SoManyThingz

Russia aim to make Star Trek-style teleportation a reality within 20 years

If you have been a avid Star Trek follower you may have seen Captain Kirk and Spock beam themselves upto to some different planet as a click of a button. The legendary dialogue by Captain Kirk, ‘Beam Me Up Scotty‘ looks to be reality soon. Russia is embarking on a ambitious Star Trek style teleporatation program and its research program has received financial backing from the Russian government. The program seems to be part of a new Kremlin drive to encourage Russia’s IT sector and high-tech economy.
A proposed multi-trillion pound strategic development program drawn up for Vladimir Putin would seek to develop teleportation by 2035. According to Kommersant, the $2.1 trillion (£1.4 trillion) “road map” for development of the cybernetics market to 2035 also includes developing a Russian computer programming language, secure cybernetic communications, quantum computing, and neural interfaces (direct connections between computers and human brains).
“It sounds fantastical today, but there have been successful experiments at Stanford at the molecular level,” Alexander Galitsky, a prominent investor in the country’s technology sector, told Russia’s Kommersant daily on Wednesday. “Much of the tech we have today was drawn from science fiction films 20 years ago.”
While the concept of people teleporting from one place to another remains in the realm of fantasy, the Star-Trek style target is listed in the National Technological Initiative, a state-sponsored strategic development plan created to fund research and development sector in a number of key sectors.
However, the goal is not as far-fetched as it may sound.
Ilya Massukh, head of the Informational Democracy Fund NGO, told Kommersant that because of science’s rapid development it is necessary to make plans 15 to 20 years in advance.
“It is important to have intermediate goals to have an opportunity to correct the road map and its realization in order not to get involved in knowingly utopian spheres,” he said.
For the first time in 2014, scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands presented that it was possible to teleport information programmed into sub-atomic particles between two points three metres apart with 100% dependability.
Even though teleportation remains a remote prospect, experts believe that the next few decades will likely see significant progress in quantum computing and neural interfaces.
Looking to create its own version of Elon Musk’s hyperloop, The network would link Western Russia to the Far East and the northern reaches of the enormous country, with the first section of the network linking St. Petersburg to Moscow in order to transport cargo the 400 miles (640 km) from Baltic Sea terminals.
Earlier this week, Mr Putin showered praise on Russia’s IT sector when he met a team of programmers from St. Petersburg State University who won the 2016 international “Programming Olympiad.”
Russia not only has a talented programming community but also a small and lively software sector that has created many successful IT companies, including Kaspersky Labs and Yandex.
Western governments are also of the opinion that Russia has leveraged its computing talent to make one of the most impressive state-sponsored hacking and cyber-warfare programs in the world.

This guy refused a whoppping $80,000 offer to sell kanyeforpresident.com to Kanye West

You may already know Kanye West who has been making more news off the stage than on it. West who is also married to one the top celebrities of Hollywood, Kim Kardashian managed to deliver one hit album, The Life of Pablo.
However West has other dreams also. He wants to be the President of the United States of America

However to make a successful bid for presidency, he needs to own the domain called www.kanyeforpresident.com. Sadly, he can own it because its owner refused a whopping $80,000 offer to sell it.
When you visit kanyeforpresident website, you will be taken to the Instagram page of Tramall Ferguson.
Tramall Ferguson is a graduate from Australia and turned a paltry $10 into whopping $80,000, all in a nights surfing. Tramall told ABC that he was purchased the domain for $10 a year ago while surfing aimlessly.
“I was just trying to do something out of the box,” Tramall told ABC’s Control Z podcast.
He then made two impulse purchases: kanyeforpresident.com and petergriffinforpresident.com.
“I thought it was clever and no one had it yet, so I went ahead and did it,” Tramall says, “And then I literally forgot that I had it.”
Tramall’s $10 investment grew tremendously in five months, when Kanye West announced his Presidential bid at the MTV awards. Suddenly, kanyeforpresident.com was HOT internet real estate. Everyone wanted a slice, and the bids started rolling in.
“I got a call from some guy, he was offering me like, $30,000 at first. And I didn’t even know that he was offering me money for it, so I was just like, ‘50 grand!’ And he was like, ‘35’, and I was like, ‘50!’ and he was like, I’ll call you back.
“Then I got a call from Greg at TMZ, and then that’s when I kind of raised my eyebrows.
“Then I started getting crazy phone calls that day with people throwing out offers. The highest one on the first day was about 80 grand.
“[It was] like getting a lottery ticket and just winning. That’s basically what happened,” Tramall says.
Domain names can be a good business if you know how to deal in websites. Otherwise you have to plain lucky like Tramall above or Sanmay Ved who purchased Google.com for $10 during a night surfing expedition. Like Tramall, Sanmay too would have made millions from his buy but he chose to give back the domain to Google for something like $10,000 to be donated to charity.

We can use bacteria as living hard drives to store vast amounts of information state scientists

Instead of those bulky hard drives, soon we would be storing vast amounts of information on a bacteria. Yes, the humble bacteria can store information just like hard drives say scientists.
Harvard scientists led by Jeff Nivala and Seth Shipman have discovered a remarkable way to store lines of code in living bacteria, which can then be passed down to the next generation as genetic information. Based on a new study, bacteria colonies when fed by a series of human-written data can transform tiny cells into living hard drives.
According to Shipman, genotyping the bacteria could easily read the data from these living memory sticks. This type of experiment allows the transfer of 100 bytes of data, almost ten times more than possible with artificial DNA. Previously, the scientists had attempted this experiment but with synthetic DNA. The technique used by the scientists practically tricked the bacteria into copying actual computer code into their DNA without compromising their own cellular activities.
“Rather than synthesizing DNA and cutting it into a living cell, we wanted to know if we could use nature’s own methods to write directly onto the genome of a bacterial cell, so it gets copied and pasted into every subsequent generation,” says Shipman. “But working within a living cell is an entirely different story and challenge.”
“We write the information directly into the genome. While the overall amount of DNA data we have currently stored within a genome is relatively small compared to the completely synthetic DNA data storage systems, we think genome-based information storage has many potential advantages,” Nivala told Gizmodo. He says that these advantages could include higher fidelity and the capability to directly interface with biology. For example, a bacterium could be taught to identify, provide information, and even kill other microorganisms in its midst, or provide a record of genetic expression.
“Depending on how you calculate it, we stored between about 30 to 100 bytes of information,” said Nivala. “Which is quite high compared to the previous record set within a living cell, which was ~11 bits.”
Going forward, the kind of bacteria one uses is important. The researchers used E. coli for this particular experiment that clocks in a fairly respectable storage of 100 bytes. However, certain bacteria, such as Sulfolobus tokodaii may be capable of storing thousands of bytes.
To protect certain bacteria from viral infection, the scientists used the bacteria’s built-in immune system called CRISPR or Cas system. When the bacteria are attacked by viruses, they physically cut out a segment of the invaders’ DNA and paste it into a specific region of their own genome. This way, if that same virus attacks again, the bacteria can identify it and respond accordingly. Thus, the cell passes this information over to its progeny of the bacteria, transferring the viral immunity to next generations.
The bacteria research team discovered that by introducing a segment of genetic data that looks like viral DNA into a colony of bacteria that have the CRISPR/Cas system, the bacteria would devour it and include it in their genetic code. Therefore, the scientists spread the loose segments of DNA into the E.coli bacterial colony that had the CRISPR. They gulped it all up essentially becoming tiny, living hard drives.
The segments used were arbitrary strings of A, T, C, G nucleotides with pieces of viral DNA at the end. Shipman introduced one segment of information at a time and allowed the bacteria do the rest, storing away information like fastidious librarians.
Conveniently enough, the bacteria store new immune system entries in sequence, with earlier viral DNA recorded before that of more recent infections.
“That’s quite important,” Shipman says. “If the new information was just stored randomly, that wouldn’t be nearly as informative. You’d have to have tags on each piece of information to know when it was introduced into the cell. Here it’s ordered sequentially, like the way you write down the words in a sentence.”