Lifeboat Foundation

The world’s second-most powerful rocket—though it’s largest partially renewable rocket—yesterday blasted-off on a secret mission for the US Space Force amid spectacular views. Only the fifth flight of the company’s heavy-life Falcon Heavy rocket (though the second inside a few months), the event took place in twilight Sunday, with a satellite being successfully sent into geosynchronous Earth orbit (meaning it will orbit at the same speed as Earth rotates). Two side-boosters then returned to land in tandem on launch pads.

They were the 163th and 164th successful landings of an orbital-class rocket, according to SpaceX.

Continue reading “Watch The Spectacular SpaceX Rocket Launch As Boosters Return To Earth In Tandem” »

There are few more beautiful sights than the orangey-red disk of our star, the Sun, sinking into the ocean. At sunset it seems a far cry from powerful, hot star we feel at midday and can’t even look at safely. If we were only able to view the Sun at sunset what would we think of it? It would be fair to conclude that it was far weaker than it actually is.

It could be a similar case for astronomers’ observations of the centers of galaxies, suggests a new study.

A new study indicates that scientists have substantially underestimated the energy output of supermassive black hole-powered active galactic nuclei.

Continue reading “The Center Of Our Galaxy May Be Way More Powerful Than We Thought, Say Scientists” »

Each Monday I pick out the northern hemisphere’s celestial highlights (mid-northern latitudes) for the week ahead, but be sure to.

The celestial highlights for the week ahead include a beautiful conjunction between two iconic planets in the solar system.

This weekend, Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo told Le Parisien that Parisians will get to vote whether they want to ban free-floating electric scooters or not. As I explained last week, Dott, Lime and Tier, the three scooter companies currently operating in the city, have operating licenses that are set to expire on March 23rd, 2023. And the fate of those services could have wide implications across the micromobility sector.

“If Parisians want to own their own scooter, there’s no issue. But we have a real issue with free-floating scooters. It’s not climate-friendly. Employees working for these companies are not properly treated,” Mayor of Paris told Le Parisien.

“That’s why I’m going to ask a question to Parisians in a vote that is going to take place on Sunday, April 2nd so that I can understand what they want,” she added.

The suit claims generative AI art tools violate copyright law by scraping artists’ work from the web without their consent.

A trio of artists have launched a lawsuit against Stability AI and Midjourney, creators of AI art generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and artist portfolio platform DeviantArt, which recently created its own AI art generator, DreamUp.

The artists — Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz — allege that these organizations have infringed the rights of “millions of artists” by training their AI tools on five billion images scraped from the web “with­out the con­sent of the orig­i­nal artists.”

Continue reading “AI art tools Stable Diffusion and Midjourney targeted with copyright lawsuit” »

The state introduced the resolution as a tribute to its oil and gas industry.

A U.S. state has decided to swim against the tide with its proposal to phase out all-electric vehicles from the state by 2035. You heard it right. Wyoming’s legislature is debating a resolution introduced on January 13, intended to pay tribute to its oil and gas industry which has created countless jobs and revenues over the decades.

In 2021, the state had produced 85.43 million barrels of crude oil, making it the eighth largest producer of oil among states in the U.S. Wyoming has a total population of just 577,000 people.

Continue reading “This US state wants to phase out EVs instead of ICEs by 2035” »

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

2022 was a great year for generative AI, with the release of models such as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, Imagen, and Parti. And 2023 seems to follow on that path as Google introduced its latest text-to-image model, Muse, earlier this month.

Like other text-to-image models, Muse is a deep neural network that takes a text prompt as input and generates an image that fits the description. However, what sets Muse apart from its predecessors is its efficiency and accuracy. By building on the experience of previous work in the field and adding new techniques, the researchers at Google have managed to create a generative model that requires less computational resources and makes progress on some of the problems that other generative models suffer from.

Summary: Researchers have developed a novel neurofeedback technique based on Pavlovian conditioning that detects when a person’s mind is wandering.

Source: ATR Brain Information Communication Research Laboratory Group

Everyone knows the feeling. You are trying to concentrate on driving or studying, or paying attention in a boring meeting, but suddenly, you realize that you are thinking about something irrelevant to the task at hand.

Real-world science may show that the brain-controlling zombie Fungi from The Last Of Us franchise may actually be a threat to humanity.