Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 10327

A space launch every 3 hours may soon be possible using rockets carried on a fully autonomous unmanned airplane, a new startup company suggests.

Alabama-based startup Aevum aims to per mission, using an air-launch system called Ravn.

“Ravn is designed to launch every 180 minutes,” Jay Skylus, Aevum’s CEO and chief launch architect, told Space.com. “Other launch vehicles fly only a handful of times a year with an average of 18 months of lead time.” [Rocket Launches: The Latest Liftoffs, Photos & Videos].

Read more

What does it mean to be human in world of increasingly powerful technology? This is a question video games have grappled with, most recently in the “Deus Ex” franchise and the upcoming E3 show-stealing “Cyberpunk 2077.”

Daedalic’s “State of Mind” approaches the topic in a different, more philosophical way. Guns and body mods aren’t the order of the day. Rather, “State of Mind” is a narrative adventure that considers how far the human race will go to trade dystopia for utopia.

Creative lead Martin Ganteföhr is an avid follower of transhumanist theory, and how humanity will evolve over the coming decades as scientists pursue the singularity. Transhumanism explores the intersection of people and technology, with the ultimate goal giving all people access to technology that leads to an egalitarian utopia.

Read more

Antibiotics have saved countless lives for the better part of a century, but these medical marvels may be approaching the end of their usefulness. Thanks to overuse, bacteria are rapidly evolving resistance to our best drugs, prompting scientists to try to develop new ones. Now, a team at Purdue University has found that a compound called F6 is effective at killing bacteria that have already evolved resistance to existing antibiotics. In tests, the new drug also seems less susceptible to bacterial resistance down the track.

The discovery and use of antibiotics was one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 20th century, as previously-dangerous procedures quickly became safe and infections relatively easy to treat. But after decades of overuse and overprescription, bacteria are fighting back, with more and more antibiotics becoming ineffective – including some of our last lines of defense. If left unaddressed, the problem is predicted to worsen until these so-called superbugs are killing up to 10 million people a year by 2050.

Read more

IBM Research AI team demonstrated deep neural network (DNN) training with large arrays of analog memory devices at the same accuracy as a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU)-based system. This is a major step on the path to the kind of hardware accelerators necessary for the next AI breakthroughs. Why? Because delivering the Future of AI will require vastly expanding the scale of AI calculations.

Above – Crossbar arrays of non-volatile memories can accelerate the training of fully connected neural networks by performing computation at the location of the data.

This new approach allows deep neural networks to run hundreds of times faster than with GPUs, using hundreds of times less energy.

Read more

One night, as I was putting my daughter to bed and waiting for her to fall asleep, I tried to think of some new markets for space utilization.

We often hear about attempts to find industrial uses for microgravity for growing crystals, for purification of electronic materials (which is an actual thing with ACME Advanced Materials: http://www.a2-m.com/), maybe growth of certain metal foams, etc. However, in space, you’re in both a hard vacuum and not physically resting on anything, so you can spin up something, and it will simply keep on spinning (stably, if you spin it around the correct axis) nearly indefinitely without any additional energy input and no wear on bearings or anything. So in fact, you can get basically any gravity level you want, including HYPERgravity, nearly for free.

What are the applications of this?

Read more