Lifeboat Foundation

Helion, the clean energy company with its eye firmly on the fusion prize, announced a couple of years ago that it had secured $2.2 billion of funding to help it develop cleaner, safer energy at a commercial scale in November 2021. Today, it is starting to reap the fruits of its labor, announcing an agreement to provide Microsoft with electricity from its first fusion power plant, with Constellation serving as the power marketer and managing the transmission for the project.

Fusion has been the energy goal for over 60 years, as it produces next to no waste or radioactivity while processing and is far less risky than fission. But achieving the same process that occurs in stars has proved mighty difficult to contain, with it taking more energy to keep the reaction under control than it can generate. Progress has been slow and steady, with the potential rewards keeping companies such as Helion focused on the reaction. Helion has been working on its fusion technology for over a decade. To date, it has built six working prototypes and it expects its seventh prototype to demonstrate the ability to produce energy in 2024.

With this in mind, Helion’s plant is expected to be online by 2028 and has a power generation target of 50MW, or greater, with a one-year ramp-up period. While that might seem a long way into the future still, it’s significantly sooner than the projections had suggested.

First Snapchat, now Wendy’s. No one is safe from AI.

The fast food chain will use an artificial intelligence chatbot to take drive-through orders, reports The Wall Street Journal (opens in a new tab). The new chatbot runs on Google’s natural-language processing software and is trained to understand customers’ orders. It will officially launch in June at a company-owned Wendy’s in Columbus, Ohio.

A.I. entrepreneur Gary Marcus thinks the technology is too important to cede to corporate control.

Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, thinks artificial intelligence could spark the greatest positive transformation education has ever seen. He shares the opportunities he sees for students and educators to collaborate with AI tools — including the potential of a personal AI tutor for every student and an AI teaching assistant for every teacher — and demos some exciting new features for their educational chatbot, Khanmigo.

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Continue reading “The Amazing AI Super Tutor for Students and Teachers | Sal Khan | TED” »

On April 28, NASA and its partners achieved another major milestone in the future of space communications — achieving 200 gigabit per second (Gbps) throughput on a space-to-ground optical link between a satellite in orbit and Earth, the highest data rate ever achieved by optical communications technology.

These data rates are made possible by using laser communications, which packs information into the oscillations of light waves in lasers, instead of using radio waves like most space communications systems.

-optical and even free space optics seems to be the future. People need to think about this when making devices.

Continue reading “NASA, Partners Achieve Fastest Space-to-Ground Laser Comms Link” »

A new Linux NetFilter kernel flaw has been discovered, allowing unprivileged local users to escalate their privileges to root level, allowing complete control over a system.

The CVE-2023–32233 identifier has been reserved for the vulnerability, but a severity level is yet to be determined.

The security problem stems from Netfilter nf_tables accepting invalid updates to its configuration, allowing specific scenarios where invalid batch requests lead to the corruption of the subsystem’s internal state.

May 11 (Reuters) — Google announced a flurry of artificial intelligence products – but users might need AI just to understand them all.

The Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) unit on Wednesday demonstrated or referenced at least 15 different AI products and features ranging from software solely for creating smartphone wallpaper to another for organizing personal files to yet another for photo editing.

Attendees of Google’s I/O conference in Mountain View, California, could be forgiven for leaving the annual event with their heads spinning. Take one of Google’s press releases from the event: “Duet AI serves as your expert pair programmer and assists cloud users with contextual code completion, offering suggestions tuned to your code base, generating entire functions in real-time, and assisting you with code reviews and inspections.”

Cell division is a standard biological process we all learned about in high school. While this process becomes more complex with more advanced study, there | Immunology.

The costs used to recover the deposits for the failed US regional banks will be paid by other US banks especially the larger banks.

The largest US lenders face billions of dollars in extra fees to replenish the government’s bedrock deposit insurance fund. The move comes after the fund was tapped to backstop uninsured depositors at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Su Keenan reports on Bloomberg Television.

Continue reading “Big Banks Face Billions in Extra FDIC Fees After SVB Failure” »