Where Artificial Intelligence Is Now and What's Just Around the Corner

In recent years, I've seen several articles on the development of artificial intelligence (AI).  It seems to be developing along with the expansion of Moore's Law with more powerful microprocessors chips that are in almost all electronic devices we use on a daily basis.

This article is a real wake-up call on where AI stands today and where we are about to go with this technology.  Many of us have been using Apple's Siri on our iPhones for a few years and this is an interesting and useful tool.  Well, things are about to ratchet up a couple of notches.  We are now on the threshold of having something not too far off from the technology of HAL in Stanley Kubrick's epic "2001: A Space Odyssey."

My question is whether it is possible for AI to have any sense of good or evil.  For AI will this understanding be comprised of only the human sensation of pleasure or pain.  Will advanced AI have compassion for human beings as well as animals?  How about plants and micro organisms?  This could turn into a real can of worms, so to speak.

Maxwell's Demon

Have physicists really found the first photonic implementation of Maxwell's demon?  A recent paper published in Physical Review Letters seem to indicate so.  The extracted work could be used to charge a battery.

Astronaut Grafitti Inside Apollo 11 Command Module

The interior of the Apollo 11 Command Module was inspected and photographed by a team of artists, scientists, and curators at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum this month and now some of the findings are being made public.  This was part of an effort to 3-D scan and digitize over 138 million objects for public consumption online and through Virtual Reality (VR).

Are Electric Cars Really Green?

Gigapixels of Andromeda

Earlier this year, NASA released the 'largest photo' ever taken.  This video shows over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the Andromeda galaxy.  This section stretches over 40,000 light years. That covers 5,869,700,000,000 miles.  The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light-years from earth. 

Nuclear Chemist Publishes Paper Detailing: "Aluminum Poisoning of Humanity via Geoengineering

Dr. Marvin Herndon is back in the news.  A few years ago some of his research related to his theory on the possibility of a natural uranium breeder reactor in the earth's core raised a few eyebrows.  Dr. Herndon had collaborated with scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (using a super computer) to test some modeling on the concept.  The results were intriguing.  Dr. Herndon was a student of Dr. Marvin Rowe, Professor Emeritus of Texas A and M University.  Dr. Rowe received his Ph.D. by working under Professor Paul K. Kuroda of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where I earned my Ph.D. under Kuroda a couple of decades later.  Kuroda published a theory of the natural nuclear reactor in a geological setting (1.9 billion years ago) in 1956.  In a uranium mine in the Belgian Congo in 1972, French scientists discovered the remnants of a natural nuclear reactor which occurred precisely 1.9 billion years ago, and produced a low-power chain reaction for about 100,000 years.  The site was later used to study the migration of nuclear waste (most radionuclides did not move much).

His newest publication involves the so called "chemtrails" in the skies around the world that have been a controversial point of discussion on various blogs and forums over the last few years.  His findings indicate that fly ash from coal burning power plants is being released in the atmosphere as part of a clandestine geoengineering activity that has been going on for at least 15 years.  Read more about this here.

Inside the Nuclear Bunker Where America Preserves Its Movie History

In a former nuclear bunker for the preservation of currency, an organization is working to preserve film and video archives for digital access.  Read more about it at the Wired site by clicking here.