Lifeboat Foundation

Last year, we reported that Microsoft and Facebook were teaming up to build a massive undersea cable that would cross the Atlantic, connecting Virginia Beach to the northern city of Bilbao in Spain. Last week, Microsoft announced that the cable, called Marea, is complete.

Marea, which means “tide” in Spanish, lies over 17,000 feet below the Atlantic Ocean’s surface and is around 4,000 miles long. It weighs 10.25 million pounds. The data rates (which let’s face it, that’s what we’re all really interested in) are equally staggering: Marea can transmit at a rate of 160 terabits/second. And it was finished in less than two years.

What’s really interesting about Marea, though, is that it has an open design. This means that Microsoft and Facebook are trying to make the cable as future proof as possible. It can evolve as technology changes and demands increase for more data and higher speeds. Its flexibility means that upgrading the cable and its equipment to be compatible with newer technology will be easier.

The nation’s space industry has been active for decades, yet a government space agency is only now taking form.

A robot in China has successfully performed dental surgery on a volunteer. The recent procedure records the first successful autonomous implant surgery, and could change the way dental surgery is performed in China.

Brave Volunteer, Successful Surgery

Would you willingly get dental surgery from a robot? One woman did and because of her bravery, experts saw how the robot was able to perform dental surgery successfully and efficiently — not to mention she got two of her teeth replaced with dental implants.

Continue reading “LOOK: Robot In China Successfully Performs Dental Surgery On Living Person” »

Daimler, Mercedes-Benz’s parent company, announced last week a $1 billion investment in electric car and battery production in the US.

As with any new EV investment from a legacy automaker, the media painted it as an “attack on Tesla”, but Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and largest shareholder, doesn’t seem too worried about it.

But it’s not coming to the US — yet.

Russian IT security firm InfoWatch designed the phone for the corporate market, and claims users will control all information that passes through it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ie1T6bxY7TE

Muscles lead to robots — which could lead to humanity’s new best friend.

Looking back at vintage conceptions of the future can be interesting. Most depictions of the 2000s that were rendered in the 1800s or early 1900s come off as whimsical, because they’re so off-target. Illustrators in the past were often focused on transportation, military tactics, and domestic life, and they predicted everything from whale buses to Fallout -esque fashion. Some illustrated predictions, however, are eerily accurate.

In 1963, science fiction author Hugo Gernsback posed for Life Magazine wearing a fake mock-up of a tool featured in one of his stories. He called the contraption “TV glasses”. Considering them now, they look a lot like an oculus rift. Hugo told Life that users would one day watch television on screens so close to their eyes that they felt immersed in the action, effectively predicting the media’s recent preoccupation with virtual reality.

No one’s sure if Hugo also predicted immersive “action” of the pornographic kind, but that’s what technology’s up to now.

Continue reading “8 Science Fiction Illustrations That Now Feel Crazy Prescient” »

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