisticated spying operation.  This bombshell news should alarm every one of the millions of Echo users worldwide. In a...

The speed of digital advancements is what drives our economy. Since President Donald Trump took office, America has enjoyed an economic boom, with astonishingly low unemployment numbers and record capital investments in new technology that would have once seemed like science fiction. With our smartphones and wireless data plans, more workers can telecommute today than ever before. This technology advances at lightning speed, which is why America is currently in a race with China and other countries to have a robust 5G network. This would require a massive infrastructure investment to build a network that offers previously impossible connectivity speeds...

The observable universe contains more than 100 billion galaxies. Our galaxy alone, popularly known as the Milky Way, has more than 100 billion stars. Does that make you yearn for those days of yesteryear when many followed the thought of Aristotle and Ptolemy: Five planets plus the sun and the moon circling Earth? Was it easier to evangelize before people thought of Earth as a little sphere circling a fifth-rate star on a minor galaxy’s periphery -- so why should God care about us? A century ago scientists of course knew the Earth moved, but many still thought we were...

Auto makers and Silicon Valley are locked in a fight to control the dashboard display... The current state of play is a confused free-for-all as the two industries circle each other warily. Some car makers are turning over their dashboard operating systems to Alphabet’s Google entirely. Others, including Ford Motor Co. and Daimler AG , wager they can muster the technological chops to compete... With his wife’s 2016 Mazda CX-5, he can’t figure out how to turn off the radio. “We can turn it down,” he said. “But off is apparently a complex process we haven’t been able to figure...

Internal discussion threads exclusively obtained by Breitbart News shows Google employees in meltdown over the tech giant’s decision to include the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, Kay Coles James, on an artificial intelligence advisory council. Multiple Google employees in the thread also engaged in outright smears against the Heritage Foundation. Google employees accused the think-tank of transphobia, homophobia, and “extremism,” of viewing LGBT people as “sub-human,” questioning their “humanity,” and supporting “exterminationist” views. “Would we even consider having a virulent anti­-semite on the advisory board? How about an avowed racist or white supremacist?” asked one Google employee. “This seems...

Russia wants to copy China. Reliance on American servers, and American technology is a serious threat to the privacy of Russian citizens. Russia wants to cut itself off from the global internet. Here’s what that really means. The plan is going to be tricky to pull off, both technically and politically, but the Kremlin has set its sights on self-sufficiency. by Charlotte Jee March 21, 2019 In the next two weeks, Russia is planning to attempt something no other country has tried before. It’s going to test whether it can disconnect from the rest of the world electronically while keeping...

Joe Barnard has spent the last three years pioneering DIY landing technologies for amateur rockets and now the aerospace industry is paying attention. SHARETWEET by Daniel Oberhaus | Sep 21 2018, 8:00pm Image: Joe Barnard / BPS Space SHARETWEET To call Joe Barnard an “amateur” rocketeer is something of a misnomer. As the founder of Barnard Propulsion Systems (BPS), a small business making flight hardware for other amateur rocketeers, the 25-year-old Nashville resident is working on cracking propulsive landings for model rockets. This is the same principle that allows SpaceX to land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rockets...

It’s true: it’s that time of year again, already. Time to reset your clocks.In addition to death and taxes we are now required to surrender an hour of our time to government; tomorrow morning at 2:00 AM you are mandated to turn your clock ahead one hour (unless you live in Arizona or Hawaii where they successfully rebelled against this tyranny years ago). What they do with our hour is anybody’s guess but when we finally get it back next November I know it will be greatly devalued.Like the dollarIn the past you could protest by refusing to adjust your...

February 19, 2019 |   Today, China released a new grand plan for the development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen and Guangzhou would be the four key cities of the bay area and the core engines for regional development.Finance, Insurance Industry Support for Hong Kong The plan supports Hong Kong as an international finance, transport and trade center as well as an aviation hub, promoting the development of high-end and high-value-added financial, commercial, trading, logistics and professional services. The insurance sector will be one of the biggest winners under the plan for the new economic...

February 22, 2019 |   Salvatore Cezar Pais is a US Navy researcher. Salvatore has three amazing patents that would be incredible breakthroughs in physics if they are true. The least extreme is a patent for Piezoelectricity-Induced Room Temperature Superconductor. The other two patents are gravity wave generator and inertial mass reduction.If these could be realized as technologies then we are talking Star Trek level spaceships. The gravitational wave generator could be used for propellentless propulsion to near the speed of light. Being able to reduce inertia would also mean capabilities which currently seem beyond known physics.The more likely situation...