Lifeboat Foundation

In the first episode of the new season of “Star Trek: Picard,” Raffi (Michelle Hurd), while working for a mysterious, faceless contact within Starfleet, is attempting to locate dangerous stolen technology that can be used as a massively destructive weapon. Raffi catches wind of where the weapon will be used but arrives moments too late to stop it. She watches in horror as the Starfleet recruitment building — the entire massive structure — is sucked into a mysterious portal that is instantaneously formed below it. An exit portal then appears about a mile up and a few miles over, and the building crashes to the ground, crushing its own next-door neighbors.

The practical implications for portal technology will, of course, be immediately evident to anyone who has ever played the 2007 video game “Portal.” That game was predicated on making magical doorways through which the player would pass in order to surmount increasingly complex physics and maze puzzles. If one could form an entrance portal in front of them, and then an exit portal on a platform above, one could easily traverse the world.

Generally speaking, the relationship “Star Trek” has with technology is very positive. Starships allow people to travel the cosmos, replicators have essentially ended hunger, and transporters allow people to visit alien worlds. But often, when new technologies are introduced into “Star Trek,” ethical concerns are immediately raised. What, for instance, is a building-size portal-maker really for besides transporting entire buildings a mile into the air and then dropping them? Characters speak often about how certain machines could handily be weaponized.

The CEO of social-media giant Meta has sworn by AI, popularized by the chatbot ChatGPT.

Humanoid robots are one of those ideas that never truly goes out of style — it does, however, tend to ebb and flow across the decades. Whatever you happen to think about the project or the company that built it, Tesla’s Optimus prototype has revived the conversation around the form factor and efficacy and viability of general-purpose robots. Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert told me in an interview this week, “I thought that they’d gotten a lot more done than I expected, and they still have a long way to go.”

It’s also reopened the debate. When I spoke to Playground Global partner Peter Barrett last week, he was quick to point out that our bodies aren’t exactly the hallmark of efficiency or product design, even if they made us sufficiently capable of outsmarting or out-running a wooly mammoth back in the day. The flip side of that conversation certainly makes sense however: We built our environment with us in mind, so it follows that we’d make robots in our image to perform our jobs.

Figure, which comes out of stealth this week, is very much in the second camp. Back in September, we broke the news of the startup’s existence. Founded by Archer co-founder Brett Adcock (who has also funded the company to the tune of $100 million), the startup is spending lot of time and money to build a general-purpose bipedal humanoid robot. It’s not an easy dream in any respect, of course. That no one has yet managed to crack the code certainly isn’t for lack of trying.

ALGORITHMS TURN PHOTO SHAPSHOTS INTO 3D VIDEO AND OR IMMERSIVE SPACE. This has been termed “Neural Radiance Fields.” Now Google Maps wants to turn Google Maps into a gigantic 3D space. Three videos below demonstrate the method. 1) A simple demonstration, 2) Google’s immersive maps, and 3) Using this principle to make dark, grainy photographs clear and immersive.

This technique is different from “time of flight” cameras which make a 3D snapshot based on the time light takes to travel to and from objects, but combined with this technology, and with a constellation of microsatellites as large as cell phones, a new version of “Google Earth” with live, continual imaging of the whole planet could eventually be envisioned.

Continue reading “NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images” »

While Earth and Venus are approximately the same size, and both lose heat at about the same rate, the internal mechanisms that drive Earth’s geologic processes differ from its neighbor. It is these Venusian geologic processes that a team of researchers led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the California Institute of Technology hopes to learn more about as they discuss both the cooling mechanisms of Venus and the potential processes behind it.

The geologic processes that occur on Earth are primarily due to our planet having tectonic plates that are in constant motion from the heat escaping the core of the planet, which then rises through the mantle to the lithosphere, or the rigid outer rocky layer, that surrounds it. Once this heat is lost to space, the uppermost region of the mantle cools, while the ongoing mantle convection moves and shifts the currently known 15 to 20 tectonic plates that make up the lithosphere. These tectonic processes are a big reason why the Earth’s surface is constantly being reshaped. Venus, on the other hand, does not possess tectonic plates, so scientists have been puzzled as to how the planet loses heat and reshapes its surface.

Continue reading “Venus May Have a Bizarro Version of a Vital Earth Phenomenon” »

Why do some people love Impressionist paintings like Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” (1906) while others can’t understand the hype? The question of aesthetic taste has stumped scholars for centuries. Now, neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) say they have come closer to decoding how the brain decides which artworks it deems good or attractive.

In a study published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, CalTech Professor John O’Doherty and other researchers propose that the mind creates an opinion of an artwork after dissecting it into discrete elements. Basic features, such as color and texture, and complex qualities, like style, are ranked and weighed individually to make a judgment.

Connect with top gaming leaders in Los Angeles at GamesBeat Summit 2023 this May 22–23. Register here.

While AI has been a part of game development for years, generative AI’s ability to create assets for games instantly is a relatively new component. This new technology has the capacity to serve as a tool for game developers, especially those with smaller teams — and, according to the creators of Story Machine, it already is.

Continue reading “Story Machine demonstrates how AI is helping game development” »

Astronomers interpret the spectra of 10 well-known dark asteroids and find them to be water-rich like the dwarf planet Ceres.

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Continue reading “Glycogenolysis: This Video Explains The Process Of Glycogenolysis” »