Lifeboat Foundation

Artificial intelligence (AI) is continuing to advance and has now defeated a human fighter pilot in a virtual combat simulation.

This result was achieved in the US Army’s AlphaDogfight competition, which aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of developing autonomous agents capable of defeating enemy aircraft in aerial combat.

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They’re not a common thing right now, but the technology of solar sails has recently had some success. In particular, it’s had success in exactly the way JPL has been proposing it be used more—in combination with CubeSats. From 2019 to 2022, a crowdfunded CubeSat project called LightSail 2 run by The Planetary Society “successfully used sunlight alone to change its orbit around Earth,” according to the Society’s website. And just recently, NASA launched a sail-powered CubeSat called Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout as part of the Artemis I mission.

So, with recent functional missions to point to and inside knowledge of what it takes to complete a successful space mission—from engineering marvels to monetary considerations—the team from JPL is pitching we make a lot more use of this pairing through what they call the Sundiver concept.

“Together, small satellites with lightweight instruments and solar sails offer affordable access to deep regions of the solar system, also making it possible to realize hard-to-reach trajectories that are not constrained to the ecliptic plane,” the preprint reads. “Combining these two technologies can drastically reduce travel times within the solar system, while delivering robust science.”

DEER PARK, Texas (AP) — Fire erupted at a petrochemical plant in the Houston area Friday, leaving five workers hospitalized and sending up a huge plume of smoke visible for miles.

The Harris County Sheriff’s Office said the fire was at a Shell USA Inc. facility in Deer Park, a suburb east of Houston.

Law enforcement received a call to help divert traffic around the plant just after 3 p.m., Harris County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Thomas Gilliland said. The city of Deer Park said in an advisory that there was no shelter-in-place order for residents.

Amazon opened a robotics fulfillment center in Windsor, Connecticut, where workers will process orders alongside bots.

The 3.8 million square-foot facility will have “thousands of robotic systems such as mobile robots and robotic handling systems that help employees deliver for customers everyday,” an Amazon spokesperson told Supply Chain Dive.

More than 2,000 employees will work at the facility, which primarily handles smaller shipments such as books, electronics and toys. The company began processing and delivering customer orders in November 2022, according to a press release.

Engineering organs to replace damaged hearts or kidneys in the human body may seem like something out of a sci-fi movie, but the building blocks for this technology are already in place. In the burgeoning field of tissue engineering, live cells grow in artificial scaffolds to form biological tissue. But to evaluate how successfully the cells develop into tissue, researchers need a reliable method to monitor the cells as they move and multiply.

Now, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed a noninvasive method to count the live cells in a three-dimensional (3D) scaffold. The real-time technique images millimeter-scale regions to assess the viability of the cells and how the cells are distributed within the scaffold—an important capability for researchers who manufacture complex biological tissues from simple materials such as living cells.

Their findings have been published in the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part A.

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One of the most critical problems for space travel is the enormous distances at which objects are found. In the solar system alone, the planets are so far away that going from one to another would take several years or even decades while going to the closest stars would take centuries or thousands of years.
A human being cannot carry out such a long journey since we do not live that long, so a possible solution to this problem is cryogenic sleep or induced hibernation.
This is a method in which we could put astronauts into an artificial coma, putting them in capsules or chambers where they would remain asleep for decades or even centuries and then wake up until they reached their destination.
How possible is it to do this for modern science? Is there cryogenic sleep for space travel?
Let’s find out!

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Toyota’s latest electric LQ concept car satisfies the “huмan need to Ƅe engaged eмotionally” with an on-Ƅoard artificial intelligence agent naмed Yui.

The Toyota LQ is Ƅoth fully electric and equipped with an SAE leʋel four equiʋalent autoмated driʋing systeм, мeaning no huмan interʋention is needed to driʋe the ʋehicle.

Its мain feature howeʋer is the on-Ƅoard AI-powered, interactiʋe agent, called Yui, which proʋides a personalised мoƄility experience Ƅy learning and responding to the driʋer’s eмotional and physical state.

Helmeted and harnessed directly behind my pilot, I prepare for takeoff as the cockpit canopy shuts over us. It could be a scene from Top Gun: Maverick save for the fact that we’re not launching from an aircraft carrier but pulling out of pit lane at the Thermal Club’s track in a final prototype of the Czinger 21C hypercar.

The $2 million, carbon-fiber-bodied, tandem-seat Czinger 21C astounds with specs—1,250 hp, zero to 62 mph in 1.9 seconds, a claimed top speed of 253 mph—and recently blew away the McLaren P1’s production-car track record at Circuit of the Americas by six seconds. But more impressive—seriously—is the hybrid’s build process: The main structural components are designed by Czinger’s proprietary AI software and then 3D-printed. “These structures cannot be made more perfect for the requirements inputted,” says Kevin Czinger, who, along with his son Lukas, cofounded Los Angeles–based Czinger Vehicles. “You could have 1,000 engineers and they would never get to this solution.”

I’m in the 1/3rd group. I think.

A thought experiment that’s dividing mathematicians can help illuminate how belief shapes rational decisions.