Lifeboat Foundation

George “Geohot” Hotz is driving forward with his push to bring self-driving cars to the masses, but he’s going about it a slightly unconventional way. His company Comma.ai is brushing past some previous regulatory issues and is trying another route — open-sourcing not only its self-driving technology, but also instructions for building your very own hardware device (“a robotics platform”) called Comma Neo. All of this information is available today through Comma.ai’s GitHub repositories.

Since the beginning, the company has had a goal of being the Android version of self-driving cars — it wants to empower “ghostriding for the masses.” Earlier this year, it was approached by state and federal regulators inquiring about a product Hotz claimed wasn’t even on sale yet. Fed up with the scrutiny, Comma.ai cancelled its first product, the Comma One, and pivoted its thinking to democratizing its knowledge. So it’s keeping with its promise, but has scrapped its $999 price point in favor of it being free. “If we really want to be the Android of self-driving cars, we can’t be charging $999, can we?” Hotz explained.

Nathaniel David from Unity Biotech giving a talk about the potential of Senolytics and how science can break the natural limit to lifespan. David is the CEO of Unity Biotechnology a company taking SENS based Senolytic drugs into human clinical trials in the next year or so. Very exciting as this is the first true rejuvenation biotechnology therapy to be deployed in humans.

Unity is leading the way for the first rejuvenation technologies in the #sens model. Here we have Nathaniel David from Unity talking about the potential of Senolytics and increased lifespans.

Continue reading “Drugs to Extend Life — Nathaniel David, CEO of Unity Biotechnology” »

A researcher who co-wrote a paper in the 1990s on a crucial artificial intelligence technique feels overlooked by today’s stars in the field.

“The two options looked like going to work at NASA or going to work with a large corporation that was fulfilling space contracts with the government — a Boeing, a Lockheed or Northrup,” said the partner at San Francisco-based Founders Fund.

Then Elon Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp. — SpaceX — and Nolan became its first intern in 2003. The internship turned into a full-time gig developing reusable Dragon capsules at SpaceX and working on rocket propulsion, giving Nolan — who now invests in space startups — a front-row seat for the “New Space” race.

Musk’s Southern California company, which raised $1 billion early this year from Google and others at a $10 billion valuation, dramatically cut the cost of launching a space mission from $1 billion down to tens of millions.

Continue reading “Silicon Valley Startups Enter the Space Race” »

Amazon today announced three new artificial intelligence-related toolkits for developers building apps on Amazon Web Services.

At the company’s AWS re: invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon showed how developers can use three new services — Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon Rekognition — to build artificial intelligence features into apps for platforms like Slack, Facebook Messenger, ZenDesk, and others.

The organization’s largest event dedicated to building BCI prototypes was held in Budapest.

30 November 2016

It’s a step towards giving speech back to people with paralysis.

Wonder if Gates or Musk will do this.

Strategic investment in brain research will help Chinese enterprises push back the frontiers of scientific progress.

Astronomers have at last observed polarisation of light by virtual particles in a neutron star’s magnetic field, a long-expected quantum effect.