Lifeboat Foundation

Tomorrow, Friday, August 26, is International Dog Day and this year Teck is celebrating with Spot, the robot dog developed by Boston Robotics that is supporting safety inspections and data collection at its Elkview mine operations.

Spot is an artificial intelligence (AI) assisted robot designed as man’s best friend.

Spot is a four-legged sensor device that navigates terrain with unprecedented mobility – getting into places that are frequently unsafe or challenging for people, allowing the mine to automate routine inspection tasks and data capture safely, accurately, and frequently.

Circa 2021 face_with_colon_three

Researchers have found a new way to convert methane into rocket fuel on Mars — adding crucial flexibility to future astronaut missions to the Red Planet, according to a recent blog post on the University of California, Irvine’s (UCI’s) official website.

RELATED: LIFE ON MARS: SCIENTISTS ARE A LITTLE CLOSER TO SOLVING THE METHANE MYSTERY ON MARS

Continue reading “Scientists Just Created New Way to Make Rocket Fuel From Methane on Mars” »

face_with_colon_three circa 2017.

Project Icarus is an extremely fascinating initiative which aims to bring humanity closer to the stars. The latest theory proposed by scientists there is related to the development of system which could allow the harvesting of helium-3 gas from Uranus to fuel a possible interstellar mission. Uranus, then, seems to be a very resourceful planet, considering scientists believe it’s covered in oceans of diamonds.

Continue reading “Harvesting gas from Uranus might power interstellar flight” »

Circa 2017 face_with_colon_three

An MIT team has identified a process that could be used to harness methane that is now wasted by being burned off at wellheads.

Emerging Technologies on the Horizon.

Sharing the 10th Issue of my Security and Tech Insights newsletter! Please check it out and have a great weekend! #security #tech #emergingtechnologies #cybersecurity #innovation

As we gain new knowledge, our scientific picture of how the Universe works evolves. This is a feature of the Big Bang, not a bug.

Physicists from TU Delft, ETH Zürich and the University of Tübingen have built a quantum scale heat pump made from particles of light. This device brings scientists closer to the quantum limit of measuring radio frequency signals, which may be useful in the hunt for dark matter. Their work will be published as an open-access article in Science Advances on Aug. 26.

If you bring two objects of different temperature together, such as putting a warm bottle of white wine into a cold chill pack, heat usually flows in one direction, from hot (the wine) to cold (the chill pack). And if you wait long enough, the two will both reach the same temperature, a process known in physics as reaching equilibrium: a balance between the heat flow one way and the other.

If you are willing to do some work, you can break this balance and cause heat to flow in the “wrong” way. This is the principle used in your refrigerator to keep your food cold, and in efficient heat pumps that can steal heat from the cold air outside to warm your house. In their publication, Gary Steele and his co-authors demonstrate a quantum analog of a heat pump, causing the elementary quantum particles of light, known as photons, to move “against the flow” from a hot object to a cold one.

We need the computers and sensors to better our lives, to allow everyone access to the wisdom of the ages. We can’t collect all the data ourselves and try to make sense of it without machines because our brains aren’t up to the task. Imagine if every little decision everyone has made over the past thousand years along with its outcome had been recorded on index cards and stored in a gargantuan facility somewhere. Remember that giant warehouse at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they ended up storing the Ark of the Covenant? That’s where index cards AA through AC are housed. Imagine five thousand more of those to store all that data. What could we do with it? Nothing useful.

Computers can do only one thing: manipulate ones and zeros in memory. But they can do that at breathtaking speeds with perfect accuracy. Our challenge is getting all that data into the digital mirror, to copy our analog lives in their digital brains. Cheap sensors and computers will do this for us, with prices that fall every year and capabilities that increase.

Coupling massive processing power with sensors will create a species-level brain and memory. Instead of being billions of separate people with siloed knowledge, we will become billions of people who share a single vast intellect. Comparisons to The Matrix are easy to make but are not really apropos. We aren’t talking about a world without human agency but with enhanced agency, information-based agency. Making decisions informed by data is immeasurably better. Even if someone ignores the suggestion of the digital mirror, they are richer for knowing it. Imagine having an AI that could not only tell you what you should do but would allow you to insert your own values into the decision process. In fact, the system would learn your values from your actions, and the suggestions it gives you would be different from those it would give everyone else, as they should be. If knowledge is power, such a system is by definition the ultimate in empowerment. Every person on the planet could effectively be smarter and wiser than anyone who has ever lived.

Interaction between glass spheres suspended in a vacuum might one day lead to advances in quantum computing.