Lifeboat Foundation

The wealth gap worries Forbes, not your usual wide-eyed socialist.

How do we expect to feed that many people while we exhaust the resources that remain?

Human activities are behind the extinction crisis. Commercial agriculture, timber extraction, and infrastructure development are causing habitat loss and our reliance on fossil fuels is a major contributor to climate change.

Continue reading “Unless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity By 2050” »

In August Hacked covered the rumor, then confirmed by NASA, that a paper by the NASA Eagleworks team, titled “Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio Frequency Cavity in Vacuum,” to be published in December’s issue of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)’s Journal of Propulsion and Power, a prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal, will reveal promising experimental results on the controversial, “impossible” EmDrive propulsion system. Now, a NASA Eagleworks paper that could be the December paper, or a draft, has been leaked.

The EmDrive results are often dismissed because they appear to violate the fundamental conservation laws of physics, but possible models for the anomalous thrust effect have been proposed that, while belonging to highly imaginative areas of theoretical physics, could explain the controversial results without violating fundamental conservation laws.

The leaked paper was first shared in the NasaSpaceFlight forum, which is often the primary source of updates for all things EmDrive, and a Reddit thread that was then removed at the request of the Eagleworks authors, then posted with a commentary by tech news site Next Big Future. Of course, the paper could be removed again, and therefore those who want to read it before December might want to download it now.

Continue reading “Leaked NASA Eagleworks Paper Confirms Promising EmDrive Results” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KPFnmGRZ8GQ

Optalysys’s technology performs a mathematical function called the Fourier transform by encoding data, say a genome sequence, into a laser beam. The data can be manipulated by making light waves in the beam interfere with one another, performing the calculation by exploiting the physics of light, and generating a pattern that encodes the result. The pattern is read by a camera sensor and fed back into a conventional computer’s electronic circuits. The optical approach is faster because it achieves in a single step what would take many operations of an electronic computer.

The technology was enabled by the consumer electronics industry driving down the cost of components called spatial light modulators, which are used to control light inside projectors. The company plans to release its first product next year, aimed at high-performance computers used for processing genomic data. It will take the form of a PCI express card, a standard component used to upgrade PCs or servers usually used for graphics processors. Optalysys is also working on a Pentagon research project investigating technologies that might shrink supercomputers to desktop size, and a European project on improving weather simulations.

Continue reading “Optical laser computing Could Power Up Genomics and AI and Optalysys targets one petaflop next year” »

Two weeks ago a journalist from The New Yorker followed me on a day of transhumanism campaigning in NYC. Here’s the story, out in print today too with over a million copies. If you like, you can vote for me in New York state (and at least 10 other states) by writing me in: Zoltan Istvan Gyurko. Email me with questions.

Zoltan Istvan is running on a platform of curing death and uploading consciousness to the cloud. He’s on track to appear on the ballot in zero states.

Aubrey de Grey in the British paper “The Express”. Sadly not given the his correct Dr. title and also misquoted once again as saying people will live forever.

HUMANS could potentially live forever, according to a a leading researcher on the subject.

Marines will control a head-up display with a gun-mounted mouse.

With the phone, predictions now feel relatively easy. But we’re setting off on our next five years, and we’re looking beyond the phone. What happens next? And what does it mean for how we live in the future? For our anniversary, we asked 10 of the smartest, most interesting, most influential people we know to describe our lives in 2021 — and the many ways technology, culture, science, and transportation will change. We’ll be running these interviews all through November, and they paint an ambitious, dynamic vision of the future.

We’ll discuss how in the near future, many Americans may never drive again. We’ll talk to groundbreaking scientists about CRISPR, a revolutionary method of editing genes that’s already led to incredible breakthroughs. We’ll see how for many employees, technology may make geography irrelevant, and how social media will usher in a new age of social activism. More women will finally find their rightful place in boardrooms, and by 2021, artificial and human intelligence will exist in something called “symbiotic autonomy.”

It’s tempting to look backwards on an anniversary. But The Verge is about looking ahead, and we would much rather spend our fifth birthday imagining the incredible (and occasionally terrifying) promise of the future. We’ve collected some excellent guides to help us along the way — we hope you join us.

In groundbreaking work on morality-proofing AI, researchers at MIT are designing neural networks that will provide explanations for why they reached a conclusion.

Credits: Futurism