Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: internet – Page 225

X, the private spaceflight company known for reusable rockets and a giant, shiny Starship, will begin offering its own satellite internet service in 2020, according to SpaceNews. In fact, the U.S. Air Force is already testing it in planes.

To build the service, SpaceX will have to launch up to eight Falcon 9 rockets filled with the company’s Starlink satellites, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell told SpaceNews and other reporters this week at the 70th International Astronautical Congress in Washington.

“We’ll continue to upgrade the network until mid to late next year,” SpaceNews’ Jeff Foust quoted Shotwell as saying during a media roundtable on Tuesday (Oct. 22). “We’re hoping for 24 launches by the end of the year.”

Read more | >

Reader, Tamia Boyden asks this question:

In the 90s, how could we access the internet without WiFi?

This post began as an answer to that question at Quora. In the process of answering, I compiled this history of public, residential Internet access. Whether you lived through this fascinating social and technical upheaval or simply want to explore the roots of a booming social phenomenon, I hope you will find the timeline and evolution as interesting as I do.

I have included my answer to Tamia’s question, below. But first, let’s get a quick snapshot of the highlights. This short bullet-list focuses on technical milestones, but the history below, explains the context, social phenomenon and implications.

Continue reading “Public Internet Access: Brief history” | >

Art by AI update: not GAN but CAN (Creative Adversarial Networks)

Scientist Ahmed Elgammal went from doing artificial intelligence research to attending his first art exhibit in Chelsea. How? With the help of his creative partner AICAN, an nearly autonomous AI artist. Together they made stunning art that is molding the field of AI art and the art scene in general. We stopped by the Chelsea gallery to talk to Elgammal about how AICAN works, and of course, see the art.

► Subscribe for more tech & culture videos: http://on.mash.to/subscribe ◄

Continue reading “We Attended an AI’s First Art Exhibit in NYC — Future Blink” | >

The research scientists’ warnings come amid rising concern about the power of the big tech companies. Most of the focus has been on the current generation of technology — search, online advertising, social media and e-commerce. But the scientists are worried about a barrier to exploring the technological future, when that requires staggering amounts of computing.

Each big step of progress in computing — from mainframe to personal computer to internet to smartphone — has opened opportunities for more people to invent on the digital frontier.

But there is growing concern that trend is being reversed at tech’s new leading edge, artificial intelligence.

Computer scientists say A.I. research is becoming increasingly expensive, requiring complex calculations done by giant data centers, leaving fewer people with easy access to the computing firepower necessary to develop the technology behind futuristic products like self-driving cars or digital assistants that can see, talk and reason.

Continue reading “At Tech’s Leading Edge, Worry About a Concentration of Power” | >

The industry science behind EMF radiation is more corrupt than that of climate science, and has been so since the beginning. With the imminent rollout of 5G, no scientific studies have been done on exposure to humans at any distance. ⁃ TN Editor.

Neurosurgeon and researcher Dr. Leif Salford has conducted many studies on radio frequency radiation and its effects on the brain. Dr. Salford called the potential implications of some of his research “terrifying.” Some of the most concerning conclusions result from the fact that the weakest exposure levels to wireless radiation caused the greatest effect in causing the blood brain barrier to leak.

Since he began his line of research in 1988, Dr. Leif Salford and his colleagues at Lund University Hospital in Sweden has exposed over 1,600 experimental animals to low-level radiation. Their results were consistent and worrisome: radiation, including that from cell phones, caused the blood-brain barrier–the brain’s first line of defense against infections and toxic chemicals–to leak.

Read more | >

Scientists have managed to send a record-breaking amount of data in quantum form, using a strange unit of quantum information called a qutrit.

The news: Quantum tech promises to allow data to be sent securely over long distances. Scientists have already shown it’s possible to transmit information both on land and via satellites using quantum bits, or qubits. Now physicists at the University of Science and Technology of China and the University of Vienna in Austria have found a way to ship even more data using something called quantum trits, or qutrits.

Qutrits? Oh, come on, you’ve just made that up: Nope, they’re real. Conventional bits used to encode everything from financial records to YouTube videos are streams of electrical or photonic pulses than can represent either a 1 or a 0. Qubits, which are typically electrons or photons, can carry more information because they can be polarized in two directions at once, so they can represent both a 1 and a 0 at the same time. Qutrits, which can be polarized in three different dimensions simultaneously, can carry even more information. In theory, this can then be transmitted using quantum teleportation.

Read more | >

Three years ago, an outfit called Electric GT (EGT), led by Eric Hutchison, hit the green tech radar by converting a 1978 Ferrari 308 GTS to an electric car. Out went the mid-mounted 2.9-liter V8 making 280 horsepower and 181 pound-feet of torque, in went 48 lithium-ion batteries powering three AC51 HPEVS electric motors that cumulatively produced 465 hp and 330 lb-ft. The company’s relocated from San Diego to Chatsworth, California, and is back on the scopes at Green Car Reports with what it calls an Electric Crate Motor. The innovation repackages the ICE crate motor methodology into a system making EV conversions easier for the weekend enthusiast. EGT promises a plug-and-play system with “high performance and near zero maintenance,” having packaged its one- and two-motor systems into a “motor block” and peripherals that look just like an internal combustion engine.

The block includes everything necessary for the swap to electric except the batteries and the mounting bracket, meaning” motor(s), controller(s), charger(s), sensors, relays and computer systems.” EGT has already designed a number of mounting brackets, and can design others to custom specs. According to the web site, the package is “pre-engineered, pre-built, and pre-tested,” so installation takes five steps: Bolt in the block, install the wiring harness and cooling system, connect the AC and DC power leads with the OEM-level touch-safe connectors, and route the internal cooling pump to a heat exchanger. Voila, silent running. Every e-crate motor comes with an installation manual, EGT provides tech support, and auxiliaries like electric AC compressors and heaters can be optioned.

Read more | >

Swedish and Chinese scientists have developed organic solar cells optimised to convert ambient indoor light to electricity. The power they produce is low, but is probably enough to feed the millions of products that the internet of things will bring online.

As the internet of things expands, it is expected that we will need to have millions of products online, both in public spaces and in homes. Many of these will be the multitude of sensors to detect and measure moisture, particle concentrations, temperature and other parameters. For this reason, the demand for small and cheap sources of renewable energy is increasing rapidly, in order to reduce the need for frequent and expensive battery replacements.

This is where organic solar cells come in. Not only are they flexible, cheap to manufacture and suitable for manufacture as large surfaces in a printing press, they have one further advantage: the light-absorbing layer consists of a mixture of donor and acceptor materials, which gives considerable flexibility in tuning the solar cells such that they are optimised for different spectra – for light of different wavelengths.

Read more | >

Linksys, a division within Belkin International and Foxconn Interconnect Technology, has announced that it is offering a new motion detection service with its mesh Wi-Fi routers. As part of its announcement, the company said that the service will be subscription-based and will only be available (for now) with its Linksys Velop Tri-Band AC2200 routers. The new service is called Linksys Aware.

Mesh routers are designed to be placed in multiple locations in a home or business to ensure that there are no dead spots. Since the signals create a signal mesh, software in the routers detect how the signals are bounced around, creating imprints of individual rooms and what the signals look like. If signals are interrupted, it means that something is physically blocking them, such as a person. If such a blockage is detected, the routers can send a message to an app, also created by Linksys, alerting homeowners to a possible intruder.

Users who want the new service need only install the software on their current routers, along with the app—and then sign up to pay either $2.99 each month or $24.99 for a full year. The company is also offering a 90-day free trial of the service.

Read more | >