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The strange story of Amir Taaki—Bitcoin coder, anti-ISIS revolutionary, and British terrorism defendant. The post How an Anarchist Bitcoin Coder Found Himself Fighting ISIS in Syria appeared first on WIRED.
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It’s a little after 8 a.m. at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., and Michelle Harris’ AP Environmental Science class is getting right to it.
“All right, you guys got your brackets out?” Harris asks.
The class of mostly juniors and seniors ruffle through folders and pull out pieces of paper with brackets — 64 slots, four quadrants, and one central box to predict the championship. But there’s something a little different about these brackets …
“We’re going to jump down to the fourth-seeded spider monkey against the twelfth-seeded antelope squirrel,” Harris says.
“Spider monkey better win!” one student shouts from the back of the class.
This is March Mammal Madness: round two. It’s a competition that’s been playing out online and in hundreds of classrooms over the past month. Real animals wage fictional battles, while students use science — a lot of it — to try to predict the winner.
March Mammal Madness was created five years ago by Katie Hinde, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University, though now, she says, the competition depends on a whole team of volunteer scientists and conservationists: biologists, animal behaviorists, paleoanthropologists, marine biologists.
Hinde’s team meets every year for a Selection Sunday of their own. They pick the animals that will compete and even decide who will win, though they keep it a secret. That’s because a whole lot of research has to be done.
Each scientist is assigned a specific battle, then studies up and writes a battle story based on facts.
“Then the battles are live-tweeted as a dynamic, play-by-play story, much like someone would watch a basketball game,” Hinde says.
Those tweets link to scientific articles, videos, photos, fossil records — whatever the team can use to drop knowledge into the story. Which is why so many teachers, including Michelle Harris, have begun using the brackets in class.
As in basketball, there are plenty of upsets and broken hearts: Like the time a snow leopard and a flying squirrel faced off in the rain forest. The snow leopard overheated and lost. Or the time tourists used their human junk food to lure an adorable quokka off the playing field.
“Sometimes animals can displace one another. Sometimes animals can hide, animals can run away. Sometimes they get eaten. Sometimes they actually engage in contact aggression,” Hinde says.
It’s a little ridiculous, but she says the point is to have fun while also creating a learning opportunity.
“We really try to showcase animals that people might never have heard of,” she says. “Like dhole and bandicoot and binturong and babirusa.”
At Wakefield High, Michelle Harris is going over the tweets from one of the previous night’s battles: the number six seed tiger versus the number three seed leopard seal.
“And apparently we need to bundle up,” she tells the class, “because we’re headed to the vast coastal ice flows of Antarctica!”
Near the back of the class, senior Jordan Simpson giggles with Tiara Jones, both looking at a computer screen. They’ve Googled the bilby, a tiny Australian marsupial with big, rabbit-like ears. Simpson says she picked it to go all the way.
“I thought it was cute,” she says with a laugh. “I knew it had no chance, but I thought I’d give it a shot.”
Jones bursts out laughing. The bilby was ousted in the first round by a Tibetan sand fox.
Harris says those fits of giggles are a big reason she uses the bracket in class.
“This time of year can be a little stressful as we’re leading up to AP exams, so it’s nice to have a little bit of fun along the way,” she says.
That’s Hinde’s ultimate goal too — to make science fun.
“I think it’s a chance to return to that time when science was all about the imagination and the wonder at the natural world,” she says. “Science is narrative, and that is incredibly salient to the human mind.”
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Wonder why some companies still ship products on boats instead of speedy aircraft? It’s because air freight is much more expensive — the costs of the crew and fuel quickly add up. Natilus, however, thinks drones might offer a solution. The startup is prepping enormous, 200ft-long drones (roughly the size of a Boeing 777) that would haul up to 200,000lbs of cargo over the ocean. They’d theoretically reduce the cost of air freight in half by eliminating the crew and improving fuel efficiency. And while the drone likely wouldn’t be cleared to fly over populated areas, that wouldn’t matter — it’s designed to land on water and unload its goods at a seaport.
The idea is ambitious, to say the least, but there is a practical roadmap for making it a reality. A 30-foot prototype is poised to fly near San Francisco this summer. If that goes well, the next steps are finishing a full-scale prototype (due in 2020) and taking customers.
The main obstacle? Funding. As Fast Company explains, Natilus is currently a tiny company with three regular employees and under $1 million to its name. It’s going to need a lot of interest from investors to make its drones a reality. Thankfully, that might not be too hard. If the project works as planned, it could cut overseas shipping times down to less than a day without leading to absurd costs. You’d be more likely to get your online orders quickly, and it would be more practical to ship time-sensitive products like food.
Via: Fast Company
Source: Natilus
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Somewhere between rolling out new Teslas, launching re-usable rockets and digging a tunnel under Los Angeles, Elon Musk managed to start yet another new company. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Musk’s latest project is called Neuralink and its goal is to explore technology that can make direct connections between a human brain and a computer.
As the Journal reports, Musk has an "active role" in the California-based neuroscience startup, which aims to create cranial computers for treating diseases and, eventually, for building human-computer hybrids. During a conference last summer, Musk floated the idea that humans will need a boost of computer-assisted artificial intelligence if we hope to remain competitive as our machines get smarter.
Neuralink is registered in California as a medical research company and has reportedly already hired several high profile academics in the field of neuroscience: flexible electrodes and nano technology expert Dr. Venessa Tolosa; UCSF professor Philip Sabes, who also participated in the Musk-sponsored Beneficial AI conference; and Boston University professor Timothy Gardner, who studies neural pathways in the brains of songbirds.
Like Tesla or SpaceX, the company plans to present a working prototype to prove the technology is safe and viable before moving on to the more ambitious goal of increasing the performance of the human race. In this case, the prototype will likely be brain implants that can treat diseases like epilepsy, Parkinson’s or depression. Musk himself told Vanity Fair that he believes the technology for "a meaningful partial-brain interface" is only "roughly four or five years away." But even if that proves successful, there’s still a long way to go before we’re plugging an AI directly into our brains.
Source: Wall Street Journal
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There’s a new 3D modeler in VR town and it feels like a game-changer — MakeVR was released today by Vive Studios and Sixense. We tested early versions on the HTC Vive system and I can testify it’s an amazing experience, very intuitive and so natural feeling — you just […]
The post MakeVR Lets You Create 3D Models in Virtual Reality with Real CAD appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
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For a decade now, one of the biggest factors in choosing a computer has been the choice between traditional hard drive and solid state drive. The former is cheap, bulky, and slow. The latter is expensive, light, and fast. There has been zero middle ground. You’ve had to compromise between price and speed. But Intel’s…
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