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The modularity of DAC systems implies that costs for CO2 removal might drop 90% to 95% over a couple of decades, just like the recent cost declines for other modular solutions such as wind turbines, solar panels and lithium-ion batteries.

Unlike other pollutants, what matters with carbon dioxide isn’t the location of its release but the total atmospheric accumulation. Releasing greenhouse gases in industrial corridors and then removing them from the atmosphere in remote locations has essentially the same net effect as if the carbon wasn’t emitted in the first place. That means we can deploy DAC systems wherever the energy for their operation is cheapest, ecosystem impacts are lowest, and the economic activity would be welcome.

A solar microgrid, which generates, stores and distributes clean energy to homes and facilities in a local network, provides a strong answer to these needs and wants. It can integrate with the main electric grid or disconnect and operate autonomously if the main grid is stressed or goes down. The physical pieces—solar panels, batteries and inverters—have been improving for a while. What’s new and coming, though, is the ability to orchestrate these different pieces into agile electric grids.

there is a really simple way of thinking of the debate over net neutrality: Is access to the Internet more like access to electricity, or more like cable television service?

For all the technical complexity of generating electricity and distributing it to millions of people, the economic arrangement is very simple: I give them money. They give me electricity. I do with it what I will.

Comcast, my cable provider, offers me a menu of packages from which I might choose, each with a different mix of channels. It goes through long and sometimes arduous negotiations with the owners of those cable channels and has a different business arrangement with each of them. The details of those arrangements are opaque to me as the consumer; all I know is that I can get the movie package for X dollars a month or the sports package for Y dollars and so on.

Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces are turning the science fantasy of transmitting thoughts directly from one brain to another into reality.

A TMS device creates a magnetic field over the scalp, which then causes an electrical current in the brain.

Cell-to-cell communication occurs via a process known as synaptic transmission, where chemical signals are passed between cells resulting in electrical spikes in the receiving cell.

Researchers have found that suppressing activity in part of the brain involved in planning and reasoning can boost an individual’s ability to think in creative ways and solve mind-bending problems.

We can improve very specific think-out-of-the-box [processes], but at the same time we decrease working memory processes,

participants who had been given small amounts of electrical stimulation were three times more likely to solve puzzles than those who had not had their brains “zapped”.

Slow transit constipation (STC) is a common disease characterized by markedly delayed colonic transit time as a result of colonic motility dysfunction. It is well established that STC is mostly caused by disorders of relevant nerves, especially the enteric nervous system (ENS).

After 5 weeks of treatment, CES could enhance the colonic electromyogram (EMG) signal to promote colonic motility, thereby improving the colonic content emptying of STC beagles. HE staining and transmission electron microscopy confirmed that CES could regenerate ganglia and synaptic vesicles in the myenteric plexus.

Taken together, pulse train CES could induce the regeneration of myenteric plexus neurons, thereby promoting the colonic motility in STC beagles.

But there is one exception. Tesla, the electric-vehicle upstart, continues to surge.

“Investors want something that is going to go up in orders of magnitude in six months to six years, and Tesla is that story,” said Karl Brauer, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book. “Nobody thinks Ford or G.M. is going to do that.”

Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has shattered the conventional wisdom that automakers should be viewed as a stable, reliable investment. Instead, he promotes his California-based company as a dynamic vehicle for growth, despite the risks and challenges ahead of it.

But the brain doesn’t contain any digital switches and was not designed for the convenience or edification of any external user. The idea that it is a computer is just the latest in a series of metaphors, and one that is looking increasingly threadbare.

how previous ages thought of the brain. It was a collection of cavities through which animal spirits flowed; then it became a machine, which was a breakthrough idea: perhaps you could investigate it as you might any machine, by breaking it down into its constituent parts and seeing what they do.

A century later, electricity was the fashionable thing, so natural philosophers began to theorise that perhaps the animal spirits sloshing around in the brain were in fact a kind of “electric fluid”.

The Unite union has urged Ford to convert its UK engine plants to making electric cars and battery technology.Currently Ford makes engines for the Ford Fiesta and Jaguar Land Rover vehicles at Bridgend in South Wales and diesel engines in Dagenham in Essex.

Production of engines for Jaguar Land Rover at the Ford Engine plant in Bridgend will end in September 2020.Half of the workforce of 1,930 at Bridgend works on that engine.At the moment Ford Bridgend makes half a million engines a year for Ford's own models and a quarter of a million for JLR.After 2020 the number of engines being made on the site will be just a quarter of present production levels.

Figures from industry body the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders showed sales of new diesel cars fell 17.1% last year as higher taxes and pollution fears hit demand.

Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, had been troubled by the question of what happens to us when we die. She had read about the near-death experiences of certain cardiac-arrest survivors who had undergone extraordinary psychic journeys before being resuscitated. Sometimes, these people reported travelling outside of their bodies towards overwhelming sources of light where they were greeted by dead relatives. Others spoke of coming to a new understanding of their lives, or encountering beings of profound goodness

Borjigin didn’t believe the content of those stories was true – she didn’t think the souls of dying people actually travelled to an afterworld – but she suspected something very real was happening in those patients’ brains. In her own laboratory, she had discovered that rats undergo a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, after their hearts stop and their brains lose oxygen. She wondered if humans’ near-death experiences might spring from a similar phenomenon, and if it was occurring even in people who couldn’t be revived

when she looked at the scientific literature, she found little enlightenment. “To die is such an essential part of life,” she told me recently. “But we knew almost nothing about the dying brain.” So she decided to go back and figure out what had happened inside the brains of people who died at the University of Michigan neurointensive care unit.

“Civilization,” wrote the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead in 1911, “advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

On this account, technology can save us a lot of cognitive effort, for “thinking” needs to happen only once, at the design stage.

The hidden truth about many attempts to “bury” technology is that they embody an amoral and unsustainable vision. Pick any electrical appliance in your kitchen. The odds are that you have no idea how much electricity it consumes, let alone how it compares to other appliances and households. This ignorance is neither natural nor inevitable; it stems from a conscious decision by the designer of that kitchen appliance to free up your “cognitive resources” so that you can unleash your inner Oscar Wilde on “contemplating” other things. Multiply such ignorance by a few billion, and global warming no longer looks like a mystery.

The coal industry knows that to stop runaway climate change all coal-powered generators need to close Australia joined 174 countries and the European Union in 2015, signing the Paris agreement. In doing so, Australia agreed to do its part in keeping the global temperature rise “well below” 2C.

According to data from the Office of the Chief Economist, the demand for coal-generated electricity has dropped by more than 15% in the past eight years.

Coal is now the most expensive form of new power. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the cost of energy from a new coal power plant would be $134-$203/MWh. That’s more expensive than wind, solar or highly efficient combined-cycle gas (costing $61-$118/MWh, $78-$140/MWh and $74-$90/MWh, respectively).

His new company Neuralink will work on linking human brains with computers, utilizing “neural lace” technology.

Musk talked recently about this kind of technology, seeing it as a way for human to interact with machines and superintelligencies.

What's next? We'll wait for the details. Elon Musk's influence on our modern life and aura certainly continue to grow, especially if he'll deliver on the promises of his various enterprises.

subjects — 780 New Haven residents who volunteered — helped make an untenured assistant professor named Stanley Milgram a national celebrity. Over the next five decades, his obedience experiments provided the inspiration for films, fiction, plays, documentaries, pop music, prime-time dramas, and reality television. Today, the Milgram experiments are considered among the most famous and most controversial experiments of all time. They are also often used in expert testimony in cases where situational obedience leads to crime

Perry’s evidence raises larger questions regarding a study that is still firmly entrenched in American scientific and popular culture: if Milgram lied once about his compromised neutrality, to what extent can we trust anything he said? And how could a blatant breach in objectivity in one of the most analyzed experiments in history go undetected for so long?

the debate has never addressed this question: to what extent can we trust his raw data in the first place? In her riveting new book, Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments, Australian psychologist Gina Perry tackles this very topic, taking nothing for granted

Neurologically, how does our brain adapt itself to new technologies? Nicholas Carr: A couple of types of adaptations take place in your brain. One is a strengthening of the synaptical connections between the neurons involved in using that instrument, in using that tool. And basically these are chemical – neural chemical changes. So you know, cells in our brain communicate by transmitting electrical signals between them and those electrical signals are actually activated by the exchange of chemicals, neurotransmitters in our synapses. And so when you begin to use a tool, for instance, you have much stronger electrochemical signals being processed in those – through those synaptical connections. And then the second, and even more interesting adaptation is in actual physical changes,anatomical changes. Your neurons, you may grow new neurons that are then recruited into these circuits or your existing neurons may grow new synaptical terminals. And again, that also serves to strengthen the activity in those, in those particular pathways that are being used – new pathways. On the other hand, you know, the brain likes to be efficient and so even as its strengthening the pathways you’re exercising, it’s pulling – it’s weakening the connections in other ways between the cells that supported old ways of thinking or working or behaving, or whatever that you’re not exercising so much.

And it was only in around the year 800 or 900 that we saw the introduction of word spaces. And suddenly reading became, in a sense, easier and suddenly you had to arrival of silent reading, which changed the act of reading from just transcription of speech to something that every individual did on their own. And suddenly you had this whole deal of the silent solitary reader who was improving their mind, expanding their horizons, and so forth. And when Guttenberg invented the printing press around 1450, what that served to do was take this new very attentive, very deep form of reading, which had been limited to just, you know, monasteries and universities, and by making books much cheaper and much more available, spread that way of reading out to a much larger mass of audience. And so we saw, for the last 500 years or so, one of the central facts of culture was deep solitary reading.

What the book does as a technology is shield us from distraction. The only thinggoing on is the, you know, the progression of words and sentences across page after page and so suddenly we see this immersive kind of very attentive thinking, whether you are paying attention to a story or to an argument, or whatever. And what we know about the brain is the brain adapts to these types of tools.

11 experiments. In most, they asked participants to put away any distractions and entertain themselves with their own thoughts for 6 to 15 minutes

Over the first six studies, 58 percent of participants rated the difficulty at or above the midpoint on a scale (“somewhat”), and 42 percent rated their enjoyment below the midpoint

Participants rated the task of entertaining themselves with their own thoughts as far less enjoyable and more conducive to mind-wandering than other mellow activities such as reading magazines or doing crossword puzzles.

Brain scientists may speculate on a grand scale, but they work on a small scale.

ow identity, personality, memory — all the things that define a human being — grow out of the way brain cells and regions are connected to each other.

way to link brain cells to a computer to manipulate their activity and test ideas about how cells and networks of cells work.

Value added by the information technology and communications industries — mostly hardware and software — has remained stuck at around 4 percent of the nation’s economic output for the last quarter century.

But these statistics do not tell the whole story. Because they miss much of what technology does for people’s well-being. News organizations that take advantage of computers to let go of journalists, secretaries and research assistants will show up in the economic statistics as more productive, making more with less. But statisticians have no way to value more thorough, useful, fact-dense articles. What’s more, gross domestic product only values the goods and services people pay for. It does not capture the value to consumers of economic improvements that are given away free. And until recently this is what news media organizations like The New York Times were doing online.

“G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers,” said Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric.”