taste of science: Earth fight and Cyborg invasion?

Moving Flying Mountains: Deflecting Hazardous Near-Earth Asteroids

The near-Earth asteroids are a population of objects on orbits around the Sun that cross or come near Earth's orbit. They can and, rarely, do hit Earth. I will review the near-Earth population, the asteroid impact hazard, and describe proposed projects to demonstrate asteroid deflection to address the small-but-significant risk that we will need to prevent an asteroid from hitting Earth in the next few hundred years.

Speaker: Michael Busch, SETI Institute

Brain-Machine Interface - are we that close to the cyborg age?

The interaction between human and highly sophisticated machine has become a norm in our modern societies. The use of computers, remote servers, and smartphones has become part of the daily routine. Yet, the abundance of sci-fi literature as well as public announcements that were made by famous entrepreneurs over the last years have heightened our questioning of human relationships with ‘intelligent’ machines. The debates on a future threatened world where machines would outperform humans seems more legitimate than ever. Yet, smartphones technology has enabled instant communication and information sharing across the world, rapid and democratic expansion of knowledge and major breakthrough into medical devices.

This talk aims to provide an optimistic vision of the future, in which the competition between human and machines is replaced by complementary interaction. An introduction to the current scientific advances in the Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs), as well as a general understanding of the fundamental functioning of those two worlds will give the audience the keys to understand the field of bioelectronics.

Speaker: Marc Ferro, Stanford