Lifeboat Foundation

What does it mean to be alive? This question has been haunting us since the beginning of time. Thousands if not millions of novelists, philosophers, scientists have tried to answer.

However, for practical purposes, you don’t really need to know: you just live. You just learn to move in this world according to a certain set of rules, and as long as they work, you keep going.

All things considered this is not much different to the approach to brain-like computers that a Newark, California, based startup named Koniku is taking. Most of the experiments in this field are focused on trying to understand and replicate the infinite complexity of the brain using artificial methods, or on creating interfaces that connect the physical world with machines.

Continue reading “Neuron-Based Chips Will Soon Become Commonplace, This Startup Founder Says” »

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In Hyper Reality’s dystopian future city, every interaction has a digital overlay, filling your vision with information like a character in a computer game.

Continue reading “Keiichi Matsuda’s Hyper-Reality merges digital media with reality” »

Yesterday, we saw the news from D-Wave in development & release of a new scalable QC. Now, Dartmouth has been able to develop a method to design faster pulses, offering a new way to accurately control quantum systems.

Dartmouth College researchers have discovered a method to design faster pulses, offering a new way to accurately control quantum systems.

The findings appear in the journal Physical Review A.

Quantum physics defines the rules that govern the realm of the ultra-small — the atomic and sub-atomic world — which explains the behavior of matter and its interactions. Scientists have been trying to exploit the seemingly strange properties of this quantum world to build practical devices, such as ultra-fast computers or ultra-precise quantum sensors. Building a practical device, however, requires accurately controlling your device to make it do what you want. This turns out to be challenging since quantum properties are very fragile.

Light waves might be able to drive future transistors. The electromagnetic waves of light oscillate approximately one million times in a billionth of a second, hence with petahertz frequencies. In principle also future electronics could reach this speed and become 100.000 times faster than current digital electronics. This requires a better understanding of the sub-atomic electron motion induced by the ultrafast electric field of light. Now a team of the Laboratory for Attosecond Physics (LAP) at the Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) and theorists from the University of Tsukuba combined novel experimental and theoretical techniques which provide direct access to this motion for the first time.

Electron movements form the basis of electronics as they facilitate the storage, processing and transfer of information. State-of-the-art electronic circuits have reached their maximum clock rates at some billion switching cycles per second as they are limited by the heat accumulating in the process of switching power on and off.

The electric field of light changes its direction a trillion times per second and is able to move electrons in solids at this speed. This means that light waves can form the basis for future electronic switching if the induced electron motion and its influence on heat accumulation is precisely understood. Physicists from the Laboratory for Attosecond Physics at the MPQ and the LMU already found out that it is possible to manipulate the electronic properties of matter at optical frequencies.

Last weekend, an invite-only group of about 150 experts convened privately at Harvard. Behind closed doors, they discussed the prospect of designing and building an entire human genome from scratch, using only a computer, a DNA synthesizer and raw materials.

The artificial genome would then be inserted into a living human cell to replace its natural DNA. The hope is that the cell “reboots,” changing its biological processes to operate based on instructions provided by the artificial DNA.

In other words, we may soon be looking at the first “artificial human cell.”

Continue reading “Is the World Ready for Synthetic Life? Scientists Plan to Create Whole Genomes” »

PlaNet, made by a team led by Google computer vision specialist Tobias Weyand, can determine the location of photos just by studying its pixels.

You can usually tell where a picture was taken by recognizing certain location cues within the photo. Major landmarks like the Great Wall of China or the Tower of London are immediately recognizable and fairly easy to pinpoint, but how about when the photo lacks any familiar location cues, like a photo of food, of pets, or one taken indoors?

People do fairly well on this task by relying on all sorts of knowledge about the world. You could figure out where a photo was taken by looking at any words found on the photo, or by looking at the architectural styles or vegetation.

Continue reading “Google’s Superhuman Computer Can Tell Where Nearly Any Photo Was Taken” »

Advances in microchips—particularly the graphics-processing units pioneered by Nvidia—are fueling growth in machine learning, a programming approach in which computers teach themselves without explicit instructions.

10nm tech is coming in 2017.

As robots become more pervasive in society, humans will want them to do chores like cleaning the house or cooking, researchers said.

However, to get a robot started on a task, people who are not computer programmers will have to give it instructions, they said.

“We want everyone to be able to programme, but that is probably not going to happen,” said Matthew Taylor from Washington State University (WSU).

Continue reading “Technique to Teach Robots New Tricks Developed: Study” »