Moshe Vardi, a computer science professor at Rice University, traces the evolution of the idea that artificial intelligence may one day surpass human intelligence, from Turing to Kurzweil, and looks at the current rate of progress.

Early predictions were rubbish and it has taken 15 years to go from Deep Blue beating Kasparov at chess to self-driving cars and Watson beating Jeopardy champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

According to The Atlantic,  Vardi thinks it's reasonable to believe intelligent machines may one day replace human workers almost entirely and put millions out of work permanently, just as the world's food runs out.

What he is suggesting is an economic singularity, after which the labour market as we know it will cease to exist. Historically the labour market has evolved and adapted. Accelerating technology over the last few centuries has consistently erased some jobs only to replace them with others but the question is if the machines have replaced our brains what is there for us to do?

Vardi thinks that the world in 50 years either will be a utopia or a dystopia. Either we will solve the problem before it happens or things will get very very nasty.

He is not optimistic. If machines can do almost all of our work, then it is not clear that even 15 weekly hours of work will be required. He does not find the prospect of leisure-filled life appealing.

"I believe that work is essential to human well-being and our economic system would have to undergo a radical restructuring to enable billions of people to live lives of leisure," he said.

The unemployment rate in the US is currently under nine percent and is considered to be a huge problem.

"We cannot blindly pursue the goal of machine intelligence without pondering its consequences," Vardie added. 

Ramaraja Ramasamy, assistant professor in the UGA College of Engineering and the corresponding author of a paper describing the process in the Journal of Energy and Environmental Science said the goal was to generate cleaner power from sunlight using plant-based systems.

According to Phys.org plants have a thing or too to teach scientists about solar power. Most of them operate at nearly 100 percent quantum efficiency, meaning that for every photon of sunlight a plant captures, it produces an equal number of electrons. The best solar panels can do is 12 and 17 percent

Ramasamy has come up with a way to interrupt photosynthesis so that electrons can be captured before the plant uses them to make sugars.

This involves separating out plant cell thylakoids, which are responsible for capturing and storing energy from sunlight. He then manipulates the proteins contained in the thylakoid.

These modified thylakoids are immobilised and stuck on the back of carbon nanotubes which act as an electrical conductor, capturing the electrons from the plant material and sending them along a wire.

So far the system has been tested on small-scale experiments. These are double the efficiency of solar panels.

Ramasamy warned that much more work must be done before this technology reaches commercialisation. At the moment he is trying to make it a little more stable and scalable.

In the short term it might find a use in remote sensors or other portable electronic equipment that requires less power to run. However to power a house it might take other technologies like genetic engineering to enhance stability of the plant photosynthetic machineries. 

The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and the Brazilian government have confirmed that they have found a lump of granite which normally forms only on dry land.

Apparently this is strong evidence that a continent used to exist in the area where the legendary island of Atlantis, mentioned in antiquity by Plato in his philosophical dialogues, was supposedly located.

Atlantis was supposed to have been a highly developed civilization, but the story goes it sunk into the sea around 12,000 years ago. No trace of it has ever been found it and it is mostly taken seriously by New Agers who think that they had a lifetime there as a Priest of the Sun, or a Priestess of the Moon.

It is strange that the Japanese press is so keep to tie the lump of rock to Atlantis as the Shinkai 6500 manned submersible operated by the Japanese agency has not exactly found any human made structures.

While they have found a granite mass which is estimated to have sunk into the sea several tens of million years ago, it is not exactly the pyramids of a high tech civilisation.

The rock was found on the the Rio Grande Rise, a seabed more than 1,000 km southeast of Rio de Janeiro. At a depth of 910 meters, it found a rock cliff around 10 meters in height and breadth.

The area around it was a large volume of quartz sand, which is also not formed in the sea and the bedrock is believed to consist mainly of basalt rock.

The rise stretches around 1,000 km at the widest point, and is considered part of the continent left behind when South America and Africa split apart more than 100 million years ago.

It would have been above sea level until about 50 million years ago but became submerged over a period spanning several million years.

Shinichi Kawakami, a professor at Gifu University said the granite could have been a part of a big continent before it separated into what is now Africa and South America.

"The concept of Atlantis came way before geology of the modern age was established. We should not jump to the Atlantis conclusion right away," he warned. The Japanese press  already jumped to that conclusion, but also vaulted well past it. 

Tesla founder Elon Musk recently confirmed that he has been in talks with Google about integrating the search giant’s self-driving car technology into next generation cars, reports Forbes.

However, Musk prefers not to use “self-driving” cars to describe the technology. He sees it as an autopilot. Mind you, with prices starting at $70,000, Tesla needs to make its cars as cutting edge as possible. The company now wants to come up with a $30,000 model, packed with space age technology.

Even at $70,000 Tesla’s Model S seems to be doing quite well in the US, but the same can’t be said for Europe. Unlike California’s tree hugging legislature, Europeans aren’t willing to offer generous tax breaks for zero emission cars. Also, Europe is sort of broke at the moment and lawmakers are primarily focused on dodging petrol bombs thrown by austerity protesters.

However, autopilot technology could still be years away. Musk tweeted that autopilot development is important, but it is not a priority for Tesla. He said it is still a few years from production.

It has been a holy grail of security experts to create a quantum internet that allows perfectly secure communication based on quantum mechanics.

The big idea is that if you measure a quantum object, such as a photon, it is always changed. In a quantum internet any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message will leave telltale signs of snooping.

This means that anybody can send a "one-time pad" over a quantum network which can then be used for secure communication using normal email. The user is sure that the cryptography key is secure and not been tampered with. Since it is only used once, there is no change of a hacker knowing what the key is, unless they are a cat which is potentially dead and alive at the same time. Fortunately these are quite rare.

Some forms of quantum networking have been around for a while, but they are limited by the fact that they can only be point-to-point connections over a single length of fibre.

This means that they can only send secure messages directly and cannot be routed.

What Richard Hughes and his mates at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico have revealed is that they have been running an alternative quantum internet for two and half years.

This uses a quantum network based around a hub and spoke-type network. All messages get routed from any point in the network to another via this central hub.

So as long as the hub is secure, then the network should also be secure.

While this idea has been thought of, it has been difficult to scale, Los Alamos got around this problem by equipping each node with quantum transmitters. Only the hub is capable of receiving a quantum message but all nodes can send and receiving conventional messages in the normal way.

This means that the entire network is secure, and scalable provided that the central hub is not attacked.

Los Alamos has already designed and built plug-and-play type modules that are about the size of a box of matches so that it will not cripple any network.

The big idea is to eventually have a modules built in to almost any device connected to a fibre optic network, such as set top TV boxes, home computers and so on, to allow perfectly secure messaging. 

The technique involves magnetic levitation, developed by n3D. It allows scientists to grow three-dimensional, lifelike microtissues similar to those found in the human body. The samples could then be used for in-vivo drug testing models. 

The technology should lessen the dependence on animal pharma, which is good from a safety standpoint, as it will eliminate some threats of contamination. 

“We strongly believe that n3D’s levitation technology is the future of cellular research,” RBCC CEO Patrick Brown said. He added that magnetic levitation labs are being “eagerly adopted” by labs across the globe. 

RBCC and n3D signed a joint venture agreement to market and develop the technology last year.

The full details appeared in an article published by Nature here.

Viable cell therapies, though, are years away from reaching the market.

According to the research spec this means that the protocol can manage to process 33 trillion events in 65 seconds which is hugely faster than the 504 billion events/second carried out in the past.

Researchers Peter Barnes, Christopher Carothers, David R. Jefferson and Justin M. Lapre have dubbed their protocol Time Warp and it is a parallel discrete-event simulation synchronization that automatically uncovers the available parallelism through its error detection and rollback recovery mechanism.

They noticed a 97 times performance improvement when scaling from 32,768 to 1,966,080 cores thanks to cache performance improvements when running at peak scale.

The system uses a new, long range performance metric, called Warp Speed, which grows linearly with an exponential increase in the PHOLD event-rate.

In true Star Trek style, the machine has warp speeds. Currently it is at Warp Speed 2.7 and it will be nearly 150 years before we expect to reach Warp Speed 10.0.

The paper on Warp Speed can be found by a jump to the left and then a step to the right here. 

Researchers have unsuccessfully used internet-based concepts in attempts to try to build MANET for the last 20 years.

Now, according to Network World, DARPA thinks they can only scale to around 50 nodes before network services become ineffective and is asking for new ideas to break MANET limitations.

In a statement, DARPA said while the internet created some far-reaching technical advances it can't cope with the requirements of MANET.

It said that MANET will not happen using existing protocols and concepts and someone is going to have to come up with something truly revolutionary to build one.

It is still an important technological goal. A MANET of a thousand nodes could support an entire battalion without the need for manual network setup, management and maintenance that comes from 'switchboard'-era communications.

This would give troops robust services such as real-time video imagery, enhanced situational awareness and other services that we have not yet imagined.

So DARPA thinks the only way to get it, is to scrap internet developments and go back to the drawing board.

DARPA says it intends to discuss the MANET concepts at a Novel Methods for Information Sharing in Large-Scale Mobile Ad-hoc Networks Symposium in August. It might be a good idea to have a Powerpoint with your ideas by then. 

Branson's Virgin Galactic ignited its rocket motor in mid-flight for the first time and sped to Mach 1.2, faster than sound and reached about 56,000 feet in altitude.

The test took place over the Mojave Desert and was the biggest milestone in Virgin Galactic's 8 1/2-year endeavor to be the world's first commercial space liner.

Branson wants to take scores of paying customers into space for a brief journey. However, it is taking a jolly long time. Branson wanted to see the first space tourists in 2007 but had to push that date back to 2014.

Branson told the assorted throngs that he never thought it would take this long, but it was worth the wait. Now the plane has accomplished supersonic flight, the company says it is just about ready to take the next step and there are an awful lot of exciting things to come.

Virgin Galactic still needs to clear regulatory hurdles, particularly satisfying safety concerns with the Federal Aviation Administration. We guess they want pilots to take their shoes off before they board the plane.

During the test, SpaceShipTwo was taken to about 47,000 feet by a carrier aircraft, and approximately 45 minutes into the flight, it was dropped.

Pilot Mark Stucky and co-pilot Mike Alsbury engaged the hybrid rocket motor for 16 seconds, at which point SpaceShipTwo's speed reached Mach 1.2.

The entire flight test lasted a little more than 10 minutes, ending in a smooth landing in the Mojave.

Virgin Galactic uses a WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft that will fly with the reusable SpaceShipTwo rocket plane under its wing to 50,000 feet, where the spaceship will separate and blast off.

When the rocket motor engages, it will power the spaceship to nearly 2,500 miles per hour and take the pilots and up to six passengers to the edge of space, more than 60 miles above the Earth's surface.

For $200,000 each passengers will reach a suborbital altitude, passengers experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth. Then they will reenter the atmosphere and glide back to the runway.

So far Virgin Galactic has accepted more than $70 million in deposits from about 580 reservations made by people who are interested in the ride.