Lifeboat Foundation

Eight completely paralysed people have regained function in their limbs following virtual reality training, in an accidental result that has astonished even the scientists involved.

Using a brain-machine interface, scientists showed that people with long-term severe paralysis could retrain the few remaining connections in their damaged spines, letting their brains talk to their extremities once more. This enabled them to feel sensation, move their limbs and improved their bladder and bowel control.

The results came about as a wholly unexpected side effect of training to help people use robotic exoskeletons, which let them walk upright.

Continue reading “Paralysed patients move limbs after virtual reality training” »

This is a comprehensive and critical write-up on some of my policies by some leading researchers and thinkers. It’s from the magazine website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences. Naturally, people in the field of science and engineering are some of the most difficult to please, since they are such critical thinkers (which is precisely why I like them so much):

When a transhumanist runs for president, what does that mean for society?

1™, the world’s first commercial interplanetary mining mission, will fly to and rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid to determine its value as a source of space resources. The destination asteroid will be chosen from a group of top candidates selected by the world renowned team of asteroid experts at Deep Space Industries.

Once the spacecraft arrives at the asteroid, the autonomous spacecraft will map the surface and subsurface, taking visual and infrared imagery and mapping overall water content. With the initial science campaign complete, Prospector-1 will use its water thrusters to gently touch down on the asteroid, measuring the target’s geophysical characteristics.

Prospector-1 is a small spacecraft that strikes the ideal balance between cost and performance. In addition to radiation-tolerant payloads and avionics, all DSI spacecraft notably use the Comet line of water propulsion systems, which expel superheated water vapor to generate thrust. Water will be the first asteroid mining product, so using water as propellant will provide future DSI spacecraft with the ability to refuel in space.

Glad folks realizes and admit to the risks; however, I stand by my argument until the underpinning technology is still tied to dated digital technology; it will be hacked by folks like China who are planning to be on a new Quantum network and platforms. Reason why all countries must never lose sight of replacing their infrastructure and the net with Quantum technology.

A team of researchers from Pittsburgh has won DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge – a competition billed as the ‘world’s first automated network defense tournament.’ The implications for the Internet of Things (IoT) are grave, as the machines on display threaten to ravage the already flaky state of IoT security.

DARPA, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is a wing of the US military that investigates how the latest technological breakthroughs can be put to use on the battlefield. With nation-state cybersecurity now declared a new front in conventional warfare, militaries around the world will be flocking to gather the tools needed to exert force in this new medium.

Continue reading “DARPA competition sees dawn of autonomous IoT hacking” »

Many folks have voiced the concerns over autonomous autos for many legitimate reasons including hacking and weak satellite signals for navigation especially when you review mountain ranges of the east coast.

The world has witnessed enormous advances in autonomous passenger vehicle technologies over the last dozen years.

The performance of microprocessors, memory chips and sensors needed for autonomous driving has greatly increased, while the cost of these components has decreased substantially.

Continue reading “Autonomous car development will speed up following a fatality” »

LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Mayhem ruled the day when seven AIs clashed here last week — a bot named Mayhem that, along with its competitors, proved that machines can now quickly find many types of security vulnerabilities hiding in vast amounts of code.

Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the first-of-its-kind contest sought to explore how artificial intelligence and automation might help find security and design flaws that bad actors use to penetrate computer networks and steal data.

Mayhem, built by the For All Secure team out of Carnegie Mellon University, so outclassed its competition that it won even though it was inoperable for about half of the contest’s 96 270-second rounds. Mayhem pivoted between two autonomous methods of finding bugs and developing ways to exploit them.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Just Changed the Future of Information Security” »

I already voiced my concerns of this technology in the hands of criminals and terrorists. If we can have it so can others. Only when QC and a Quantum net is in place will we be truly protected with bots.

Cybersecurity could soon be another place where bots become invaluable for experts. DARPA recently organized The Cyber Grand Challenge, where computer algorithms showed how easy it is to clean up vulnerabilities in code written by humans. ( DARPA )

The Cyber Grand Challenge took place under DARPA patronage, and it is good to see how preoccupied the U.S. Department of Defense is with cybersecurity.

Continue reading “DARPA Autonomous Bug-Hunting Bots Don’t Need Human Hackers Anymore: Are Bots The Future Of Cybersecurity?” »

I will like to see how this stacks against China’s Quantum net, QC platform, AI, and hackers in the future. Not sold at this point until we truly have a QC infrastructure in place.

At DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge, bots showed off their ability to help a world wallowing in vulnerable code.

LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Mayhem ruled the day when seven AIs clashed here last week — a bot named Mayhem that, along with its competitors, proved that machines can now quickly find many types of security vulnerabilities hiding in vast amounts of code.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Just Changed the Future of Information Security – Defense One” »

An accurate method for spacecraft navigation takes a leap forward today as the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and the University of Leicester publish a paper that reveals a spacecraft’s position in space in the direction of a particular pulsar can be calculated autonomously, using a small X-ray telescope on board the craft, to an accuracy of 2km. The method uses X-rays emitted from pulsars, which can be used to work out the position of a craft in space in 3D to an accuracy of 30 km at the distance of Neptune.

Pulsars are dead stars that emit radiation in the form of X-rays and other electromagnetic waves. For a certain type of pulsar, called ‘millisecond pulsars’, the pulses of radiation occur with the regularity and precision of an atomic clock and could be used much like GPS in space.

The paper, published in Experimental Astronomy, details simulations undertaken using data, such as the pulsar positions and a craft’s distance from the Sun, for a European Space Agency feasibility study of the concept. The simulations took these data and tested the concept of triangulation by pulsars with current technology (an X-ray telescope designed and developed by the University of Leicester) and position, velocity and timing analysis undertaken by NPL. This generated a list of usable pulsars and measurements of how accurately a small telescope can lock onto these pulsars and calculate a location.

Continue reading “Navigating in deep space: The recipe to make Interstellar travel a reality” »