Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk is confident that SpaceX will be able to send people to Mars in 2024, with arrival in 2025. This is in line with his long-term vision of colonizing the Red Planet, as he strongly believes it is the next step in ensuring the survival of human civilization.

After saying that the chances of us not being a computer simulation is just one in billions, Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, went on to say that SpaceX will be sending people to Mars by 2024, with arrival planned for 2025.

When asked about what he thinks the government on Mars will be, he playfully joked: “Well I think I was just declared king of Mars a moment ago.”

Continue reading “SpaceX Is Heading to Mars in 2018 and Sending Humans in 2025” »

It’s not all that easy to call KnuEdge a startup. Created a decade ago by Daniel Goldin, the former head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, KnuEdge is only now coming out of stealth mode. It has already raised $100 million in funding to build a “neural chip” that Goldin says will make data centers more efficient in a hyperscale age.

Goldin, who founded the San Diego, California-based company with the former chief technology officer of NASA, said he believes the company’s brain-like chip will be far more cost and power efficient than current chips based on the computer design popularized by computer architect John von Neumann. In von Neumann machines, memory and processor are separated and linked via a data pathway known as a bus. Over the years, von Neumann machines have gotten faster by sending more and more data at higher speeds across the bus as processor and memory interact. But the speed of a computer is often limited by the capacity of that bus, leading to what some computer scientists to call the “von Neumann bottleneck.” IBM has seen the same problem, and it has a research team working on brain-like data center chips. Both efforts are part of an attempt to deal with the explosion of data driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Goldin’s company is doing something similar to IBM, but only on the surface. Its approach is much different, and it has been secretly funded by unknown angel investors. And Goldin said in an interview with VentureBeat that the company has already generated $20 million in revenue and is actively engaged in hyperscale computing companies and Fortune 500 companies in the aerospace, banking, health care, hospitality, and insurance industries. The mission is a fundamental transformation of the computing world, Goldin said.

Continue reading “Former NASA chief unveils $100 million neural chip maker KnuEdge” »

A Russian developer here has created an open source computer vision platform, in collaboration with Facebook and Google, that acts as a teaching machine and enables them “see”.

VisionLabs, a solutions developer in the field of computer vision, data analysis and robotics, and a Skolkovo IT Cluster resident have developed this as a global open-source computer vision project with the support of Facebook and Google, an official said.

VisionLabs integrated two popular libraries for developers — OpenCV and Torch. The joint project with Facebook and Google was launched last year. “The two IT giants became interested in the in-depth study of neural networks and artificial intelligence and hence extended their support,” the official told IANS.

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Silicon forms the basis of everything from solar cells to the integrated circuits at the heart of our modern electronic gadgets. However the laser, one of the most ubiquitous of all electronic devices today, has long been one component unable to be successfully replicated in this material. Now researchers have found a way to create microscopically-small lasers directly from silicon, unlocking the possibilities of direct integration of photonics on silicon and taking a significant step towards light-based computers.

Whilst there has been a range of microminiature lasers incorporated directly into silicon over the years, including melding germanium-tin lasers with a silicon substrate and using gallium-arsenide (GaAs) to grow laser nanowires, these methods have involved compromise. With the new method, though, an international team of researchers has integrated sub-wavelength cavities, the basic components of their minuscule lasers, directly onto the silicon itself.

To help achieve this, a team of collaborating scientists from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of California, Santa Barbara, Sandia National Laboratories and Harvard University, first had to find a way to refine silicon crystal lattices so that their inherent defects were reduced significantly enough to match the smooth properties found in GaAs substrate lasers. They did this by etching nano-patterns directly onto the silicon to confine the defects and ensure the necessary quantum confinement of electrons within quantum dots grown on this template.

On May 11, 2016, the Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Center invited Yuval Noah Harari, a professor of history at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of the international bestseller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” to deliver a talk on “The New Inequalities” at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Prior to the talk, Harari was interviewed by BPPC director Daniel A. Bell. This is an edited transcript of the interview.

You argue in your book that material progress, for example in the agriculture revolution and industrial capitalism doesn’t necessarily contribute to human happiness. In fact, it may lead to the opposite. Can you elaborate on that?

Until the middle of the 19th century there was a complete lack of correlation between material progress and the well-being of individual humans. For thousands of years until about 1850 you see humans accumulating more and more power by the invention of new technologies and by new systems of organization in the economy and in politics, but you don’t see any real improvement in the well-being of the average person. If you are the emperor of China, then obviously you’re much better off. But if you’re an average Chinese peasant in 1850, it’s very, very hard to say that your life is any better than the life of hunter-gatherers in the Yangtze Valley 20,000 years ago. You work much harder than them, your diet is worse, you suffer far more from infectious diseases, and you suffer far more from social inequality and economic exploitation.

Continue reading “Historian: When Computers and Biology Converge, Organisms Become Algorithms” »

Gene-based circuits are about to get decidedly more sophisticated. MIT scientists have developed a method for integrating both analog and digital computing into those circuits, turning living cells into complex computers. The centerpiece is a threshold sensor whose gene expression flips DNA, converting analog chemical data into binary output — basically, complex data can trigger simple responses that match the language of regular computers.

The practical applications are huge. Along with general-purpose computing, you could have advanced sensors that trigger different kinds of chemical production depending on levels for other chemicals. You could produce insulin when there’s too much glucose, for instance, or deliver different kinds of cancer therapy. And this isn’t just talk. Clinical trials for a simple gene circuit (which will treat gut diseases) are starting within a year, so you could see these organic machines in action before too long.

A new twist to address an old problem.

Micro-drops of water channeled through the chip silicon looks like a promising way to keep chips cool and increase their performance.

Terahertz radiation, or T-rays, can do some really incredible stuff. It can be used to scan for tumors and bombs build ultrafast wireless networks and see through solid objects. As an imaging technology, however, T-ray cameras have always had a resolution limitation. Well, they used to. Researchers at the University of Exter has developed a new terahertz camera that can see at a microscopic level — and they want to use it to find defects in microchips.

This breakthrough kind of changes the game for terahertz imaging. The radiation has always been able to look through solid objects without damaging them — which is why it’s frequently used in the art world to look past the surface layer of various masterpieces — but resolution limitations kept it from being used to diagnose broken computer chips.

Project lead Rayko Stantchev says his team has effectively doubled the technology’s resolution, creating a proof-of-principle prototype that can see a microscopic image printed on a circuit board obscured by a thick silicon wafer. “With our device you could test the quality of microchips that have buried under optically-opaque materials,” Stantchev says. “Allowing you to tell if a hidden chip is broken without having to open it up.”

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Of course it can — why we have Biocomputing efforts today.

Living cells are capable of performing complex computations on the environmental signals they encounter.

These computations can be continuous, or analogue, in nature—the way eyes adjust to gradual changes in the light levels. They can also be digital, involving simple on or off processes, such as a cell’s initiation of its own death.

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