Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 10,580

Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World” (Crown), by the economic journalist Annie Lowrey, is the latest book to argue that a program in this family is a sane solution to the era’s socioeconomic woes. Lowrey is a policy person. She is interested in working from the concept down. “The way things are is really the way we choose for them to be,” she writes. Her conscientiously reported book assesses the widespread effects that money and a bit of hope could buy.

It has enthusiasts on both the left and the right. Maybe that’s the giveaway, Nathan Heller writes.

Read more

Disney’s animatronics are coming a long way from drunken pirates waving flagons of ale or hippos that wiggle their ears. In the (relatively) near future, robotic versions of Iron Man or Buzz Lightyear could be performing autonomous acrobatics overhead in Disney theme parks, thanks to the newly-unveiled Stuntronics robot.

Animatronic characters have populated Disney parks for more than half a century, albeit often just looping a specific movement over and over. In recent years Disney Research has tried to make the robots more agile and interactive, developing versions that can grab objects more naturally, and even juggle and play catch with visitors.

Back in May the company unveiled a prototype called Stickman. Basically a mechanical stick with two degrees of freedom, the robot could be flicked into the air like a trapeze artist, where it used a suite of sensors to tuck and roll in midair, perform a couple of backflips, and unfurl for landing.

Read more

Chinese physicists realized a genuine entanglement of 18 quantum particles, beating their own world record set in 2016, while the team has set their next goal at 50-qubit entanglement.

The result of the study was published in the US journal Physical Review Letters on June 28. Chinese leading quantum physicist Pan Jianwei led the project. Together with his team, Pan earlier demonstrated quantum entanglement with 10 quantum bits, or “qubits,” in 2016, according to a report sent by Pan’s team to Global Times on Tuesday.

Quantum entanglement is a weird phenomenon which Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” where quantum particles are connected “even if they are at opposite ends of the universe,” an Australia-based Cosmos Magazine reported.

Read more

Charania told GeekWire that the first Blue Moon landing could take place even before 2023.

Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, is laying out a plan to support the creation of permanent settlements on the moon, starting with a lunar landing mission within the next five years.

The Kent, Wash.-based company’s roadmap was laid out most recently last week during the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace conference in Renton, Wash.

Read more