CuriouTech

Elon Musk claims that humans are at risk of becoming the dumb "house pets" of artificial intelligence, unless we implant technology into our brains to help us compete with machine learning of the future. Musk announced that a 'neural lace' - which is basically a brain implant that can augment natural intelligence by hooking us up to computers - will be the key to maintaining our authority as a species. Musk is one of the biggest supporters of AI, but he hasn't been shy in the past about his concerns over the future of machine learning, with the tech entrepreneur last year penning an open letter - along with Stephen Hawking and dozens of other researchers - on the need to investigate the societal impacts of AI. His biggest worry is that AI will one day become smarter than humans - which could be a good thing when it comes to using them to help us cure diseases and solve global problems - but it also means that machines could one day come to think of us as lit...

On Wednesday night, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and announced that the speediest way to terraform Mars and allow humans to live outside of an airlock dome would be to nuke it. "The fast way is to drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles," Musk told Colbert, prompting the host to call him a super villain. But is the idea that crazy? The basis of the bomb plot is that the nukes would melt the frozen CO2 on the Red Planet's poles, releasing it as gas into the atmosphere. This would help to thicken up the Red Planet's thin atmosphere, which could be enough to heat the planet and allow water to exist in a liquid form. Essentially, the bombs would kick-start something similar to the global warming that's happening here on Earth, and hopefully trigger a cascade effect - so the more ice that melts, the more CO2 that's released, which warms the planet and melts more ice, and so on. However, there are some...

NASA scientists  have reported  that they've successfully tested an engine called the electromagnetic propulsion drive, or the EM Drive, in a vacuum that replicates space. The EM Drive experimental system could take humans to Mars in just 70 days without the need for rocket fuel, and it's no exaggeration to say that this could change everything. But before we get too excited (who are we kidding, we're already freaking out), it's important to note that these results haven't been replicated or verified by peer review, so there's a chance there's been some kind of error. But so far, despite a thorough attempt to poke holes in the results, the engine seems to hold up. The engine is controversial because it seems to violate one of the fundamental concepts of physics - the conservation of momentum, which states that for something to be propelled forward, it needs some kind of propellant to be pushed out in the opposite direction. But the EM Drive doesn't...

German car manufacturer Audi has reportedly invented a carbon-neutral diesel fuel, made solely from water, carbon dioxide and renewable energy sources. And the crystal clear 'e-diesel' is already being used to power the Audi A8 owned by the country’s Federal Minister of Education and Research, Johanna Wanka. The creation of the fuel is a huge step forward for sustainable transport, but the fact that it’s being backed by an automotive giant is even more exciting. Audi has now set up a pilot plant in Dresden, Germany, operated by clean tech company Sunfire, which will pump out 160 litres of the synthetic diesel every day in the coming months. Their base product, which they’re calling 'blue crude' is created using a three-step process. The first step involves harvesting renewable energy from sources such as wind, solar and hydropower. They then use this energy to split water into oxygen and pure hydrogen, using a process known as reversible electrolysis. This hyd...

Three-dimensional holographic images are a mainstay in many sci-fi films. But in real life, we’ve struggled to achieve the same effect without the use of annoying 3D glasses. Now scientists from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia have used a graphene-based material to create a full-colour, pop-up, 3D floating display - visible from a wide angle with the naked eye. The effect was created using a graphene oxide, and could be applied to the touch-screen surface of smartphones or watches, the authors Min Gu and Xiangping Li explain over at The Conversation. Holograms work by bending light off the screen in a carefully controlled way so that, instead of bouncing directly back into your eye, it makes it appear as though it's projected off a separate display. The Swinburne researchers were able to create the floating 3D display by tweaking the refractive index - the measure of how much light bends as it passes through a medium - of graphene...

Aerogels have long been one of those ‘gee whiz’ materials that gets people to take notice—watching a solid float on air tends to do that. To accomplish their remarkable feats, aerogels are essentially a gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with gas. We’ve seen them used in applications from “ invisibility cloaks ” to  oil spill remediation . Now researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have produced an aerogel out of graphene  that could have applications ranging from electronics to energy storage. Boosting the ‘gee whiz’ factor: the new material is produced through  3-D printing . In research published in  Nature Communications , the LLNL research team were able to produce a predetermined architecture for a graphene-based aerogel, which previously had always been random, by using 3-D printing. By being able to define the architecture, the researchers were able to improve the material’s performance. ...

A new study has narrowed the theoretical speed limit for how quickly quantum computers of the future will be able to transmit and process information. Quantum computing systems have the potential to perform certain calculations exponentially faster than classical computers. As such, they could offer enormous advantages for solving complex problems, like searching expansive databases, cracking modern encryption, and modelling atomic-scale systems for drug development. The fundamental building blocks of these computers are quantum bits, or qubits. While several candidate particles exist, most - if not all - qubits are single atoms. Information is stored on the magnetic spin of these atomic particles, which can point either "up" or "down" - states that are considered equivalent to the 0 and 1 of binary code. Importantly, qubits can harness a strange quantum phenomenon called superposition, which allows the spin to exist in both states simultaneously. A scal...