Lifeboat Foundation

In April, a team of scientists including Stephen Hawking announced a mind-boggling new project to explore interstellar space, using lasers to propel a nano-spacecraft the size of a postage stamp to our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.

If they could get their little ‘StarChip’ spacecraft to travel at 20 percent the speed of light, it could arrive in just 20 years. But how would the electronics on such a tiny, vulnerable spacecraft survive for 20 years in the hostility of space?

Continue reading “NASA’s Working on a Nano-Starship That Travels at 1/5 the Speed of Light” »

Trump’s pick for labor chief, the CEO of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., likes the idea.

Novel approach could enable various electronics from sensors to displays on packaging.

In Brief

• Jürgen Schmidhuber asserts that, by 2050, there will be trillions of self-replicating robot factories on the asteroid belt.
• In a few million years, robots will naturally explore the galaxy out of curiosity, setting their own goals without much human interaction.

Robots have learned to be flexible.

George Musser explains the central role of weirdness in physics, and shatters the dreams of those who hope humans can one day tap into psychic powers.

We recently wrote an article about how we need to redefine what “nanotechnology” means in the context of looking for “nanotech” companies to invest it. When you can use synthetic biology and gene editing to change the way that bacteria function by genetically modifying them, the result are microscopic biological machines. These tiny biological machines sound a whole lot like the nanobots that we were promised which would go around doing cool things without even being visible to the human eye. Earlier this year we profiled three companies that we claimed were working on building nanobot factories that create designer organisms on demand. Let’s take a closer look at one of these companies called Ginkgo Bioworks.

Founded in 2008, Massachusetts based startup Ginkgo Bioworks has taken in a total of $154 million in funding so far with their latest $100 million Series C round closing in summer of this year. The Company refers to themselves as “the organism company” and their value proposition has attracted investment from a whole slew of investors who realize the potential of developing new organisms that can replace technology with biology. In their own words, Ginkgo Bioworks is doing “programming without a debugger, manufacturing without CAD, and construction without cranes” which requires a whole lot of intellectual firepower and may be why they have 5 founders:

Very interesting news…

New tests verify that Germany’s Wendelstein 7-X fusion energy device is on track to safely suspend plasma in magnetic fields.

Computers are getting smarter, but first they’re stuck in some sort of uncanny valley of intelligence, reassembling normal, everyday objects into increasingly creepy combinations. First came the revelations of Google’s DeepDream technology, which, in learning to “see” objects, “saw” creepy multi-eyed organisms all over the place, turning the world into a half-sentient dog-like mess.

Now, researchers in Toronto have used a technology called “neural karaoke” to teach a computer to write a song after looking at a photo, and the little carol it penned after viewing a festive Christmas tree is an absolutely horrifying display of what these things think of us.

Continue reading “This AI’s attempt to write a Christmas carol is absolutely bone-chilling” »