Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 11,005

Friends, I’m super excited to announce I’m launching a new #transhumanism column at The Maven, a new site out that features leaders in their field writing about their lives and activities. My column (or channel as The Maven editors call them) is titled: Transhumanist Wager. And I’ll be posting every day on it, often with original stories. Here’s my first one, just out! Give it a read!

Transhumanism—the social movement of merging people with machines & synthetic parts—is turning dangerously hard left.

Read more

This is a new picture of Neptune taken from the Earth. It’s nothing short of amazing.

You’ve probably seen better pictures of Neptune from when Voyager 2 flew by in 1989. But there isn’t currently a spacecraft orbiting Neptune, so if scientists want pictures, they need to take them from 2.9 billion miles away. An upgrade on the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile has now allowed the ground-based telescope to take images as crisp as those taken by Hubble, a telescope that orbits Earth.

The Very Large Telescope consists of four telescopes with 8.2-meter (27-foot) mirrors in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. Today, scientists at the observatory have released the first observations taken with laser tomography, the new adaptive optics mode on its GALACSI unit, which works alongside a spectrograph instrument called MUSE on one of the telescopes.

Read more

It wasn’t that long ago that solar power and wind power were labeled as marginal, ‘green’ electricity, but in the last five years or so they have become much more affordable and economically more feasible than conventional sources like coal and nuclear.

What supported solar along the way partly was the emergence of energy storage in the form of battery systems. Electricity can now be made by solar power systems and the excess can be stored for usage at night or on less sunny days. At least, solar power has been paired successfully with energy storage, and it is catching up with solar power. The cost of this newish technology is dropping, “The overall estimated cost fell 32% in 2015 and 2016, according to the 2017 GTM Reseach utility-scale storage report. That will slow over the next five years, GTM reported. But battery storage is — in certain places and applications — on its way to cost-competitiveness.”

According to Lazard, it could drop another 36% between 2018 and 2022. The UC-Berkeley research study, “Energy Storage Deployment and Innovation for the Clean Energy Transition,” predicted lithium-ion batteries could hit the $100 per kilowatt-hour mark in 2018.

Read more

To keep an organization safe, you must think about the entire IT ecosystem.

The ever-expanding range and diversity of cyber threats make it difficult for organizations to prioritize their offensive and defensive strategies against attackers. From malware, ransomware, and other attacks coming from the outside, to insider threats and system vulnerabilities from within, today’s expanded attack surfaces cut across the whole enterprise landscape — and that means an enterprise’s threat intelligence strategy must address the entire IT ecosystem.

To be effective, threat intelligence must be proactive, comprehensive, and done in a way that doesn’t inadvertently create more risk. Unfortunately, as a recent Ponemon survey illustrates, most organizations fall short of this goal — tripped up by a range of challenges, including a lack of expertise and overwhelming volumes of data. Improved threat intelligence comes from improving the strategy, techniques, and tools employed by enterprises to probe their networks for weakness and shore up defenses and resiliency.

Read more