Lifeboat Foundation

DETROIT — Federal regulators said on Friday that 10 automakers had agreed to install automatic braking systems, which use sensors to detect potential collisions, as standard equipment in new vehicles.

But the automakers have not set a timetable for the introduction of the systems, and regulators may still seek government rules that would require the equipment as a standard feature in all cars and trucks — just as airbags were mandated a generation ago.

Anthony Foxx, the transportation secretary, said in a prepared statement that emergency braking technology could reduce traffic deaths and injuries.

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This is a seriously cool visualization of the solar system. What if you turned the planets into a sort of music box? That’s the point of Solarbeat, which turns the movement of the planets into music.

Solarbeat actually launched five years ago in 2010, but the designer Luke Twyman decided to revamp the website recently in light of the New Horizons and Dawn missions.

Continue reading “Listen To The Solar System Sing With This Fantastic Simulation” »

And send the results to your smartphone.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=bwz9SPMDO2k

The US government said today (Sept. 11) that it’s successfully made a Luke Skywalker-like prosthetic arm that allows the wearer to actually feel things.

At a conference in July, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) presented the achievements it’d had to date in building a robot arm that can be controlled by a human brain. A little over two months later, the agency has announced at another conference that it’s managed to update the technology to give the wearer the feeling of actually being able to sense things with the arm.

Continue reading “This mind-controlled prosthetic robot arm lets you actually feel what it touches” »

The making of a working Star Wars BB-8 droid.

You can now buy Star Wars’ adorable BB-8 droid and let it patrol your home.

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Drawn to the Future, a major exhibition on visualization technology featuring leading pioneers in architecture and engineering tech, highlights how our experience of our cities and buildings will rapidly change.

Images of the city have always wielded psychological, emotional and political power. Anyone brought up on a diet of Hollywood movies and US TV shows will have had that uncanny experience as a first-time visitor to a US city — a sense of déjà vu, the feeling of being on a movie set, in a story. I took the Blade Runner cityscape so seriously as a student in New York in 1983, that after a late-night showing of the film, I went into a phone box and rang the number dialed by Harrison Ford on the ‘video screen’ (555−7563 in case you’re interested). The decay of Ridley Scott’s dystopian future spilled over into the rodent-rich, un-gentrified, occasionally threatening Lower East Side of the time.

Continue reading “Better Than 'Blade Runner': Re-Imagining Our Cities” »

Elon Musk has yet another dream to make this world a better place, namely Space Internet. And it’s feasible.

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So, you think you’ve seen it all? You haven’t seen anything yet. By the year 2030, advancements will excel anything we’ve seen before concerning human intelligence. In fact, predictions offer glimpses of something truly amazing – the development of a human hybrid, a mind that thinks in artificial intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, spoke openly about this idea at the Exponential Finance Conference in New York. He predicts that humans will have hybrid brains able to connect to the cloud, just as with computers. In this cloud, there will be thousands of computers which will update human intelligence. The larger the cloud, the more complicated the thinking. This will all be connected using DNA strands called Nanobots. Sounds like a Sci-Fi movie, doesn’t it?

Kurzweil says:

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Synthetics startup Ras Labs is working with the International Space Station to test “smart materials” that contract like living tissue. These “electroactive” materials can expand, contract and conform to our limbs just like human muscles when a current moves through them – and they could be used to make robots move and feel more human to the touch.

Ras Labs co-founder Lenore Rasmussen accidentally stumbled upon the synthetic muscle material years ago while mixing chemicals in the lab at Virginia Tech. The experiment turned out to be with the wrong amount of ingredients, but it produced a blob of wobbly jelly that Rasmussen noticed contracted and expanded like muscles when she applied an electrical current.

It would be years later when Rasmussen’s cousin nearly lost his foot in a farming accident that she would start to employ that discovery to robotic limbs and space travel. The co-founder thought her cousin might lose his foot and started researching prosthetics.

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