Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX’s Starship program has won $53 million from NASA to perform a full-scale test of orbital propellant transfer, taking the company and space agency’s relationship on the crucial technology to the next level.

NASA revealed the results of its fifth round of “Tipping Point” solicitations on October 14th, announcing awards of more than $370 million total to 14 separate companies. This year’s investments focused on three main categories: “cryogenic fluid management, lunar surface [operations], and closed-loop [i.e. autonomous] descent and landing capability demonstrations.”

In a fairly predictable outcome, the bulk (~$176 million) went to Lockheed Martin and the United Launch Alliance (ULA), while the other half (~$189 million) was split among the twelve remaining companies. In an upset, however, SpaceX was awarded a substantial contract for a crucial aspect of Starship development.

Robots will help farmers analyze crops to determine how to get better yields. Re-sharing from BBC.

The project will analyse every leaf on every crop, helping farmers tend the fields.

Except someone—or, rather, something— can hear: your car. Hearing your angry words, aggressive tone, and raised voice, and seeing your furrowed brow, the onboard computer goes into “soothe” mode, as it’s been programmed to do when it detects that you’re angry. It plays relaxing music at just the right volume, releases a puff of light lavender-scented essential oil, and maybe even says some meditative quotes to calm you down.

What do you think—creepy? Helpful? Awesome? Weird? Would you actually calm down, or get even more angry that a car is telling you what to do?

Continue reading “Cars Will Soon Be Able to Sense and React to Your Emotions” »

Doug Robinson

‘Machines set loose to slaughter’: Dangerous rise of military AI…

Continue reading “‘Machines set loose to slaughter’: the dangerous rise of military AI” »

Nvidia is is going to be powering the world’s fastest AI supercomputer, a new system dubbed “Leonardo” that’s being built by the Italian multi-university consortium CINECA, a global supercomputing leader. The Leonardo system will offer as much as 10 exaflops of FP16 AI performance capabilities, and be made up of more than 14,000 Nvidia Ampere-based GPUS once completed.

Leonardo will be one of four new supercomputers supported by a cross-European effort to advance high-performance computing capabilities in the region, which will eventually offer advanced AI capabilities for processing applications across both science and industry. Nvidia will also be supplying its Mellanox HDR InfiniBand networks to the project in order to enable performance across the clusters with low-latency broadband connections.

The other computers in the cluster include MeluXina in Luxembourg and Vega in Slovenia, as well as a new supercooling unit coming online in the Czech Republic. The pan-European consortium also plans four more Supercomputers for Bulgaria, Finland, Portugal and Spain; though, those will follow later and specifics around their performance and locations aren’t yet available.

Continue reading “Nvidia will power world’s fastest AI supercomputer, to be located in Europe” »

Is Tesla about to revolutionize the way we travel once more? Will it keep its promises? Or will regulators prove a massive oil slick to progress? A giant network of autonomous cars, that will drive at a very low cost and much safer than any human ever could. Everything we know about Tesla RoboTaxi Service.

0:00 Robotaxi information
3:09 preview of tesla ride sharing app functionality
4:49 Q2 2020 Earning Call — elon talks about driving the FSD tech himself
5:51 Elon Musk talks about Level 5 Autonomy and when Elon Musk hopes will reach full Level 5 Autonomy.

Continue reading “Elon Musk Robotaxi Coming: Will Make Uber Obsolete |elonTV” »

AI is revolutionizing the way we build video games.

Chemical space contains every possible chemical compound. It includes every drug and material we know and every one we’ll find in the future. It’s practically infinite and can be frustratingly complex. That’s why some chemists are turning to artificial intelligence: AI can explore chemical space faster than humans, and it might be able to find molecules that would elude even expert scientists. But as researchers work to build and refine these AI tools, many questions still remain about how AI can best help search chemical space and when AI will be able to assist the wider chemistry community.

Outer space isn’t the only frontier curious humans are investigating. Chemical space is the conceptual territory inhabited by all possible compounds. It’s where scientists have found every known medicine and material, and it’s where we’ll find the next treatment for cancer and the next light-absorbing substance for solar cells.

But searching chemical space is far from trivial. For one thing, it might as well be infinite. An upper estimate says it contains 10¹⁸⁰ compounds, more than twice the magnitude of the number of atoms in the universe. To put that figure in context, the CAS database—one of the world’s largest—currently contains about 10⁸ known organic and inorganic substances, and scientists have synthesized only a fraction of those in the lab. (CAS is a division of the American Chemical Society, which publishes C&EN.) So we’ve barely seen past our own front doorstep into chemical space.

Continue reading “Exploring chemical space: Can AI take us where no human has gone before?” »

Robots for artists. 😃

What if you could instruct a swarm of robots to paint a picture? The concept may sound far-fetched, but a recent study in open-access journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI has shown that it is possible. The robots in question move about a canvas leaving color trails in their wake, and in a first for robot-created art, an artist can select areas of the canvas to be painted a certain color and the robot team will oblige in real time. The technique illustrates the potential of robotics in creating art, and could be an interesting tool for artists.

Creating art can be labor-intensive and an epic struggle. Just ask Michelangelo about the Sistine Chapel ceiling. For a world increasingly dominated by technology and automation, creating physical art has remained a largely manual pursuit, with paint brushes and chisels still in common use. There’s nothing wrong with this, but what if robotics could lend a helping hand or even expand our creative repertoire?

Continue reading “Robot swarms follow instructions to create art” »