Ananuri - a castle complex on the Aragvi River in Georgia, Pasanauri – a
small town in Dusheti district
, the confluence of Black and White Aragvi Rivers, travertines – you
will meet all these incredible sites on the way to Kazbegi, a beautiful
town in the Mtskheta-Mtianeti region of north-eastern of the country.
Yet, through this footage and different perspective you will rediscover
this mesmerizing part of Georgia from the bird’s eye view.
CHINESE have developed the "world's first"
mind-reading chip that they claim enables people to control
computers using just brain signals. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are devices that have been designed to
create simple communication between the human brain and computers.
A collaboration between Tianjin University and the
state-owned China Electronics Corporation led to the recent unveiling of “Brain
Talker,” a computer chip designed specifically for use in BCIs.
“The signals transmitted and processed by the brain are
submerged in the background noise,” Tianjin University researcher Ming Dong
said in a press release. “This BC3 [Brain-Computer Codec Chip] has the ability
to discriminate minor neural electrical signals and decode their information
efficiently, which can greatly enhance the speed and accuracy of brain-computer
interfaces.”
Ming believes the chip could help bring BCIs out of labs and
into the mainstream. "The Brain Talker chip advances BCI technology allowing it to become
more portable, wearable, and accessible to the general public."
In future, this technology could be used for a variety of purposes,
such as imparting education to disabled people, gaming, or creating
medical devices for people that have problems with body movements, for
example, those suffering from motor neurone disease. The researchers have not yet revealed whether Brain Talker will be worn outside the body or embedded in the user's brain.
Stephen Hawking had a vision that the universe expanded out of a
dimensionless point, rather like a shuttlecock. Recently, his stunning
proposal has come under attack, but a vigorous defense has been mounted.
“If you know the wave function of the universe, why aren’t you rich?” — Murray Gell-Mann
" The “no-boundary proposal,” which Hawking and his frequent
collaborator, James Hartle, fully formulated in a 1983 paper, envisions
the cosmos having the shape of a shuttlecock.
Just as a shuttlecock has a diameter of zero at its bottommost point
and gradually widens on the way up, the universe, according to the
no-boundary proposal, smoothly expanded from a point of zero size.
Hartle and Hawking derived a formula describing the whole shuttlecock —
the so-called “wave function of the universe” that encompasses the
entire past, present and future at once — making moot all contemplation
of seeds of creation, a creator, or any transition from a time before.
Hartle and Hawking’s proposal radically reconceptualized time. Each
moment in the universe becomes a cross-section of the shuttlecock; while
we perceive the universe as expanding and evolving from one moment to
the next, time really consists of correlations between the universe’s
size in each cross-section and other properties — particularly its
entropy, or disorder. Entropy increases from the cork to the feathers,
aiming an emergent arrow of time. Near the shuttlecock’s rounded-off
bottom, though, the correlations are less reliable; time ceases to exist
and is replaced by pure space. As Hartle, now 79 and a professor at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, explained it by phone
recently, “We didn’t have birds in the very early universe; we have
birds later on. … We didn’t have time in the early universe, but we have
time later on.”
