Lifeboat Foundation

The lifting body vehicle will be launched on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket and will have the ability to return—along with cargo—by landing at any available airport. SNC’s Dream Chaser is made of non-toxic materials meaning it can touch down on commercial runways and be accessed immediately.

The chance to showcase a reusable spacecraft on government funded missions bodes well for a potential pivot to commercial use. SNC is at the leading edge of private space companies that one day might cater to a more diverse base of consumers like universities, medical companies and individuals.

To learn more about Dream Chaser’s history and development, we spoke to John Roth, Vice President of Business Development for SNC’s Space Systems.

Read more

2 trends that is happening now especially with millennials: car ownership is no longer the desire; and home ownership is out of reach. And, this will impact at a minimum 4 industries — financial, real estate, auto, and insurance industries? Something that many in industry will need to get very creative in addressing to entice the future larger market consumers.

Young people no longer rush to buy their first car, meaning future cities need to think quickly about public transport and the emerging “share economy”, one of Australia’s leading urban futurists says.

Fewer people will “own a car”, “shared” driverless cars will be common and the “Uber” idea of sharing a ride will extend beyond an alternative to taxis, to ‘sharing’ homes, jobs, electric cars, hotel rooms and bikes by 2050.

Continue reading “Young Aussies thinking twice about car ownership: city futurist” »

This is definitely a major feat for global business and partnerships.

Within 10 years, earpieces will whisper nearly simultaneous translations—and help knit the world closer together.

Read more

I must admit, the thought of something constantly reading my mind would get on my nerves after a while; just like a nagging spouse asking you constantly what are you thinking about. Ugh.

The team behind Siri have a new idea: a voice-controlled personal assistant linked to all your devices that can almost read your mind.

Read more

Could an avg “Joe” from Wall Street actually beat AI? It sounds like it.

Investor and Forbes contributor John S. Tobey has a rather fatalistic view of artificial intelligence-based investing and trading regimes. In a recent article, the former professional investment manager who formerly operated a multi-manager fund of funds, likes three primary investment strategies – and they don’t generally include artificial intelligence and computer-based hedge fund decision processes.

Continue reading “Beat Artificial Intelligence In Markets By Investing In Individual Stocks?” »

Another major leap forward in Quantum; researchers have been able to transport heat consistently ten thousand times further than ever before. This will enable Quantum technology to be leveraged in across multiple areas of manufacturing (clothing, etc.), energy, and electronics due to its heat conductive properties.

Heat conduction is a fundamental physical phenomenon utilized, for example, in clothing, housing, car industry, and electronics. Thus our day-to-day life is inevitably affected by major shocks in this field. The research group, led by quantum physicist Mikko Möttönen has now made one of these groundbreaking discoveries. This new invention revolutionizes quantum-limited heat conduction which means as efficient heat transport as possible from point A to point B. This is great news especially for the developers of quantum computers.

Continue reading “New invention revolutionizes heat transport (w/video)” »

A Lifeboat guest editorial

Richelle Ross is a sophomore at the University of Florida, focusing on statistics and data science. As a crypto consultant, she educates far beyond the campus. Her insight on the evolution and future of Bitcoin has been featured in national publications. Richelle writes for CoinDesk, LinkedIn, and Quora, providing analysis on Bitcoin’s evolving economy.

In 2003, I remember going to see my first IMAX 3D film, Space Station . My family was touring NASA at Cape Canaveral Florida. The film was an inside view into life as an astronaut enters space. As the astronauts tossed M&Ms to each other in their new gravity-free domain, the other children and I gleefully reached our hands out to try and touch the candy as it floated towards us. I had never experienced anything so mind-blowing in my 7 year life. The first 3D film was released in 1922. Yet, surprisingly, flat entertainment has dominated screens for in the 9½ decades that followed. Only a handful of films have been released in 3D—most of them are animated. But now, we are gradually seeing a shift in how people experience entertainment. As methods evolve and as market momentum builds, it promises to be one of the most groundbreaking technologies of the decade. I foresee Virtual Reality reaching a point where our perception of virtual and real-life experiences becomes blurred—and eventually—the two become integrated.

Ever since pen was put to paper, and camera to screen, audiences have enjoyed being swept into other worlds. For those of us “dreamers” being able to escape into these stories is one way we live through and expand our understanding of other times and places—even places that may not be accessible in our lifetimes. Virtual reality is the logical progression and natural evolution of these experiences.

Continue reading “The Coming Era of Virtual Reality” »

In 2014, Twitter stated that nearly 1 in 10 of its accounts are controlled by “bots” that generate automatic tweets for purposes ranging from innocuous to potentially harmful. Recently, DARPA ran a competition to find Twitter bots designed to influence online debates, and the outcome was a fundamental shift in anti-bot strategies.

http://ow.ly/XH4uT

Read more

(Phys.org)—Although in theory it may seem possible to divide time up into infinitely tiny intervals, the smallest physically meaningful interval of time is widely considered to be the Planck time, which is approximately 10^-43 seconds. This ultimate limit means that it is not possible for two events to be separated by a time smaller than this.

Read more