Lifeboat Foundation

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) Chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) has warned that the economies on both sides of the Taiwan Strait will plunge into turmoil should China invade Taiwan.

CNN on Monday (Aug. 1) published footage of a video interview with Liu, titled “Can China afford to attack Taiwan?” in which Liu noted chipmaking will no longer be “the most important thing we should be worried about” if Beijing were to attack Taiwan.

Still,“Nobody can control TSMC by force,” Liu said, when asked about the company’s perceived reputation as a “shield” given its significance. TSMC factories will be rendered “non-operable” in the event of a Chinese attack because the sophisticated manufacturing facilities depend on real-time connections with the outside world, with Europe, U.S., and Japan, he reckoned.

Minxin Pei is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a nonresident senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Confidence in the safety of Chinese banks has been badly shaken by the failure of several small banks in Henan Province in April this year. In terms of their assets of about 40 billion yuan ($6 billion) and the number of customers, roughly 400,000, the shuttered rural banks are minions in China’s financial system.

Elon Musk, often known to break the Internet by his statements or acts recently tweeted what seemed like a futuristic invention. Being one of the wealthiest people on the planet was not enough for the CEO of Tesla as he thought two of his brains would be better. One would always wonder how a brain can be transferred into a man-made machine, but with his recent tweet, Elon Musk confirmed he copied his brain to the machine and talks to his digital version.

Read More, ‘I haven’t had sex in ages’: Elon Musk Defends Himself Against Affair Allegations With Google’s Sergey Brin’s Wife, Fans Say He’s a Snake For Forgetting Brin’s Loan To Build Tesla

A recent tweet by Shibetoshi Nakamoto, known as the creator of Dogecoin with an account named, @BillyM2k asked, “If you could upload your brain to the cloud, and talk to a virtual version of yourself, would you be buddies?”. In the second continuation of the tweet, the user posted, “would be cool to have a competitive game buddy of approximately the same skill level. Except he would be a computer and have infinite time so I would more just see him get better at everything while I am busy with dumb life things.”

Though the EmDrive might be impossible, engineers are still working on it as the payoff would be enormous if it did work.

Imagine an engine that needs no propellant. It sounds impossible, and it most likely is.

That’s not stopping one NASA engineer from testing theories around the EmDrive — a conceptual “helical” engine that could defy the laws of physics and create forward thrust without fuel.

Continue reading “NASA Engineer Says Physics-defying Engine Could Go 99% the Speed of Light” »

An international team of researchers has observed part of the formation of a dwarf galaxy, helping to explain how they evolve from a dwarf state to maturity. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes finding evidence of maturation in such galaxies.

Prior research has shown that there are dwarf galaxies in the universe. Such galaxies are typically made up of just a few billion stars, as compared to mature galaxies such as the Milky Way, which have 200 to 400 billion stars. Prior research has also suggested that some dwarf galaxies might evolve to become more mature galaxies, but how that might happen has not been clear. In this new effort, the researchers focused the AstroSat space-based telescope on several blue compact dwarf galaxies, which are calculated to be approximately 1.5 to 3.9 billion light-years from Earth. The team then used the ultraviolet imaging telescope aboard AstroSat, which is India’s first multi-wavelength space telescope, to look for evidence of star formation activity.

Prior efforts to observe star formation in dwarf galaxies have been hindered by their low luminosities, small size and the low mass of the objects they contain. These problems have been overcome with AstroSat due to the high resolving power of its telescope and because of its ability to capture multiple wavelengths of light at the same time, and also because it was fitted with UV deep field imaging technology.

Holes in the sun can beam out solar material at 500 miles per second.

From top-left to bottom right: Joel Reed, Tom Ryden, Andra Keay, Jeff Burnstein, Matt Johnson-Roberson and Ritch Ramey joined Congressman Mike Doyle for a robotics roundtable discussion. | Source: Carnegie Mellon University.

Carnegie Mellon University held a robotics caucus virtual roundtable last week with leaders from the U.S. robotics industry. The roundtable discussed the future of the industry and how the U.S. can keep up with the pace of the global industry.

The following speakers took part in the roundtable:

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A US Robotics company is adding new artificial intelligence anomaly detection capabilities to its autonomous Scout System drone. A leading US provider of private wireless data, drone and automated data has announced that the new containment capabilities will enable oil and gas customers to minimize environmental risks, clean-up costs, fines, and litigation expenses.

Suasnews.com reports that the loss of containment analytics feature will accelerate early detection and location of crude oil leaks before they become critical to customers by providing frequent, autonomous inspections of oil and gas pumpjacks, heater treaters, tanks, pipes, pumps, and more via the autonomous Scout System. Autonomous drones have become a crucial component to ensuring safety and conducting regular inspections within the oil and gas industry.

War is changing. As drones replace snipers, we must consider the ethics of autonomous weapons making life or death decisions.