A Google Exec Just Claimed the Singularity Will Happen by 2029

Ray Kurzweil, Google's Director of Engineering, is a well-known futurist with a high-hitting track record for accurate predictions. Of his 147 predictions since the 1990s, Kurzweil claims an 86 percent accuracy rate.

Earlier this week, at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, Kurzweil made yet another prediction: the technological singularity will happen sometime in the next 12 years.

"By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence," Kurzweil said in an interview with SXSW.

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Goodbye, Mimas! Saturn Moon Stuns in Cassini's Final Photo Shoot

The Cassini spacecraft snagged a final close-up view of Saturn's smallest major moon, Mimas, as it nears the end of its exploration mission at the ringed planet.

Cassini flew just 25,620 miles (41,230 kilometers) from the pockmarked moon Jan. 30, on the spacecraft's seventh and final flyby of the moon. Due to a massive crater on one side, Mimas is known as the "Death Star" moon — but this time, that crater is out of view.

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Earth's Inner Radiation Belt Is Far Weaker Than We Thought, and It's Got NASA Very Excited

More than five decades ago, scientists discovered that our planet is surrounded by two doughnut-shaped regions of charged particles, most of which originated as solar wind and got trapped in our magnetic field.

It's long been assumed that these seething regions of radiation are too dangerous for spacecraft to explore for extended periods of time, but NASA just made an unexpected discovery - the fastest, most energetic particles in the inner radiation belt are usually not even there.

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Electrons Have Been Caught Disappearing and Reappearing Between Atomic Layers

Scientist have spotted a strange type of quantum movement occurring in electrons travelling between the atomic layers of a material.

Instead of travelling from the top to the bottom layer through the middle, the electrons were caught disappearing from the top layer and reappearing in the bottom letter a fraction of a second later - with no trace of them existing in between.

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Hibernation for Deep-Space Exploration Could Happen Sooner Than You Imagined

Might humans take a cue from bears and other hibernating animals and go to sleep for months or years at a time? While the technology is still in its infancy, a paper from the aerospace engineering company SpaceWorks Enterprises suggests that it could be possible in the next 10 to 20 years.

If a hibernation system can be made to work, it could potentially cut down on some of the risks of long-term space travel. We know from long-term missions on the International Space Station that bones and muscles weaken over time, although exercise has been shown to be a partial countermeasure. But there are other issues to consider, such as bringing along enough food, or keeping astronauts mentally engaged in a small space for months at a time.

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CO2 emissions from energy remain flat for third year running

Carbon dioxide emissions from energy have not increased for three years in a row even as the global economy grew, says the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Global emissions from the energy sector were 32.1 billion tonnes in 2016, the same as the previous two years, while the economy grew 3.1 per cent, the agency says.

The IEA put the halt in growth down to growing renewable power generation, switches from coal to natural gas and improvements in energy efficiency.

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Giant Alien Planet Is Spiraling to Fiery Doom

A giant planet that is scorchingly close to its star may not survive for long, a new study finds. The planet started a death spiral more than 2 billion years ago, and may have just a few hundred thousand years of life left before it gets torn apart.

The blazingly hot skies of this doomed world could shed light on how the atmospheres of alien planets work, the study's researchers said. This research could one day help astronomers detect signs of life on distant worlds, the scientists said.

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NASA plans to make a telescope out of the Sun

As NASA astronomers peer further and further into space, they require ever larger and more powerful telescopes to do so. That's why one team of researchers from the Jet Propulsion Lab have proposed using the biggest object in our solar system, the Sun, as a cosmic magnifying glass.

According to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, massive objects will bend the space around it and cause the path of objects traveling within that space — including light itself — to curve as well. And, under the right conditions, that light can bend just enough that it magnifies the view of space behind it. This is known as gravitational lensing and astronomers have leveraged its effect for years to help boost the visual prowess of our telescopes

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Type 2 Diabetes Has Been "Reversed" in 40% of Patients for 3 Months

Type 2 diabetes is generally considered to be a chronic health condition that can't be cured once it develops, and can only be managed with a combination of medication and healthy living – assisted by gastric band (bariatric) surgery in some cases.

But new research suggests that people may actually be able to beat the disease for set periods, by undertaking an intensive short-term course of medical treatment that's been shown to reverse type 2 diabetes in a significant proportion of patients.

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SpaceX Dragon Capsule Returns to Earth with Ocean Splashdown

A SpaceX Dragon spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean Sunday (March 19), returning to Earth with more than 2 tons of science experiments and other gear from the International Space Station.

The robotic Dragon cargo ship splashed down off the coast of Baja California where it could be swiftly retrieved by a recovery team. The space capsule left the station early Sunday after being released by astronauts Thomas Pesquet (of France) and Shane Kimbrough (of NASA) using a robotic arm. SpaceX representatives reported a good splashdown of Dragon at at about 10:48 a.m. EDT (1448 GMT) in a Twitter post. (19 March)

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Watching plants grow has never been this exciting

It’s hard to take a picture of something that’s always moving—just ask anyone who’s had to photograph a child. Now, one team of researchers has solved the problem on a tiny scale, with a program that lets microscopes automatically track objects invisible to the human eye. Normally, recording something like a growing plant root would mean days of constant adjustments to a microscope. But with their program, researchers were able to watch the cells in root tips of plants (Arabidopsis thaliana) growing and splitting in 3D over the course of days.

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A New Type of Li-Fi Has Reportedly Cracked 40 Gbps, 100 Times Faster Than the Best Wi-Fi

If you're frustrated with slow wi-fi, you might be one of the many people eagerly awaiting the commercialisation of li-fi (or light-based wi-fi), which promises to be up to 100 times faster than the connections we use today.

Most li-fi systems rely on transmitting data via LED bulbs, which means there are some limitations to how easily the technology could be applied to systems outside the lab. But researchers have come up with a new type of li-fi that uses infrared light instead, and it's reportedly already cracked 40 gigabits per second (gbps) in early testing.

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The Large Hadron Collider Just Identified 5 New Subatomic Particles

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the latest addition to CERN's accelerator complex, is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. It features a 27-kilometre (16-mile) ring made of superconducting magnets and accelerating structures built to boost the energy of particles in the chamber.

In the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams are forced to collide from opposite directions at speeds close to the speed of light.

The energy densities that are created when these collisions occur cause ordinary matter to melt into its constituent parts - quarks and gluons. This allows us to interrogate the basic constituents of matter - the fundamental particles of the Standard Model.

It is a project of massive, unparalleled proportions.

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Breakthrough Starshot's Interstellar Sail Works Best As a Ball

The Breakthrough Starshot initiative, announced last year, has one very ambitious goal: to use high-powered lasers to launch a tiny, lightweight space probe toward our solar system's nearest star, Alpha Centauri, which is located roughly 4 light-years away.

Until now, illustrations depicting this concept show the probe tethered behind a parachute-shaped sail launched into interstellar space by a single, but powerful, laser beam.

But new research indicates that this design is too unstable. If the parachute tilts even a little bit, it could fly off the beam — and way off course — dragging the probe along with it, the scientists say.

The optimal design? A tiny ball nestled among four laser beams.

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Wheel damage suggests Mars rover approaching mid-life crisis

Unfortunately for NASA’s Curiosity rover, you can’t call a mechanic on Mars. A NASA image shows that one of the zig-zag treads, or grousers, on Curiosity’s left middle wheel has broken.

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Old blood can be made young again and it might fight ageing
Blood from the young seems to have healing powers, but how can we harness them without relying on donors? The discovery of a protein that keeps blood stem cells youthful might help.

The rejuvenating properties of young blood came to light in macabre experiments that stitched young and old mice together to share a circulatory system. The health of the older mice improved, while that of the younger ones deteriorated. Other animal studies have since shown that injections of young or old blood have similar effects.

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After 130 Years, We Might Have to Completely Redraw the Dinosaur Family Tree

Scientists are claiming that the classification of two major dinosaur groups has been wrong for over a century, and if they're right, it would be like everyone realising that some types of "cats" are actually dogs.

The controversial paper has also suggested that the physical location of the first dinosaurs might be incorrect – pointing to a previously unimportant cat-sized fossil in Scotland as their evidence.

"This is a textbook changer - if it continues to pan out," palaeontologist Thomas Holtz from University of Maryland, who wasn't involved in the research, told Nature.

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An Unexpected New Lung Function Has Been Found - They Make Blood
esearchers have discovered that the lungs play a far more complex role in mammalian bodies than we thought, with new evidence revealing that they don't just facilitate respiration - they also play a key role in blood production.

In experiments involving mice, the team found that they produce more than 10 million platelets (tiny blood cells) per hour, equating to the majority of platelets in the animals' circulation. This goes against the decades-long assumption that bone marrow produces all of our blood components.

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The Sun Is Nearly Spotless, Hinting at Solar Lull

Talk about spick and span! The sun was nearly spotless for more than two weeks this month, a clue that the star may be nearing its next lull in activity, according to NASA.

No sunspots on the sun's surface were visible during a 15-day stretch that began on March 7, despite constant observation by NASA's powerful Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft.

"This is the longest stretch of spotlessness since the last solar minimum in April 2010, indicating the solar cycle is marching on toward the next minimum, which scientists predict will occur between 2019—2020," NASA officials wrote in a statement.

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