Lifeboat Foundation

How does water on the surface of this bizarre material control UV light emission and also its conductivity? (credit: Mohammad A. Islam et al./Nano Letters)

In a remarkable chance landmark discovery, a team of researchers at four universities has discovered a mysterious material that emits ultraviolet light and has insulating, electrical conducting, semiconducting, superconducting, and ferromagnetic properties — all controlled by surface water.

It happened while the researchers were studying a sample of lanthanum aluminate film on a strontinum titanate crystal. The sample mysteriously began to glow, emitting intense levels of ultraviolet light from its interior. After carefully reproducing the experimental conditions, they tracked down the unlikely switch that turns UV light on or off: surface water moisture.

Read more

This week, Google released a research paper chronicling one of its latest forays into artificial intelligence.

Researchers at the company programmed an advanced type of “chatbot” that learns how to respond in conversations based on examples from a training set of dialogue.

And the bot doesn’t just answer by spitting out canned answers in response to certain words; it can form new answers from new questions.

Read more

Basic Income (10 Reasons)
https://goo.gl/PJ7bbh

Lies You’ve Been Told about Work.
https://goo.gl/3u7Vld

Continue reading “Why Basic Income?” »

This Audi Parks Itself, and Comes When You Call!

Read more

Due for release in June 2016, No Man’s Sky will allow you to visit and explore a virtual universe of trillions of planets, each one a unique world.

Read more

Read more

Healthy living isn’t meaningless, but while all of us can make positive lifestyle modifications, genes play a massive role in longevity — or there would be no species variation. We’re still discovering exactly which genes provide a longevity boost and what they do, but we now know 7 variants could help give you an advantage.

The search for a longevity gene

Previous efforts to search out a ‘longevity gene’ have been largely unsuccessful, so researchers led by Stuart Kim at Stanford decided to focus on ‘bad’ gene variants this time — or more crucially a lack of them. They analysed 800 people over 100 and 5000 people over 90 and found that while many variants are common in the average person, possession of fewer ‘bad’ versions of 5 crucial genes was indeed associated with longevity. Many long-lived individuals are able to avoid chronic disease despite harmful lifestyle choices like smoking, and this could be one of the explanations. These confirmed 5 add to 2 already associated with longer lifespans.

Read more

German quantum gravity expert Sabine Hossenfelder is fighting in the battle over theoretical physics, a clash between those looking for evidence and those looking to move forward faster.

Read more

Facebook’s Yann LeCun:

Myth #1: “Advanced robots will have feelings”. Most AIs will be specialized and have no emotions.
Myth #2: “Robots will develop emotions spontaneously”. AI will only have emotions if they’re programmed with them.
Myth #3: “Robot emotions will be similar to human emotions”. There is no reason for AIs to have self-preservation instincts or jealousy.

LeCun adds: “unless we build these emotions into them. I don’t see why we would want to do that.”

Continue reading “The 3 biggest misconceptions about artificial intelligence, according to Facebook’s expert” »