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XKCD has been tapped to teach high schoolers science

What if your most fearsome high school subjects like physics, chemistry and biology could be explained in humorous stick-figure drawings? That is exactly what textbook giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hopes to do by hiring 31-year-old artist and XKCD creator Randall Munroe to illustrate lessons. But wait, the collaboration gets even better for students.

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Last week’s chemistry news: Electronic plants, anti-viral ‘superballs’, and more! http://goo.gl/Tt21g8

Synthetic Muscles

Huntsville AL (SPX) Dec 31, 2015 Muscles are miracles of nature. They convert energy into motion more efficiently than any gasoline engine or electric motor. They’re extremely resilient and even heal themselves. Instead of degrading with use, our muscles become stronger the more we work them. Researchers have long sought a way to recreate that miracle in prosthetics. So far, no one has succeeded. But Lenore Rasmussen, Pri Full article

Artificial Intelligence, Boon or Bane? University of Cambridge Set to Find an Answer

Today’s science and technology are nearing a point where computers can recreate human-level intelligence. While it is difficult to say when exactly this will happen, some researchers are suggesting that this could take place sometime this century. In the press release, Stuart Russell, a world-leading AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that such a development would be “the biggest event in human history.”

Professor Stephen Hawking agrees, and adds that it remains to be seen whether or not artificial intelligence will be our greatest benefit or greatest downfall. He states, “when it eventually does occur, it’s likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there’s huge value in getting it right.”

In anticipation of this, the University of Cambridge is to establish a new interdisciplinary research centre, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, which will bring together computer scientists, philosophers, social scientists, and others to examine the technical, practical, and philosophical questions that artificial intelligence raises (or will raise) for humanity in the coming century.

It will be funded by a £10 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust.

Read more at: http://futurism.com/links/19069/

Scientists have come up with an explanation for that 'alien megastructure' star

Probably not aliens.

Well, it had to come to an end some time. There’s been a whole lot of buzz over KIC 8462852 - a star located about 1,500 light-years away between the Cygnus and Lyre constellations of our Milky Way galaxy. It’s displaying such weird behaviour, one scientist even threw the possibility of an advanced alien civilisation building a giant Dyson sphere nearby.

But new research has come up with the most plausible explanation yet for KIC 8462852’s weirdness - a barrage of comet fragments are spinning in a tight orbit around the star. […] But despite the evidence, they’re still not ready to discount the alien megastructure idea entirely. “We can’t really say it is, or is not,” said Marengo. “But what the star is doing is very strange. It’s interesting when you have phenomena like that - typically it means there’s some new physical explanation or a new concept to be discovered.”

Continue Reading.

Studies show that people decide if you’re trustworthy, adventurous, successful, smart, extroverted, or likeable within 3 seconds of meeting you. Source

We’ve hit peak drone everyone. 

Introducing: The delivery drone for humans.

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The God Brain: Roundtable Discussion on God and Spirituality for Brain Games

NeuroscienceNews was invited by National Geographic’s Brain Games to participate in a virtual roundtable discussion on the question:

“Is belief in God innate in our brains, as if it were installed by some divine programmer? Or is spirituality a more complex evolving adaptation that has both helped and harmed us as a species?”

Let us know what you think.

Image: Jason Silva sits with Jonathan, a grad student at IDC Herzliya as they test out the virtual reality EEG cap and goggles. Photo Credit: NG Studios/Andy Fram.

Fusion Energy: These Promising Projects Are Set to Revolutionize Our World

Fusion power would completely  revolutionize energy production on our planet. Indeed, it would reshape our entire world, allowing us to produce vast amounts of energy with little waste or cost. In essence, fusion reactors work by mimicking our Sun in that they fuse two hydrogen atoms into a single helium atom. Conversely, nuclear fission breaks a single atom into two atoms.

Ultimately, the fusion reaction releases ten times more energy per mass as our regular fission reactors, and it does so without all the harmful nuclear waste.

Unfortunately, such reactions come with a few problems. As University of Texas physicist Dr. Swadesh M. Mahajan notes, “Getting net energy from fusion is such a goddamn difficult undertaking. We know of no materials that would be able to handle anywhere near that amount of heat.”

Find out how scientists tackled that issue at: http://futurism.com/links/fusion-energy-these-promising-projects-are-set-to-revolutionize-our-world/