Lifeboat Foundation

Plastic and molten salt batteries may be the key to grid-scale energy storage.

Electricity is a marvelous thing. It can power every manner of machine and digital device, but it is ephemeral. It has to be used as soon as it is created or it is lost forever. The trick to making it serve the needs of humanity is to store it, and to do that, you need a battery.

There are hundreds of ways to make a battery — the Romans did it with copper and iron in a lemon juice bath. But not all of those storage techniques are practical in the real world. Some are too heavy, others too bulky. Many are too costly or use materials that are too scare. Nickel has long been a major component of today’s lithium-ion batteries, but upheavals in some countries masterminded by criminal leaders have caused it to triple in price recently.

Continue reading “Grid-Scale Storage Solutions — Plastic & Freeze/Thaw Battery Edition” »

A shadow war is a war that, officially, does not exist. As mercenaries, hackers and drones take over the role armies once played, shadow wars are on the rise.

States are evading their responsibilities and driving the privatization of violence. War in the grey-zone is a booming business: Mercenaries and digital weaponry regularly carry out attacks, while those giving orders remain in the shadows.

Continue reading “Drones, hackers and mercenaries — The future of war | DW Documentary” »

One multi-task performing robot can create an enormous difference in the cores of a business operation and its workflow. Over the past few years, robotics technology has risen and is still moving up the ladder, proving its worth by providing huge successes to businesses with increased productivity and customer retention rates.

These brave new robots are becoming a part of other technological changes and are moving towards enabling unprecedented opportunities for industries around the globe.

Every robot is an integration of sleek electronics and versatile software. Robots have to connect to real-life circumstances and perform based on predictive analytics about the situations that might occur in the future.

If your business needs backend services for its websites and apps, IT pros say these are the serverless computing providers to turn to.

The notion of self-driving vehicles is currently met with equal parts wonder and alarm. But a new study reveals how the pros may outweigh the cons as a business strategy.

An article titled “Impact of Autonomous Vehicle Assisted Last-Mile Delivery in Urban to Rural Settings” determines that this technology reduces the completion time of delivery tours and provides the most cost-effective business model. It appears in Transportation Science.

“The starting point of this paper involved the United States Postal Service announcing its idea to start using autonomous vehicles in rural routes,” said Sara Reed, assistant professor of business analytics at the University of Kansas.

… along with new, unfamiliar — and often poorly understood — risks.

Technology and business risks morph with changes in technology and how it is delivered. While cloud services are often considered more dependable, businesses face new risks with SaaS and public cloud — risks that are unfamiliar or not completely understood. People’s eyes pop open and ears perk up when they witness prolonged outage events such as the current issue with Atlassian. Suddenly, SaaS dependencies and resilience issues become relevant, as a business can’t access its favorite SaaS tool. The unique risk of using SaaS is that you don’t have control over the application or the tool and cannot reimplement yourself. It is also important to understand the cascading risks, as some of the well-known SaaS services are hosted on a leading hyperscaler’s infrastructure. You need to analyze the business impact of SaaS and cloud services outages just like for any other technology in your portfolio.

Trust but verify vendor claims about service-level agreements supporting operations and resilience plans. To ensure that your SaaS providers deliver on their own promises:

Renting space and IP addresses on a public server has become standard business practice, but according to a team of Penn State computer scientists, current industry practices can lead to “cloud squatting,” which can create a security risk, endangering sensitive customer and organization data intended to remain private.

Cloud squatting occurs when a company, such as your bank, leases space and IP addresses—unique addresses that identify individual computers or computer networks—on a public server, uses them, and then releases the space and addresses back to the public server company, a standard pattern seen every day. The public server company, such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, then assigns the same addresses to a second company. If this second company is a bad actor, it can receive information coming into the address intended for the original company—for example, when you as a customer unknowingly use an outdated link when interacting with your bank—and use it to its advantage—cloud squatting.

“There are two advantages to leasing server space,” said Eric Pauley, doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering. “One is a cost advantage, saving on equipment and management. The other is scalability. Leasing server space offers an unlimited pool of computing resources so, as workload changes, companies can quickly adapt.” As a result, the use of clouds has grown exponentially, meaning almost every website a user visits takes advantage of cloud computing.

CSIS will host a public event on responsible AI in a global context, featuring a moderated discussion with Julie Sweet, Chair and CEO of Accenture, and Brad Smith, President and Vice Chair of the Microsoft Corporation, on the business perspective, followed by a conversation among a panel of experts on the best way forward for AI regulation. Dr. John J. Hamre, President and CEO of CSIS, will provide welcoming remarks.

Keynote Speakers:
Brad Smith, President and Vice Chair, Microsoft Corporation.
Julie Sweet, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Accenture.

Continue reading “Responsible AI in a Global Context” »

Elon Musk tweeted Tesla may get into the lithium mining and refining business directly and at scale because the cost of the metal, a key component in manufacturing batteries, has gotten so high.

“Price of lithium has gone to insane levels,” Musk tweeted. “There is no shortage of the element itself, as lithium is almost everywhere on Earth, but pace of extraction/refinement is slow.”

The Tesla and SpaceX tech boss was responding to a tweet showing the average price of lithium per tonne in the last two decades, which showed a massive increase in prices since 2021. According to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, the cost of the metal has gone up more than 480% in the last year.