Category Archives: Singularity

An old leak potentially related to Horizon Forbidden West is getting some fresh heat, as it could point to the big villains of its new story.

The leak was originally posted in October 2019 by a Reddit user under a throwaway account. It predates the announcement of Horizon Forbidden West, referring to the project with an allegedly in-development name of Horizon 2: Singularity. That didn't stick, but as Reddit user Vincent201007 pointed out today, some other details have proven more or less correct: for instance, an expanded climbing system and the addition of a grappling hook.

The original post also points to the emergence of a tribe called the Oshua, who use comparatively advanced technology granted to them by Vast Silver, a rogue AI which is referenced in Horizon Zero Dawn. Vincent201007 proposes that these Oshua are the "even stronger tribe: strangers who pass the shore, searching for secrets" referenced by Aloy's voiceover in the Horizon Forbidden West trailer from earlier this month.

As the original leak has it, the Oshua and Vast Silver itself would be the true antagonists of Forbidden West's story, with the Oshua seeking to enthrone Vast Silver in one of the great war machines from before the robot apocalypse. However, it's worth pointing out the inconsistencies with the old info as well.

Beyond the difference in title, the leak claimed the bulk of the game would take place in the Mojave Desert. From what we've seen of Forbidden West so far, at least a decent chunk of it is set in the ruins of San Francisco, which is fairly distant from the Mojave. It also makes no mention of the Red Blight and the massive storms which lead Aloy to journey far beyond her home in the Rocky Mountains.

Game projects often change quite a bit between the time of their first conception and their announcement, let alone their release, so it's possible all of the details in the 2019 leak were accurate at one point. It's also possible that it was all made up and the points that still make sense now were simply coincidences. Leaks without a clear provenance, such as this one, are always worth taking with skepticism.

An old prototype shows what Horizon Zero Dawn may have looked like if Aloy could ride flying Glinthawks.

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Horizon Forbidden West villains may have been leaked two years ago - Gamesradar

After spending the past five years as president of Ridley Scotts Scott Free Productions, Kevin Walsh is leaving for a multi-year deal with Apple TV+ to produce film and television for the streamer.

Christening his producing shingle The Walsh Company, Walsh will bring in and set up projects of his own, while helping package product already at Apple, where film is run by head of film Matt Dentler and Apple TV+ chiefs Zack Van Amburg & Jamie Erlicht. After getting an Oscar nomination for producing Manchester By The Sea, Walsh joined Scott and oversaw worldwide development and production of Scott Frees film group. Walsh produced over a dozen films in that time, including most recently House of Gucci (alongside Giannina Scott), The Last Duel, All the Money in the World, Death on the Nile, Naked Singularity, Jungleland, Earthquake Bird, Our Friend, American Woman and Zoe.

Walsh will continue his tie with Scott at Apple TV+, where he will produce with Scott and Mark Huffam the Napoleon Bonaparte-Empress Josephine epic Napoleon [formerly Kitbag], to star Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby. Walsh is currently in production on the Scott Free drama Boston Strangler at 20th Century, starring Keira Knightley, Carrie Coon, Chris Cooper and Alessandro.

Working with Ridley Scott has been the highlight of my career, Walsh told Deadline. The past five years has been a whirlwind, and being able to learn at the side of a true genius has been invaluable. Im thrilled to keep doing what I love with Apple, one of the most successful companies in the world. Under Zack and Jamies vision, theyve built the studio into the premier destination for filmmakers, and I know its the right home for what I want to make. To produce Napoleon for them, with Ridley directing and Joaquin in the lead, is a dream come true.

Prior to Scott Free and the Oscar-nominated Manchester By The Sea, Walsh produced Thoroughbreds and The Way Way Back. He started his career in assistant roles to Tommy Mottola, Scott Rudin, and Steven Spielberg.

Walsh is represented by Gregory Slewett of Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole.

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Kevin Walsh Moves From Scott Free Prexy To Multi-Year Apple TV+ Producing Deal - Deadline

Being able to beam yourself into a robotic body has all kinds of applications, from the practical to the fanciful. Existing interfaces that could make this possible tend to be bulky, but a wireless electronic skin made by Chinese researchers promises far more natural control.

While intelligent robots may one day be able to match humans dexterity and adaptability, they still struggle to carry out many of the tasks wed like them to be able to do. In the meantime, many believe that creating ways for humans to teleoperate robotic bodies could be a useful halfway house.

The approach could be particularly useful for scenarios that are hazardous for humans yet still beyond the capabilities of autonomous robots. For instance, bomb disposal or radioactive waste cleanup, or more topically, medical professionals treating highly infectious patients.

While remote-controlled robots already exist, being able to control them through natural body movements could make the experience far more intuitive. It could also be crucial for developing practical robotic exoskeletons and better prosthetics, and even make it possible to create immersive entertainment experiences where users take control of a robotic body.

While solutions exist for translating human movement into signals for robots, it typically involves the use of cumbersome equipment that the user has to wear or complicated computer vision systems.

Now, a team of researchers from China has created a flexible electronic skin packed with sensors, wireless transmitters, and tiny vibrating magnets that can provide haptic feedback to the user. By attaching these patches to various parts of the body like the hand, forearm, or knee, the system can record the users movements and transmit them to robotic devices.

The research, described in a paper published in Science Advances, builds on rapid advances in flexible electronics in recent years, but its major contribution is packing many components into a compact, powerful, and user-friendly package.

The systems sensors rely on piezoresistive materials, whose electrical resistance changes when subjected to mechanical stress. This allows them to act as bending sensors, so when the patches are attached to a users joint the change in resistance corresponds to the angle at which it is bent.

These sensors are connected to a central microcontroller via wiggly copper wires that wave up and down in a snake-like fashion. This zigzag pattern allows the wires to easily expand when stretched or bent, preventing them from breaking under stress. The voltage signals from the sensors are then processed and transmitted via Bluetooth, either directly to a nearby robotic device or a computer, which can then pass them on via a local network or the internet.

Crucially, the researchers have also built in a feedback system. The same piezoresistive sensors can be attached to parts of the robotic device, for instance on the fingertips where they can act as pressure sensors.

Signals from these sensors are transmitted to the electronic skin, where they are used to control tiny magnets that vibrate at different frequencies depending on how much pressure was applied. The researchers showed that humans controlling a robotic hand could use the feedback to distinguish between cubes of rubber with varying levels of hardness.

Importantly, the response time for the feedback signals was as low as 4 microseconds while operating directly over Bluetooth and just 350 microseconds operating over a local Wi-Fi network, which is below the 550 microseconds it takes for humans to react to tactile stimuli. Transmitting the signals over the internet led to considerably longer response times, thoughbetween 30 and 50 milliseconds.

Nonetheless, the researchers showed that by combining different configurations of patches with visual feedback from VR goggles, human users could control a remote-controlled car with their fingers, use a robotic arm to carry out a COVID swab test, and even get a basic humanoid robot to walk, squat, clean a room, and help nurse a patient.

The patches are powered by an onboard lithium-ion battery that provides enough juice for all of its haptic feedback devices to operate continuously at full power for more than an hour. In standby mode it can last for nearly two weeks, and the devices copper wires can even act as an antenna to wirelessly recharge the battery.

Inevitably, the system will still require considerable finessing before it can be used in real-world settings. But its impressive capabilities and neat design suggest that unobtrusive flexible sensors that could let us remotely control robots might not be too far away.

Image Credit: geralt / 23811 images

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Sensor-Packed 'Electronic Skin' Controls Robots With Haptic Feedback - Singularity Hub

Before this, Stephen and Jon had previously worked together in producing the album artwork and trailer for Singularity, his previous album. Describing Jon as a lovely, conscientious and very collaborative person to work with, when he approached Stephen with an initial edit of the track alongside Eileens watercolour artworks Stephen knew it was a project worth taking. The two work together harmoniously, and often, Stephen will approach the collab in the most open manner possible in response to the sensations the music creates. Yet equally, Eileens paintings were of similar importance when it came to animating the video. The handcrafted aesthetic of her paintings was an apt pairing to the psychedelic undertones of the track and finished film; theyre almost dripping in paint, bleeding from the splash of a brush and into the rest of the frame. It feels both small, physical and tactile, hand-crafted but with a sense of something vast and cosmic in scope within it, says Stephen. I was very keen to explore a shifting sense of scale, flowing from a scene that feels microscopic to something that feels like a vast cosmos fireworks exploding in impossibly slow-motion, schools of iridescent fish fluttering by.

To achieve a final outcome like this, of course takes time and skill. Or, as Stephen puts it, a mix of the physical and the technical. For instance, the opening sequence is composed using rostrum filmed elements of ink, expanding and soaking into wet watercolour paper, or flowing in pools and swirls. Then, as the music changes, the more computer-generated 3D world opens up. I created loosely sketched forms as three-dimensional structures to travel through, emitting motes of colour that advect through simulations of swirling fluid and smoke movement, he explains. The flow of colourful specks reflect the seeping of the watercolours in the earlier sections, but now moving in depth as well.

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Stephen McNally teams up with Jon Hopkins to create a flowing animation for a song with no beat - It's Nice That

These Industrials stocks are trading higher:

-Planet Labs PBC (PL) stock is trading at $6.77, a rise of $1.13, or 18.79%, on high volume. Planet Labs Pbc gets a Sentiment Score of Bullish from InvestorsObserver and receives an average analyst recommendation of Strong Buy with a price target of $16.00.

-OceanPal Inc (OP) stock is trading at $2.21, an increase of $0.26, or 13.33%, on low volume. Oceanpal Inc gets a Sentiment Score of Very Bearish from InvestorsObserver.

-NXT-ID Inc (NXTD) stock is trading at $3.58, a gain of $0.41, or 12.93%, on average volume. Nxt-Id Inc gets a Sentiment Score of Bearish from InvestorsObserver.

-Virgin Orbit Holdings (VORBW) stock is trading at $1.79, a gain of $0.17, or 10.49%, on moderate volume. Virgin Orbit Hldgs Inc WT gets a Sentiment Score of Very Bullish from InvestorsObserver.

Find the top stocks in the Industrials Sector here.

-Vertical Aerospace Ltd (EVTL) stock is trading at $9.34, a decline of $0.96, or 9.32%, on low volume. Vertical Aerospace Ltd gets a Sentiment Score of Neutral from InvestorsObserver.

-Evolv Technologies Holdings Inc (EVLV) stock is trading at $3.62, a decline of $0.37, or 9.27%, on moderate volume. Evolv Technologies Hldgs Inc gets a Sentiment Score of Very Bearish from InvestorsObserver and receives an average analyst recommendation of Strong Buy with a price target of $13.33. Evolv Technologies Hldgs Inc next reports earnings on February8.

-Singularity Future Technology Ltd (SGLY) stock is trading at $4.00, a drop of $0.4, or 9.09%, on low volume. Singularity Future Technology gets a Sentiment Score of Neutral from InvestorsObserver.

Find the top stocks in the Industrials Sector here.

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Industrials Stocks on the Move Wednesday: PL, OP, NXTD, VORBW, BZ, EVTL, EVLV, SGLY - InvestorsObserver

Almost immediately on entering St Helens churchyard I could see its most wonderful occupant. Its a yew tree, at least of equal age to the adjacent 12th-century building, but reputed to be as old as Christianity itself.

Like all veteran trees Ive experienced, it is memorable not for its postcard beauty or elegance, and certainly not for its evocation of some Platonic ideal of the tree of life. What assails you is the monumental imperfection.

Its trunk appears to have been shorn of the wilder pubic epicormic growth common to this species, but its still a bristling hogs-back of a bole. The thing surges as one muscular rising stem, but it also twists and ripples and buckles back on itself. By head height, any singularity in that eight-metre girth has dissolved into a chaos of lesser branches, some of which are dead or hollowed out with rot. Above, amid the detail of the fretwork foliage, all sense of human order is gone and what ascends there is magnificence entirely on its own terms.

Yews, perhaps more than any other trees, possess something that gets to the heart of why we love these ancient veterans. Ironically, it is manifest most completely in a yew that stands just next to this oldest one at St Helens. This other monster is but 2.5 metres about its waist, and its upper canopy surges up then swoops down writhing like limbs about an octopus. This illustrates something noted by Richard Williamson in his book The Great Yew Forest: the species capacity to flow and sway in liquid shapes. Yews may be celebrated for wood harder than iron, but they often suggest many of the properties of water.

They are, of course, like all plants, made largely of water, and we see in the oldest organisms both their obdurate, awkward centuries-long hold on existence, yet also the moment-by-moment green grace by which they capture photons of light and turn water to carbohydrate fuel for new life. They are both alive to the light of each passing second, but they store in those archives of wounded lignin a profound story of their lived past.

Country Diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary

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Country diary: The ancient yew, hard as iron yet flowing like water - The Guardian

Media tech business Interactive Gaming Group (IGG) has signed a multi-year partnership with Danish esports organisation Team Singularity.

As part of the deal, IGG will act as a key partner and will look to raise the commercial profile of Team Singularity.

RELATED: Team Singularity expands Blocksport partnership to launch NFT series

Atle S. Stehouwer, Founder & CEO of Team Singularity, commented: I am excited for Team Singularity to team up with the good people from Interactive Gaming Group. Their extensive track record speaks for itself, and this partnership will help us grow our revenue stream and partnership engagements overall.

According to the release, the collaboration is anchored around Team Singularitys vision to become a global leader in esports, with a strong and dedicated core community. To do that, IGG will leverage some of its own existing relationships across key global markets and raise awareness of the Team Singularity brand.

Cristina Niculae, CEO of Interactive Gaming Group (IGG), added: We are delighted to partner with Team Singularity, an organisation which is paving the way to a growing worldwide eSports ecosystem across multiple platforms.

We believe in the power of community building, and Team Singularity stands out in its ability to engage a community between content and competition. This partnership is one step forward towards our vision to inspire the world to play and bring great interactive entertainment to people around the globe.

RELATED: Team Singularity unveils first Path2Pro partnerships

At the end of 2021, Team Singularity joined forces with gaming chair manufacturer AndaSeat. Moreover, the organisation expanded its cooperation with Swiss-based sportstech company Blocksport to launch fan tokens.

Esports Insider says: Team Singularitys commercial profile is set for a big boost with the help of Interactive Gaming Group (IGG). The media company boasts some big-name partners in the tech and esports industry such as Google, Twitch and YouTube. With the right strategy, Team Singularity will be able to further grow its global community.

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Team Singularity signs multi-year deal with IGG - Esports Insider

The Age of AI:And Our Human Futureby henry a. kissinger, eric schmidt, and daniel huttenlocherjohn murray, 256 pages, $30

This is a book with three authors, which is both unusual and tricky because, while reading it, youre constantly wondering who might have written the section or sentence before you. Unsurprisingly, it is a book incapable of entering into functional relationships. You cannot settle down with it or get to know the mind that created it, so as to succumb to or fight against it. This book has an insinuating purpose that is not literary, not purposefully discursive, not even argumentative. What it advances is a rather sly, self-interested, and one-sidedbrieffor how the most pressing issue currently facing the human race might be boxed off to the benefit of you-know-who.

The overall impression is of a kind of manifesto for an election yet to be declared. Clearly, the book aims to seize the initiative on AI so that Big Tech can monopolize and control it, because thats why Big Tech exists. Anyone genuinely seeking to understand what is happening with AI and the related spheres of transhumanism, posthumanism, and the Technological Singularity should probablylook elsewhere.

The questions concerning what is to be done with or about AI, and who will have control of the toggle switch, are about to become urgent ones. After a period of seeming technical somnambulanceAI winters, techies call these pauses in advancementthere has lately been a burst of renewed above-ground activity, perhaps indicating that the moment of Technological Singularity (essentially, when the machines created by man become more clever than their creators) may be at hand. This moment will trigger a frenetic jockeying for positionby governments, corporations, and especially by Silicon Valleyto lay claim to control, to table and filibuster against regulation, to frame the philosophical contract that will govern this new era.

As things stand, it appears that artificial intelligence, while capable of outperforming humans in certain tasks and reckonings, still requires human supervision. Being neither sentient nor self-aware, AI cannot reflect on its own processes. It gets things wrong, mainly due to insufficient, poor, or confusing inputs, albeit less so than before. Sometimes the problems arise from human bias manifesting in the input data. It seems the AI cannot (as yet?) be taught common sense. Such teething problems are inevitable, we are told, but the authors pointedly note thatwhiledevelopers are continually weeding out flaws, deployment has often preceded troubleshooting. This tendency, they concede, is extremely risky. But also, I would interject, inevitable when things are left in the hands of amoral corporations.

For many years, the pursuit of what is called the technological posthuman has continued at the subterranean level, pushing forward without much pause for check or scruple. The discussion, such as it was, happened in-house at Silicon Valley, and largely had to do with how far things might go before anyone started to wonder why not much about what was happening was being reported above ground.

The undoubtedly determined march of AI, with or without the Singularity, will change the majority of human lives beyond all recognition, eliminating most human work, creating a form of supra-intelligence to which humans may rapidly become subject on terms lacking accountability or transparency, and essentially demoting humanity to the role of second most intelligent species on the planet. We have no idea where this will take us, and we have yet to begin any coherent general conversations about it.

It goes without saying that the risksassociated with AI have nothing ultimately to do with the inert pieces of metal and plastic comprising the attendant technology, but with the people who will control it. The most important question is: Who should manage this epoch-making moment?

Big Tech already controls the world via the internet, through data harvesting, intimate surveillance, and censorship. Now it moves toward the final stage: the unity of humans and machine, but not on the terms of the human, or at least not the human race. Instead, as usual, the plan is for things to be handled by placing the well-placed few over the befogged many, in the name of progress.

The three authors of this book are insiders: Eric Schmidt is a former CEO and chairman of Google, Daniel Huttenlocher is a tech academic and Amazon board member; Henry Kissinger is Henry Kissinger. It goes without saying: All three authors are convinced globalists. The idea seems to be to lead the discussion in the required direction, raising the democratic and human concerns, but happily subjecting these to a series of controlled explosions so as to minimize the possibility of their being raised again before we are well past the finishing line.

In November,Timemagazine published an article titled Henry Kissingers Last Crusade: Stopping Dangerous AI, which included interviews with Kissinger and Schmidt.It contained a quote from Schmidt that defines the central problem with this book:

This may have gone down well with readers ofTime, but to the unwashed and unwoke it is clear that Schmidt comes to bury governments, not corporations. An even narrower agenda is visible also, since his reference to governments interfering in elections is designed to invoke the Russian interference lie that was comprehensively debunked by revelations arising from the Robert Mueller investigationa lie sustained by Big Tech. Schmidt thus eloquently conveys that his concern is neither philosophical nor anthropological, but superficially ideological, which is to say money- and power-related. His reference to the antivax movement is even more tedium-inducing. As far as the present COVID controversy is concerned, there is, in effect, noantivax movementjust campaigns by concerned citizens against certain vaccines, and for very good reasons that Big Tech seeks to suppress.

Schmidts arguments, in short, derive entirely from the palette of woke pseudo-liberalism, which is to say the emerging tyranny now threatening the world and its inhabitants.

This book bears the same stamp, albeit more subtly imprinted. The word disinformation, for example, is scattered throughout the text, but nowhere does it manifest as other than a camouflagedapologiafor partisan ideological censorshipfor silencing those who say things Big Tech doesnt like. There is no criticism, even implied, of Silicon Valley abuses in this connection. Nor is there any mention of Twitter's suppression of the story of Hunter Bidens laptop, or of that companys high-handed suspension of the account of a sitting president of the United States.

Yet the authors also concede that In a free society, the definition of harmful and disinformation should not be the purview of corporations alone. But if they are entrusted to a government panel or agency, that body should operate according to defined public standards and thorough verifiable processes in order not to be subject to exploitation by those in power. Chance would be a fine thing. And, what, by the way, does powermean? Governmental power only, it is clear.

The Age of AIclaims to set out the questions to be faced in the coming years of the AI advance, as well as tools to begin answering them. What do AI-enabled innovations in health, biology, space, and quantum physics look like?; what does AI-enabled war look like?; when AI participates in assessing and shaping human action, how will humans change?; what, then, will it mean to be human?

Good questions, urgent questions. Too urgent to be left to insiders spinning on behalf of interests already proven to be unfit to hold power. The committee nominated to discuss or dispose of the pressing AI issues should contain the minimum possible of Bilderbergers, Trilateralists, current or past board members of Google, or members of the Party of Davos.

Some scientists acknowledge, rather blithely, that the moment of Technological Singularity may well result in the obliteration of virtue, conscience, and morality, and even the final exit of the human species from the world, as human beings lose the battle to justify their existence against the claims of vastly more intelligent beings. Against these risks, scientists posit benefits like increased cognitive capacity and processing speed, leading to the possibility of more and more scientific discoveries, but rarely do they get to the question:to whose benefit?The outcome of such questions may depend on the emphasis placed on values, conscience, and morality in programming the AI, and will depend also on the meanings attributed to rationality and intelligence, and whether these are compatible with a moral framework. A super-intelligent entity, primed to maximize rationality in pursuit of even higher intelligence, may decide that human-centered morality is irrational, and therefore counter-productive. Inevitably, as things progress, the pressure will grow to remove impediments to the growth of machine intelligence, which will by definition mean that humans will be first to hit the pine.

The Age of AIissues intermittent calls for a discussion of such questions, and yet it reflects precisely the demeanor that has radically curtailed public discussion over the past two decades. It fails to deal with or even mention the selective censorship practices of Silicon Valley operators, while still implicitly assuming that such operators have some kind of prior entitlement to continue at the wheel even after the age of intelligent inanimacy has moved into top gear.

AI ultimately will either be a new beginning or a final ending. There is a view in tech circles that, since the human race faces extinction thanks to its own behavior, some kind of absorption of humanity by the machine may be the only way of maintaining an intelligent, albeit mechanical, human presence on earth. Thus, this thesis expands, the biological essence of humanity might have to be sacrificed, and the species maintained in the only form by that stage possible: posthumanist man. Conversely, there is the hypothesis that the moment of Technological Singularity will bring with it a radical threat to natural selection: The machine will elevate humans according to values different from those of naturea Superman. Where have we heard that before?

We have reached the upper stories of the Tower of Babel and most of us are coming down with acute vertigoand the only level-headed ones remaining have rather worrying glints in their eyes.

John Watersis an Irish writer and commentator, the author of ten books, and a playwright.

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Morality in the Age of Machines | John Waters - First Things

BIOTECH

In a First, Man Receives a Heart From a Genetically Altered PigRoni Caryn Rabin | The New York TimesA 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs. It is the first successful transplant of a pigs heart into a human being.

Second Lifes Creator Is Back to Build a Metaverse That Doesnt Harm PeopleMark Sullivan | Fast CompanyAs Second Life positions itself as an alternative to a metaverse dominated by big tech, founder Philip Rosedale is returning as an advisor. In his advisory role at Linden, Rosedale will focus on product development, with the aim of shaping Second Lifes version of the future metaverse.

Jack Dorseys Block Is Working to Decentralize Bitcoin MiningJon Porter | The VergeBlock, the payment company formerly known as Square, is working on building an open Bitcoin mining system, itsCEO Jack Dorsey has announced. In a thread, Blocks general manager for hardwareThomas Templeton outlined the companys goals for the system, which is for it to be easily available, reliable, performant, and relatively power efficient compared to its hashrate. The overall aim is to make mining more decentralized, in turn making the overall Bitcoin network more resilient.

The Radical Intervention That Might Save the Doomsday GlacierJames Temple | MIT Technology ReviewEven if the world immediately halted the greenhouse-gas emissions driving climate change and warming the waters beneath the ice shelf, that wouldnt do anything to thicken and restabilize the Thwaitess critical buttress, saysJohn Moore, a glaciologist and professor at the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland in Finland. So the only way of preventing the collapse is to physically stabilize the ice sheets, he says. That will require what is variously described as active conservation,radical adaptation, or glacier geoengineering.

First Transplant of a Genetically Altered Pig Heart Into a Person Sparks Ethics QuestionsMegan Molteni | StatThe groundbreaking procedure raises hopes that animal organs might one day be routinely used for human transplants, which would shorten waiting listswhere thousands of seriously ill people languish and die every year. But its also raising a few eyebrows and a lot of questions from bioethicists. Theres still relatively little known about how safe this is to try in humans, so Im viewing this with a little apprehension, said Arthur Caplan, the founding director of New York University School of Medicines Division of Medical Ethics.

Is Norway the Future of Cars?Shira Ovide | The New York TimesLast year, Norway reached a milestone. Only about 8 percent of new cars sold in the countryran purely on conventional gasoline or diesel fuel. Two-thirds of new cars sold were electric, and most of the rest were electric-and-gasoline hybrids. electric car enthusiasts are stunned by the speedat which the internal combustion engine has become an endangered species in Norway.

All Hail the Ariane 5 Rocket, Which Doubled the Webb Telescopes LifetimeEric Berger | Ars TechnicaNASAs Mission Systems Engineer for the Webb telescope, Mike Menzel, said the agency had completed its analysis of how much extra fuel remained on board the telescope. Roughly speaking, Menzel said, Webb has enough propellant on board for 20 years of life. This is twice the conservative pre-launch estimate for Webbs lifetime of a decade, and it largely comes down to the performance of the European Ariane 5 rocket that launched Webb on a precise trajectory on Christmas Day.

Cecilia DAnastasio | WirediWhen I look at other directors dealing with the theme of the internet, it tends to be kind of negative, like a dystopia, says Hosoda. But I always look at the internet as something for the young generation to explore and create new worlds in. And I still, to this day, have that take on the internet. So its always been optimistic. WatchingBelle, its easy to become absorbed in that optimism. Its visually stunning, with both its rural landscapes and a digital megalopolis packed tight with a breathtaking number of pixels.

The Subversive Genius of Extremely Slow EmailIan Bogost | The AtlanticDmitry Minkovsky has been working on [slow email app] Pony over the past three years, with the goal of recovering some of the magic that online life had lost for him. I used to find such projects appealing for their subversiveness: as art objects that make problems visible rather than proposing viable solutions to them. But now its clear that the internet needs design innovationsandbrake mechanismsto reduce its noxious impact. Our suffering arises, in part, from the speed and volume of our social interactions online. Maybe we can build our way toward fewer of them.

Image Credit:Pawel Czerwinski / Unsplash

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through January 15) - Singularity Hub

This week, astrophysicists presented the biggest map of the universe yet.

Having nailed down the position of 7.5 million galaxies, the map is larger and more detailed than all its predecessors combined. And its nowhere near complete. Using the ultra-precise Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the team is adding the coordinates of a million galaxies a month with plans to run through 2026. The final atlas will cover a third of the sky and include 35 million galaxies up to 10 billion light years away.

Of course, this particular map wont have much practical value for space explorers. Even at the speed of light, itd take us tens of thousands to millions of years to reach our closest galactic neighbors. Absent a convenient network of intergalactic wormholes, were likely stuck in our home galaxy for the foreseeable future. But the map has another purpose.

This project has a specific scientific goal: to measure very precisely the accelerating expansion of the universe, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratorys Julien Guy told Wired. By measuring the expansion over time, scientists hope to shine a light on dark energythe mysterious force that seems to be blowing the universe apartand predict the ultimate fate of the cosmos.

To locate galaxies, DESI uses a collection of 5,000 fiber-optic cables positioned by robotic motors to within 10 microns, less than the thickness of a human hair. This precise positioning allows the instrument to sop up the photons of 5,000 distant galaxies at a time, record their spectra in detail, and determine how much the light has been stretched into the redder bits of the spectrum during its journey to Earth. This redshift is caused by the expansion of the universe and indicates how far away a galaxy isthe redder the light, the more distant the galaxythus adding a third dimension to galaxy maps.

Whereas prior efforts like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey were slow and tediouswith scientists manually drilling holes and repositioning sensorsDESI is quick and automated, to the point of boring its operators on any given shift. But those shifts are prodigious, each adding some 100,000 galaxies to the map.

The scale is huge. Individual galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, are reduced to points of light flowing in enormous filaments, clusters, and voids. [These are] the biggest structures in the universe. But within them, you find an imprint of the very early universe, and the history of its expansion since then, Guy said in a statement.

Its by comparing the universes initial conditions just after the Big Bang to its expansion ever since that the team hopes to tease out a better understanding of how dark energy has changed over time.

In the 1990s, studies led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratorys Saul Perlmutter and Australian National Universitys Brian Schmidt attempted to measure the expansion of the universe. It had been assumed that the universes matterincluding stars, planets, dust, gas, and dark matterwould act like a brake on its expansion. Like a ball tossed into the air, gravitys pull would slow the universe down.

If you can measure the universes rate of expansion, you can predict its future trajectory. Will it grind to a halt under the force of its own matter and reverse course, imploding in a big crunch? Will it expand forever, eventually tearing itself apart? Or will it approach equilibrium, where the rate of expansion nears zero?

The teams gathered the light from supernovae with known luminositythese are called standard candles in astrophysicsto measure the expansion rate. Their results were surprising, to put it mildly. Instead of slowing, they found expansion was accelerating over time. Some gargantuan force was counteracting gravity, and scientists didnt have the faintest clue what it was.

Cosmologist Michael Turner dubbed this force dark energy and has called it the most profound mystery in all of science. Now, the race is on to better understand dark energy by putting together a more precise history of the universes evolution.

If expansion continues, the universe will never truly end. Over unimaginable eons, each orders of magnitude longer than the current age of the universe, expansion will pull galaxies apart, snuff out stars, and tear matter into its elementary constituents. The end state of the universe would be a chilly and everlasting dark age.

But scientists dont fully understand dark energy or know the fate of the universe with certainty. Which is why observations from projects like DESI are crucial. By mapping the large structure of the universe over time, scientists hope to chart how the rate of expansionand perhaps the dark energy driving ithas changed and how it might in the future.

DESI isnt the only mapping project out there. Other projects, like those that will be conducted by the European Space Agencys Euclid spacecraft and NASAs Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, will complement DESIs findings by looking deeper into the universe, and cataloging even earlier galaxies from when it was just a few billion years old. Scientists are excited to mine this data hoard to further refine the universes origin story.

In five years, we hope that we will find a deviation from this model of cosmology that will give us a hint of what really happens, Guy told New Scientist. Because today we are a little bit stuck in a simple model that describes perfectly well the data [we have], but doesnt give us any new information.

Image Credit: D. Schlegel/Berkeley Lab (using data from DESI)

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How Will the Universe End? Scientists Seek an Answer in the Biggest Galaxy Map Yet - Singularity Hub