Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Hadley Wickham is the most important developer for the programming language R. Wes McKinney is among the most important developers for programming language Python. The two languages, which are free to use, are often seen as competitors in the world of data science. Wickham and McKinney don’t think the rivalry is necessary. In fact, they think that by working together, they can make each other’s languages more useful for their millions of users.

Last month, McKinney announced the founding of Ursa Labs, an innovation group intended to improve data-science tools. McKinney will partner with RStudio—Wickham’s employer, which maintains the most popular user interface for R—on the project. The main goals of Ursa Labs are to make it easier for data scientists working in different programming languages to collaborate, and avoid redundant work by developers across languages. In addition to improving R and Python, the group hopes its work will also improve the user experience in other open-source programming languages like Java and Julia.

R and Python are essential tools for data scientists working at tech platforms like Google and Facebook, researchers, academic researchers, and data journalists (Quartz is a big user of both). A common problem for coders is that it’s hard to collaborate with colleagues who use one of the other languages. Ursa Labs will try to make sharing data and code with someone using another data science language easier, by creating new standards that work in all of them. Developers call this an improvement to “interoperability.” Wickham and McKinney have already worked together to create a file format that can used in both Python and R.

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It all started with a Big Bang. But then what?

Renowned theoretical astrophysicist Stephen Hawking had been trying to answer that and other questions about the universe right up until his death. But in his final paper, submitted just eight days before he died on March 14, at age 76, Hawking and co-author Thomas Hertog proposed that the universe is actually simpler than what’s been suggested in other theories.

Yes, they say, the massive explosion known as the Big Bang did create multiple universes — but not as many as the current theory predicts. The number of multiverses is finite, not infinite, according to them.

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NASA Langley researchers are experts in modeling and simulations for entry, descent and landing, working on missions since the Viking lander in 1976. In this episode, we explore the challenges of guiding landers like Mars InSight through the Martian atmosphere for a safe landing. Watch InSight launch as early as May 5, 2018! NASA Technology #JourneytoMars

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The battlefields of the future look set to be the province of robots duking it out on the field as their operators sit pretty, miles away. Russia is moving in leaps and bounds towards fielding its own unmanned forces.

Modern robots are nothing like the Terminator: Fielding human-shaped automatons for combat is much more trouble than it’s worth, so most ground robots are more or less tank- or car-shaped. They aren’t fully controlled by an artificial intelligence, either – not just yet, at least.

With its enormous war budgets and military industrial sector, it’s no surprise the US has been at the forefront of unmanned combat vehicle development. Its Predator drones have been raining death on Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen for over 15 years now, and it has been employing small, ground-based firing platforms like SWORDS for years, not to mention the multitude of bomb disposal and surveillance robots.

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On a recent BBC World Service program (News Hour Extra, 12.18.15), a group of space scientists were gathered to discuss these and other aspects of the post-human era. “What about the human soul”, the moderator asked, wondering whether or not these post-humans would still be human. None of the participants were particularly troubled by the question, since they all had assumed that the soul was no more than the particular configurations of DNA which resulted in varying degre…es of insight, intelligence, creativity, and sensitivity. Post-humans will be no different, they all agreed. Only their individual genomes will have been altered to produce a very different human reality – in other words a different human soul.

Once the human genome was completely sequenced; once efforts to recombine DNA had become a reality; and once a mind-computer interface had been realized, there was never any doubt that a post-human era was coming.

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