Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: A new artificial neural network aced a wine tasting test and promises a less energy-hungry version of artificial intelligence, researchers report.

Source: NIST

Human brains process loads of information. When wine aficionados taste a new wine, neural networks in their brains process an array of data from each sip. Synapses in their neurons fire, weighing the importance of each bit of data — acidity, fruitiness, bitterness — before passing it along to the next layer of neurons in the network. As information flows, the brain parses out the type of wine.

Although earlier people weren’t much aware of Julia programming language, it has now gained quite the hype. In this year’s Stack Overflow Developer Survey.

View insights.

Summary: Study reveals how motor memories are formed and how they remain persistent. The findings may help illuminate the root cause of motor disorders like Parkinson’s disease.

Source: Stanford.

Why is it that someone who hasn’t ridden a bicycle in decades can likely jump on and ride away without a wobble, but could probably not recall more than a name or two from their 3rd grade class?

Can the sum of knowledge and experience we’ve accumulated over a lifetime live on after we die? The concept of “mind-uploading” is a modern version of an age-old human dream. Transhumanism hopes to not only enhance human capacities but even transcend human limitations such as bodily death.

The main character of Oscar Wilde’s famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray wishes for eternal youth. And his wish is fulfilled: Dorian Gray remains young and exquisitely beautiful, whereas his portrait grows old, bearing the burden of aging, human shortcomings and imperfections. As we know, the story ended badly for Dorian.

In our time, scientific discoveries and new technologies promise to bring us closer to his dream. And no deal with the Devil is needed for doing so: once we understand how to manipulate the building blocks of life as well as the material foundations of our consciousness, emotions and character traits, so the story goes, we will be able to broaden human nature and overcome its inherent limitations such as aging, suffering and cognitive, emotional and moral shortcomings.

Tianwen-1 is a historic victory for both the CNSA and space exploration.

Upon successful orbital insertion and landing, Tianwen-1 became a historic victory for the CNSA and space exploration. Before Tianwen-1, the only two successful missions to send an orbiter and lander to Mars were NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 missions in 1975. Prior to that, the Soviet Union had attempted this feat with their Mars 2 and 3 missions in 1971 and Mars 6 in 1973.

Mars 2 was an outright failure, with the lander being destroyed and the orbiter sending back no data. On Mars 3, the orbiter obtained approximately eight months of data, and while the lander touched down safely, it only returned 20 seconds of data. On Mars 6, the orbiter produced data from an occultation experiment, but the lander failed on the descent.

How do you teach an autonomous drone to fly itself? Practice, practice, practice. Now Microsoft is offering a way to put a drone’s control software through its paces millions of times before the first takeoff.

The cloud-based simulation platform, Project AirSim, is being made available in limited preview starting today, in conjunction with this week’s Farnborough International Airshow in Britain.

Continue reading “Microsoft’s Project AirSim is pushing drone simulation software to new heights” »

H+DAO Interview:

“Transhumanism is a philosophy, worldview, and a movement,” Dr. Natasha Vita-More states in the book “Transhumanism: What is it?” Essentially, it’s the idea of being able to move beyond being human, and finding solutions to living longer, healthier lives.

Natasha holds a Ph.D. from the University of Plymouth. As a long-term figure in the transhumanist movement, she spends much of her time speaking and lecturing around the world. Her areas of expertise include topics such as trans-humanity and human evolution, artificial intelligence, and what it means to be human in an AI-driven world.

Military dogs will don augmented reality goggles to test their ability to keep soldiers safe by allowing them to direct the dogs from afar.