Current international shipping law states that ocean-going vessels must be properly crewed, so fully autonomous, unmanned ships aren’t allowed in international waters. As such, the Yara Birkeland will have to operate close to the Norweigan coast at all times, carrying out regular short journeys between three ports in the south of the country.
But change is afoot in the maritime sector, and earlier this year the UN’s International Maritime Organisation (IMO) began discussions that could allow unmanned ships to operate across oceans. This raises the prospect of crewless “ghost” ships crisscrossing the ocean, with the potential for cheaper shipping with fewer accidents.
Several Japanese shipping firms, for example, are reportedly investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the technology. And British firm Rolls-Royce demonstrated the world’s first remote-controlled unmanned commercial ship earlier this year.
Michael B. Fossel, M.D., Ph.D. (born 1950, Greenwich, Connecticut) was a professor of clinical medicine at Michigan State University and is the author of several books on aging, who is best known for his views on telomerase therapy as a possible treatment for cellular senescence. Fossel has appeared on many major news programs to discuss aging and has appeared regularly on National Public Radio (NPR). He is also a respected lecturer, author, and the founder and former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Anti-Aging Medicine (now known as Rejuvenation Research).
Prior to earning his M.D. at Stanford Medical School, Fossel earned a joint B.A. (cum laude) and M.A. in psychology at Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in neurobiology at Stanford University. He is also a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy. Prior to graduating from medical school in 1981, he was awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship and taught at Stanford University.
In addition to his position at Michigan State University, Fossel has lectured at the National Institute for Health, the Smithsonian Institution, and at various other universities and institutes in various parts of the world. Fossel served on the board of directors for the American Aging Association and was their executive director.
Fossel has written numerous articles on aging and ethics for the Journal of the American Medical Association and In Vivo, and his first book, entitled Reversing Human Aging was published in 1996. The book garnered favorable reviews from mainstream newspapers as well as Scientific American and was published in six languages. A magisterial academic textbook on by Fossel entitled Cells, Aging, and Human Disease was published in 2004 by Oxford University Press.
Since his days as a teacher at Stanford University, Fossel has studied aging from a medical and scientific perspective with a particular emphasis on premature aging syndromes such as progeria, and since at least 1996 he has been a strong and vocal advocate of [telomerase therapy]] as a potential treatment of age-related diseases, disorders, and syndromes such as progeria, Alzheimer’s disease, atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, cancer, and other conditions. However, he is careful to qualify his advocacy of telomerase therapy as being a potential treatment for these conditions rather than a “cure for old age” and a panacea for age-related medical conditions, albeit a potential treatment that could radically extend the maximum human life span and reverse the aging process in most people. Specifically, Fossel sees the potential of telomerase therapy as being the single most effective point of intervention in a wide variety of age-related medical conditions. His new book, The Telomerase Revolution, (BenBella, 2015) gives a careful explanation of aging, age-related diseases, and the prospects for intervention, including upcoming human trials.
Shai Ben-David, Professor at the University of Waterloo, gave Machine Learning Course composed of 23 Lectures (CS 485/685) at the University of Waterloo on Jan 14, 2015…
Machine learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. In the past decade, machine learning has given us self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and a vastly improved understanding of the human genome. Machine learning is so pervasive today that you probably use it dozens of times a day without knowing it. Many researchers also think it is the best way to make progress towards human-level AI.
Shai Ben-David holds a PhD in mathematics from the Hebrew University is Jerusalem. He has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Toronto in both the Mathematics and CS departments. He was a professor of computer science at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. Ben-David has held visiting positions at the Australian National University and Cornell University, and since 2004 has been a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
As conventional microchip design reaches its limits, DARPA is pouring money into the specialty chips that might power tomorrow’s autonomous machines.
The coming AI revolution faces a big hurdle: today’s microchips.
It’s one thing to get a bunch of transistors on an integrated circuit to crunch numbers, even very large ones. But what the brain does is far more difficult. Processing vast amounts of visual data for use by huge, multi-cellular organism is very different from the narrow calculations of conventional math. The algorithms that will drive tomorrow’s autonomous cars, planes, and programs will be incredibly data-intensive, with needs well beyond what conventional chips were ever designed for. This is one reason for the hype surrounding quantum computing and neurosynaptic chips.
In addition to opening the lab, Facebook has committed about $5.75 million to support AI research at McGill, the University of Montreal, the Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the company said in a Facebook blog post on Friday. Alphabet and Microsoft also have invested in AI at McGill and the University of Montreal.
The move comes a week after IBM said it would spend $240 million on a new AI lab in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Facebook will support Canadian AI research in addition to setting up a lab in Montreal.
The Global Space Organization plans to utilize lunar regolith as a construction material when we build our GSO Lunar Station One, but lunar regolith also contains many elements that can be utilized to sustain life and human habitation on the lunar surface.
Averages of these elements found: • Oxygen % 60.9 • Silicon % 16.4 • Aluminum % 9.4 • Calcium % 5.8 • Magnesium % 4.2 • Iron % 2.3 • Sodium % 0.4 • Titanium % 0.3
There are many traces elements found as well that could be used to refine plastics, produce sugars, vitamins and harness gasses such as neon and helium.
We believe our bodies are our own, to do with what we want. Biohacking is leading the next phase of human evolution, and we’re excited to be a part of it.
The grants focus on improving grid resiliency during a cyberattack and speeding recovery.
The Energy Department announced a roughly $33 million investment Tuesday in seven projects aimed at securing the electric grid against cyberattacks, physical attacks and weather disasters.
The projects are designed both to make grid systems more secure against cyberattacks and to improve their ability to withstand a cyberattack, according to a department fact sheet.
More great news with the book Mark O’Connell’s “To Be a Machine”, whose closing chapter is on The Immortality Bus journey and my presidential run. It was nominated on the longlist of UK’s Baillie Gifford award for nonfiction. This is one of the most prestigious nonfiction prizes in the UK: http://www.foyles.co.uk/news/2017-Baillie-Gifford-Longlist%20Announced #transhumanism
