Toggle light / dark theme

The 24th Annual International Mars Society Convention is a 4-day event that brings together leading scientists, engineers, aerospace industry representatives, government policymakers and journalists to talk about the latest scientific discoveries, technological advances and political-economic developments that could help pave the way for a human mission to the planet Mars.

I think we should approach from two angles: 1. encourage and fund through government to have everyone who can to put solar on their home/building/whatever. 2. Also have the massive sites dedicated to solar and wind harvesting. Seems we could be totally solar by mid 2030s.


Rooftop solar panels are up to 79% cheaper than they were in 2010. These plummeting costs have made rooftop solar photovoltaics even more attractive to households and businesses who want to reduce their reliance on electricity grids while reducing their carbon footprints.

But are there enough rooftop surfaces for this technology to generate affordable, low-carbon energy for everyone who needs it? After all, it’s not just people who own their own houses and want to cut their bills who are in need of solutions like this. Around 800 million people globally go without proper access to electricity.

Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) has inked a partnership with Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics to identify uses cases involving legged robots for security, defence, and humanitarian applications. They will look to test and develop mobile robotic systems, as well as the associated technology enablers, that can be deployed in challenging urban terrain and harsh environments.

The collaboration also would see robots from Ghost Robotics paired with DSTA’s robotics command, control, and communications (C3) system, the two partners said in a joint statement released Thursday.

The Singapore government agency said its C3 capabilities were the “nerve centre” of military platforms and command centres, tapping data analytics, artificial intelligence, and computer vision technologies to facilitate “tighter coordination” and effectiveness during military and other contingency operations.

German air taxi manufacturer Volocopter launched a self-developed heavy-duty drone in public for the first time on Tuesday at the ITS World Congress in Hamburg.

In cooperation with German logistics provider DB Schenker, the company demonstrated the integration of the VoloDrone into logistics supply chains.

The test flight, which lasted about three minutes, took place around the harbor area of the city in northern Germany. The ITS congress is an international digital transport event.

In 2,019 a survey from the Center for Digital Government (CDG), the National Association of Chief Information Officers and IBM found that just 13 percent of state governments reported using artificial intelligence in some non-core part of their operations. Three years later, the same survey yielded very different results.

At the NASCIO annual confference in Seattle this week, Joe Morris with CDG presented some of the study’s 2021 findings, and it was clear that the COVID-19 pandemic changed how state and local government are thinking about AI. This year, 60 percent of respondents reported AI is currently in use in their enterprise; 6.7 percent said the tech is widely used across the state, up from just 1 percent in 2019.

Full Story:


Ray Kurzweil — Singularitarian Immortalist, Director of Engineering at Google, famous inventor, author of How to Create a Mind http://GF2045.com/speakers/.

A world-class prolific inventor and leading futurist author, “the restless genius” (Wall Street Journal) points to 2045 for the technological singularity when A.I. will surpass human intelligence in his New York Times best seller The Singularity is Near, Amazon’s #1 book in science and philosophy.

In this video Ray Kurzweil discusses his predictions about radical life extension, singularity, life expansion and the imminence of physical immortality. He invites participants to the second international Global Future 2045 congress (June 2013) http://www.GF2045.com.

“If we have radical life extension only, we would get profoundly bored, we’d have profound existential ennui, running out of things to do, and new ideas, but that’s not what’s going to happen. In addition to radical life extension, we’re going to have radical life expansion, we’re going to have millions of virtual environments to explore, we’re going to literally expand our brains.”

Lebanon’s entire electric grid collapsed on Saturday when the country’s two main power stations ran out of fuel.

For months, the country had been providing citizens with a few hours of electricity a day, according to The Washington Post. Then yesterday, Lebanon’s state-owned power stations, Deir Ammar and Zahrani, ran out of diesel fuel leaving the entire country with no electricity. The outage is expected to last days.

To solve the situation, the Lebanese government is attempting to get emergency fuel from the army and other sources until the country receives and distributes a shipment of oil from Iraq.

This week, The European Parliament, the body responsible for adopting European Union (EU) legislation, passed a non-binding resolution calling for a ban on law enforcement use of facial recognition technology in public places. The resolution, which also proposes a moratorium on the deployment of predictive policing software, would restrict the use of remote biometric identification unless it’s to fight “serious” crime, such as kidnapping and terrorism.

The approach stands in contrast to that of U.S. agencies, which continue to embrace facial recognition even in light of studies showing the potential for ethnic, racial, and gender bias. A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that 10 branches including the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, and Homeland Security plan to expand their use of facial recognition between 2020 and 2023 as they implement as many as 17 different facial recognition systems.

Commercial face-analyzing systems have been critiqued by scholars and activists alike throughout the past decade, if not longer. The technology and techniques — everything from sepia-tinged film to low-contrast digital cameras — often favor lighter skin, encoding racial bias in algorithms. Indeed, independent benchmarks of vendors’ systems by the Gender Shades project and others have revealed that facial recognition technologies are susceptible to a range of prejudices exacerbated by misuse in the field. For example, a report from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology details how police feed facial recognition software flawed data, including composite sketches and pictures of celebrities who share physical features with suspects.