If you’re writing space opera, you can probably just ignore all this (along with the need for reaction mass, how hard it is to reach orbit, and how long it takes to get around a solar system). But if you’re writing hard SF set in space, you need to know it.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
What Happens to the Brain in Zero Gravity?
Originally shared by Anne-Marie Clark
Berliners have shown how to stop the march of the far right
“The demise of German fascist group Wir für Deutschland shows that citizens can unite to banish hatred”
…
“Something significant has just occurred in Berlin. The far-right group Wir für Deutschland (We for Germany), which has been marching in the capital since 2016, has just announced that it will no longer protest there. Explaining the decision in a frustration-filled statement on Facebook, Wir für Deutschland credited three factors in particular…”
Lots of people are working on this kind of stuff, and making decent progress.
Originally shared by Judah Richardson
Does your mouth water at the prospect of a nice juicy steak? How about a nice juicy 3D-printed steak, made using a paste composed of vegetable-based materials like rice, peas, and seaweed? That’s what a new Spanish startup, Novameat, is working hard to bring to market.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/3d-printed-steak-rice-peas-seaweed/
If you follow food tech as I do, there’s nothing really new in this article, but it pulls together a number of innovations in one place and provides a decent summary.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Thanksgiving Food for Thought: The Tech Helping Make Food Abundant
Paladin of Souls is a strong contender for my favourite book by anyone, and is certainly one of my two favourites by Lois McMaster Bujold. It has a middle-aged female protagonist, a lot of interiority and character depth, and a compelling struggle at the heart of it.
It’s on sale for $1.99.
https://smile.amazon.com/Paladin-Souls-Chalion-Book-2-ebook/dp/B000FC138Q
It’s good to see that people are thinking, and thinking deeply, about the unintended consequences of technology.
It’s especially good to see something (in the last point in the article) which reflects one of my own ideas: the Advisor Against, a person (or, in this case, board) whose job is specifically to point out the pitfalls of a proposed course of action. (The Advisor Against appears in my novel Realmgolds.)
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Managing the Unintended Consequences of Technology
Always up for a green building or a vertical forest.
Originally shared by Greg Batmarx
As we enter a more environmentally-conscious age, we are inevitably building more ecologically responsible and sustainable cities.
Creating buildings with the lowest possible energy consumption and carbon emission production, while still being aesthetically pleasing, is a challenge bringing together great minds to change the way we think about our living and working spaces.
Here are some of our favorite sustainable architectural projects coming out of Shanghai, Paris, Dhaka, and Barcelona.
The green hill
Shanghai, a wealthy city of 24 million people, has a varied complexity serving as a microcosm that contains a lot of what modern China is all about.
Shanghai is also the city where Thomas Heatherwick is building his ambitious vision with the 100 Trees Complex in Shanghai, an immense project that will cover 300,000 square meters and transcend the mere notion of being just another skyscraper block in the Chinese metropolis. When completed, the building will house schools, residences, retail units, offices and a hotel within its nine floors and three-story basement. It will also comprise over 400 terraces, many set with plant beds and trees, to enhance the “3D forest” effect and encourage outdoor meetings and recreation. The city’s residents are already calling it their version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and we added it to our to-go list in 2018.
The vertical forest
France has swathes of vast woodlands, but not a single vertical forest. Italian architect Stefano Boeri aims to change this with his Forêt Blanche on the outskirts of Paris, a 54-meter-high tower fashioned from stacked wood and glass cubes with thickly planted edges.
The facades of Forêt Blanche will be covered by 2000 trees, shrubs and plants, with a green surface equivalent to a hectare of forest, 10 times the surface area of the lot on which the building sits.
Once finished, the site will host residential apartments on the high floors, offices and commercial services in the lower part, with a mix of terraces and balconies on the four sides of the tower. The east and west facing side will allow the passage of sunlight all day, giving natural illumination and ventilation to the apartments and an exceptional panorama on the landscape of central Paris.
The floating university
Among the densest megalopolises in the world, Dhaka’s rapid urbanization has resulted in the displacement of the city’s water bodies, vegetation, open and civic spaces by buildings and industries. Woha Architects will try to remedy this by building a floating university in the Bangladesh capital.
Sited on an urban lake, the vision is to present an innovative and sustainable inner city campus that exemplifies tropical design strategies in response to the hot, humid, monsoon climate of the region while demonstrating the sensitive integration of nature and architecture. Drawing inspiration from the Bengal basin’s Sundarbans mangrove forest that have separate ecosystems above and below tidal level, the design strategy is to create two distinct programmatic strata by floating the Academia above the lake and revealing a Campus Park below, thus reflecting the synergistic coexistence between mankind and mangrove. This approach minimizes the building’s footprint over the lake, and further maximizes space for facilities while opening up the ground level to activity generating interaction spaces and effective additional park land that creates an imageable milieu for a vibrant campus life.
Re-greening downtown Barcelona
If you have ever visited the Catalan capital, you know how warm, noisy, polluted, and busy it gets, especially in summer, when plenty of tourists visit to escape from their routine and catch up on some of the sun and brilliant Catalan atmosphere.
The city has already proved its commitment to the environment, wanting now to move away from car hegemony and turn secondary streets into “citizen spaces” for culture, leisure and the community.
The administration plans to create several micro projects that merge into green inner-city corridors by moving entire streets underground and banning cars from the center to create the necessary space for new parks. The city has even purchased industrial land for this goal of creating 108 hectares of new green space up to 2019. To involve the entire community, there are cash prizes for the most sustainable ideas from the citizens.
I’m personally not convinced of this guy’s thesis. SF movies are good (or at least prolific) at showing the potential downside of new technologies, but not so great at showing the upsides; and actual mechanisms for making responsible choices or sane regulations are, of course, not the stuff of blockbusters. Still, there may be something in what he says.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Sci-Fi Movies Are the Secret Weapon That Could Help Silicon Valley Grow Up
Via Deborah Teramis Christian.
A long piece with a simple message: human connection makes a difference.
Originally shared by ****
“I think people die when they feel completely alone.”
The most pivotal response was sent by a study participant who lived in an apartment in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. The man, who 18 months earlier had written a “kiss-off” letter, now described himself as a broken vase held together by his own hands. His letter spanned five single-spaced typed pages and read as if it had taken days to write. Forty years later, Motto could remember the first sentence: “You are the most persistent son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever encountered, so you must really be sincere in your interest in me.” There it was, a perfect encapsulation of the study’s aims. Motto called it “the bingo letter.”
After about four years, Motto and his team had enough data to determine that their work was unprecedented in the history of suicide research. In the first two years following hospitalization, the suicide rate of the control group was nearly twice as high as that of the contact group. And it wasn’t only that no other experiment had ever been able to show a reduction in suicide deaths. Motto had also demonstrated something more profound: People who attempted suicide and wanted nothing to do with the mental health system could still be reached.
Peter Diamandis article; apply massive hype discount accordingly.
But if he’s even 5% right, cyberspace is coming.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
The Spatial Web Will Map Our 3D World—And Change Everything In the Process