Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk is today set to merge Tesla Motors and SolarCity, Reuters is reporting, kicking off part two of his master plan to transform our cities and suburbs into environmentally friendly automated wonderlands.

In July Musk wrote of his plan to merge the two companies in a blog post entitled Master Plan, Part Deux, saying it was essential to “create a smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, empowering the individual as their own utility, and then scale that throughout the world.

“We can’t do this well if Tesla and SolarCity are different companies, which is why we need to combine and break down the barriers inherent to being separate companies. Now that Tesla is ready to scale Powerwall and SolarCity is ready to provide highly differentiated solar, the time has come to bring them together.”

Continue reading “Elon Musk is kicking off an automated low-carbon future with the merger of Tesla and SolarCity” »

I’m with Noam on the whole Robot taking over the world mentality.

The renowned MIT professor, having heard for 60 years about the threat of supercomputers, says to come back to him when robots are as creative as a 4-year-old. — 2016/07/31.

Continue reading “Noam Chomsky Is Sick of Hearing About the Robot Takeover (Video)” »

Zombies and texting.

A new study presented by researchers from the Tech³Lab at HEC Montreal, along with the University of Montreal’s Department of Psychology and the Centre hospitalier Notre-Dame has found that “Texting while walking is a widespread and dangerous behaviour.”

In a research presentation called “Mobile Multitasking Distraction: A Pilot Study with Intracranial Electroencephalography”, researchers attempted to determine which neural circuitry is implicated in the act of texting while walking, with the aim of helping to develop future methods of mitigating “this dangerous habit” and perhaps to “assist the development of mobile applications aiming directly at the neural circuitry”.

Continue reading “Texting pedestrians exhibit ‘zombie-like’ behaviour, say Montreal researchers” »

The psychological challenges of cancer and survival.

A man who has survived cancer twice says the “worst part” of his journey was the fear of the disease returning after his second all-clear.

Apple’s new app to help you do deep breathing to improve your mind, intelligence, and over all health.

APPLE is set to launch a new app that aims to make you healthier through just a few minutes a day of deep breathing.

It is based on the growing field of research proving the biological benefits, including genetic changes, of mind-body medicine.

Continue reading “Now there’s an app to help you breathe” »

VR again helping people and their fears.

Actual crowds may be replaced by what we might call distributed crowds, with virtual and augmented reality’s help.

Abstract: Scientists have looked for different ways to force hydrogen into a metallic state for decades. A metallic state of hydrogen is a holy grail for materials science because it could be used for superconductors, materials that have no resistance to the flow of electrons, which increases electricity transfer efficiency many times over. For the first time researchers, led by Carnegie’s Viktor Struzhkin, have experimentally produced a new class of materials blending hydrogen with sodium that could alter the superconductivity landscape and could be used for hydrogen-fuel cell storage. The research is published in Nature Communications.

It had been predicted that certain hydrogen-rich compounds consisting of multiple atoms of hydrogen with so-called alkali metals like lithium, potassium or sodium, could provide a new chemical means to alter the compound’s electronic structure. This, in turn, may lead the way to metallic high-temperature superconductors.

“The challenge is temperature,” explained Struzhkin. “The only superconductors that have been produced can only exist at impractically cold temperatures. In recent years, there have been predictions of compounds with several atoms of hydrogen coupled with alkali metals that could exist at more practical temperatures. They are theorized to have unique properties useful to superconductivity.”

To me, maps always conjure up a sense of exploration.

Back in the Age of Discovery, rudimentary maps allowed European explorers to sail into the vast unknown. They began charting new worlds, and in turn, made newer maps that helped future generations better understand the lands and seas that cover our world.

Continue reading “Scientists Complete the Most Detailed Map of the Brain Ever” »

We spend our lives surrounded by hi-tech materials and chemicals that make our batteries, solar cells and mobile phones work. But developing new technologies requires time-consuming, expensive and even dangerous experiments.

Luckily we now have a secret weapon that allows us to save time, money and risk by avoiding some of these experiments: computers.

Continue reading “Lab 2.0: Will Computers Replace Experimental Science?” »