Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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A little more than two years have passed since the Lucy mission launched on an Atlas V rocket, ultimately bound for asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter. After a gravity assist from Earth in 2022, the spacecraft has been making a beeline for an intermediate target, and now it is nearly there.

On Wednesday, the $1 billion mission is due to make its first asteroid flyby, coming to within 265 miles (425 km) of the small main belt asteroid Dinkinesh. In a blog post, NASA says the encounter will take place at 12:54 pm ET (16:54 UTC).

About an hour before the encounter, the spacecraft will begin attempting to lock on to the small asteroid so that its instruments are oriented toward it. This will allow for the best possible position to take data from Dinkinesh as Lucy speeds by at 10,000 mph (4,470 meters per second).

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The search is on worldwide to find ways to extract carbon dioxide from the air or from power plant exhaust and then make it into something useful. One of the more promising ideas is to make it into a stable fuel that can replace fossil fuels in some applications. But most such conversion processes have had problems with low carbon efficiency, or they produce fuels that can be hard to handle, toxic, or flammable.

Now, researchers at MIT and Harvard University have developed an efficient process that can convert carbon dioxide into formate, a liquid or solid material that can be used like hydrogen or methanol to power a fuel cell and generate electricity. Potassium or sodium formate, already produced at industrial scales and commonly used as a de-icer for roads and sidewalks, is nontoxic, nonflammable, easy to store and transport, and can remain stable in ordinary steel tanks to be used months, or even years, after its production.

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President Joe Biden’s executive order plans for standardized digital watermarking rules.

President Joe Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence is a first-of-its-kind action from the government to tackle some of the technology’s greatest challenges — like how to identify if an image is real or fake.

Among a myriad of other demands, the order, signed Monday, calls for a new set of government-led standards on watermarking AI-generated content. Like watermarks on photographs or paper money, digital watermarks help users distinguish between a real object and a fake one and determine who owns it.

Digital watermarks are easily broken and abused.

Continue reading “Watermarks aren’t the silver bullet for AI misinformation” | >

You can now register.ing domains as part of an early access program. Some aren’t cheap: th.ing, for example, will cost you $38,999.99 per year from GoDaddy.

You can now register.ing domains as part of Google’s early access period, though you’ll have to pay “an additional one-time fee,” Google’s Christina Yeh wrote in a blog post. That fee will go down daily through December 5th. At 16:00 UTC (noon ET) on that date,.ing domains will officially be publicly available.

A few of us at The Verge have had some fun plugging different words into GoDaddy’s domain search to see what.ing domains are up for grabs. Some common words with-ing endings are really expensive; think.ing and buy.ing cost $38,999.99 and $129,999.99, respectively, per year to register. But I’ve found a few good ones that are pretty affordable — good luck on the hunt!

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Nearly five years ago, DeepMind, one of Google’s more prolific AI-centered research labs, debuted AlphaFold, an AI system that can accurately predict the structures of many proteins inside the human body. Since then, DeepMind has improved on the system, releasing an updated and more capable version of AlphaFold — AlphaFold 2 — in 2020.

And the lab’s work continues.

Today, DeepMind revealed that the newest release of AlphaFold, the successor to AlphaFold 2, can generate predictions for nearly all molecules in the Protein Data Bank, the world’s largest open access database of biological molecules.

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It’s strange times we’re living in when a blockchain billionaire, not the usual Big Tech suspects, is the one supplying the compute capacity needed to develop generative AI.

It was revealed yesterday that Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of blockchain startups Stellar, Ripple and Mt Gox and aerospace company Vast, launched a 501©(3) nonprofit that purchased 24,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs to build data centers that’ll lease capacity to AI projects.

Already, the cluster of GPUs — worth an estimated half a billion dollars and among the largest in the world — is being used by startups Imbue and Character.ai for AI model experimentation, claims Eric Park, the CEO of a newly formed organization, Voltage Park, that’s charged with running and managing the data centers.

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IBM’s announcement of a 1,000+ qubit computer is expected in the next few weeks but the startup might be a few leaps ahead.

Boulder, Colorado-based Atom Computing has beaten tech giant IBM in developing a quantum computer with more than 1,000 qubits. This next-generation quantum computing platform will be available for interested users next year, a company press release said.

Developments in quantum computing have become a race of sorts as businesses from different parts of the world are looking to take the lead in this next frontier of technology. Giants such as Microsoft, Google, and IBM have been working on developing their versions of the complex computer in a domain that is equally accessible to startups.

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According to the Chinese Ministry of State Security, “certain countries” are likely working on incredibly potent ethnic bioweapons.

China has blown the whistle on the potential dangers of what it calls “genetic weapons” that could prove to be an incredibly potent weapon of mass destruction, the Global Times reports. On Monday, October 20, 2023, the Chinese Ministry of State Security released a statement on WeChat warning that a “certain” foreign non-governmental organization (NGO) had recruited Chinese “volunteers” to collect biodiversity distribution data under the guise of biological species research to steal China’s species data.

AnnaStills/iStock.

Bioweapon of mass destruction.

Continue reading “China warns a ‘certain country’ is making ethnic bioweapons” | >