Lifeboat Foundation

NASA researchers reveal how today’s airlines can save over $250 billion by incorporating their green related technologies.

Green-related technologies developed by NASA could be the key to airlines saving over $250 billion dollars. “If these technologies start finding their way into the airline fleet, our computer models show the economic impact could amount to $255 billion in operational savings between 2025 and 2050,” said Jaiwon Shin, NASA’s associate administrator for aeronautics research, in a recent press release.

For the past six years, NASA’s aeronautics researchers have been working on the Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA) project, which sees airlines cutting fuel use in half, pollution by a quarter, and putting noise down to just an eighth of today’s current levels.

Continue reading “New Era of Flight: ‘Green’ NASA Research Could Potentially Save Airlines Billions” »

Whether you believe the buzz about artificial intelligence is merely hype or that the technology represents the future, something undeniable is happening. Researchers are more easily solving decades-long problems like teaching computers to recognize images and understanding speech at a rapid space, and companies like Google goog and Facebook fb are pouring millions of dollars into their own related projects.

What could possibly go wrong?

For one thing, advances in artificial intelligence could eventually lead to unforeseen consequences. University of California at Berkeley professor Stuart Russell is concerned that powerful computers powered by artificial intelligence, or AI, could unintentionally create problems that humans cannot predict.

Continue reading “Why Artificial Intelligence Needs Some Sort of Moral Code” »

DeepMind’s use of neural networks to synthesize speech could finally make computers sound more human.

Google has announced WaveNet, a speech synthesis program that uses AI and deep learning techniques to generate speech samples better than current technologies. By analyzing samples 16,000 a second, it can generate human-like speech and even its own music compositions.

If you’ve ever been lost in the maze of Youtube videos you may have stumbled on clips of computers reading news articles. You’d recognize that staccato, robotic nature of the voice. We’ve come a long way from “Danger! Will Robinson!,” but it there is yet to be a computer that can seamlessly mimic a human voice.

Now, there’s a new contender, brought to you by the brilliant minds behind DeepMind. Google has announced a new voice synthesis program in WaveNet, powered by deep neural AI.

Continue reading “At Last, Google’s DeepMind AI Can Make Machines Sound Like Humans” »

Google’s DeepMind unit, which is working to develop super-intelligent computers, has created a system for machine-generated speech that it says outperforms existing technology by 50 percent.

U.K.-based DeepMind, which Google acquired for about 400 million pounds ($533 million) in 2014, developed an artificial intelligence called WaveNet that can mimic human speech by learning how to form the individual sound waves a human voice creates, it said in a blog post Friday. In blind tests for U.S. English and Mandarin Chinese, human listeners found WaveNet-generated speech sounded more natural than that created with any of Google’s existing text-to-speech programs, which are based on different technologies. WaveNet still underperformed recordings of actual human speech.

Elon Musk blew our minds when he suggested that it’s highly likely we’re all living in a computer simulation. Seriously? Why would he think this, and how could we tell if it’s true?

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have shown for the first time that transistors fashioned out of carbon nanotubes are actually twice as efficient as regular silicon varieties. This comes after decades of research regarding how carbon nanotubes can be used to design the next generation of computers. Speaking about the breakthrough, recently published in the Science Advances journal, Michael Arnold, a member of the team, said:

Making carbon nanotube transistors that are better than silicon transistors is a big milestone. This achievement has been a dream of nanotechnology for the last 20 years.

Continue reading “Carbon Nanotube Transistors Twice As Efficient As Silicon, Study Shows” »

When this hits in 2017, we’re going to see more momentum around accelerating the adoption of a QC in mainstream devices across all areas of business and consumers. China has definitely accelerated the efforts around migrating the net to a Quantum secured net.

Nice.

“We’ve managed to put quantum-based technology that has been used in high profile science experiments into a package that might allow it to be used commercially.”

Random number generators are crucial to the encryption that protects our privacy and security when engaging in digital transactions such as buying products online or withdrawing cash from an ATM. For the first time, engineers have developed a fast random number generator based on a quantum mechanical process that could deliver the world’s most secure encryption keys in a package tiny enough to use in a mobile device.

Continue reading “New Quantum Chip Could Bring Highest Level of Encryption to Any Mobile Device” »