Lifeboat Foundation

The legendary Skunk Works had a hand in developing Tom Cruise’s fastest plane yet.

In Top Gun: Maverick, Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell takes his need for speed to a new realm: the hypersonic realm, that is. Thirty-six years after the first film debuted, Mitchell is a test pilot flying the SR-72 “Darkstar” airplane. Although fictional, the SR-72 has a real-world pedigree, with design help for the aircraft and models coming from the same group that is designing the real SR-72: the world-famous Skunk Works, Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs.

According to Lockheed Martin, the production team behind Top Gun: Maverick contacted the company’s Skunk Works division to assist with the SR-72 concept. The Skunk Works, a name drawn from the cartoon Li’l Abner, is the division of Lockheed Martin that works on classified aircraft programs.

Continue reading “Darkstar, the Hypersonic Jet in ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ Could Become a Real Plane” »

Summary: A new, open-source model of synaptic plasticity in the neocortex could propel understanding of how learning occurs in the brain.

Source: University of Montreal.

Everyone knows the human brain is extremely complex—but how does it learn, exactly? Well, the answer may be a lot simpler than commonly believed.

“Quite a large gap exists between the current narrative of AI and what it can actually do,” says Giada Pistilli, an ethicist at Hugging Face, a startup focused on language models. “This narrative provokes fear, amazement, and excitement simultaneously, but it is mainly based on lies to sell products and take advantage of the hype.”

The consequence of speculation about sentient AI, she says, is an increased willingness to make claims based on subjective impression instead of scientific rigor and proof. It distracts from “countless ethical and social justice questions” that AI systems pose. While every researcher has the freedom to research what they want, she says, “I just fear that focusing on this subject makes us forget what is happening while looking at the moon.”

What Lemoire experienced is an example of what author and futurist David Brin has called the “robot empathy crisis.” At an AI conference in San Francisco in 2017, Brin predicted that in three to five years, people would claim AI systems were sentient and insist that they had rights. Back then, he thought those appeals would come from a virtual agent that took the appearance of a woman or child to maximize human empathic response, not “some guy at Google,” he says.

Continue reading “LaMDA and the Sentient AI Trap” »

They ve got it swimming.

Ghost Robotics makes the robotic dog, and the “tail” system that enables it to swim is called the Nautical Autonomous Unmanned Tail, or NAUT.

Electrons and their behavior pose fascinating questions for quantum physicists, and recent innovations in sources, instruments and facilities allow researchers to potentially access even more of the information encoded in quantum materials.

However, these research innovations are producing unprecedented—and until now, indecipherable—volumes of data.

“The information content in a piece of material can quickly exceed the total information content in the Library of Congress, which is about 20 terabytes,” said Eun-Ah Kim, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, who is at the forefront of both quantum materials research and harnessing the power of machine learning to analyze data from quantum material experiments.

Imagine if you could repair damaged tissue in your organs. That is what stem cell research is working towards, because stem cells have tremendous potential to produce the cells of organs such as the liver, pancreas and intestine.

For decades, scientists have attempted to mimic the path that stem cells follow in order to form, for example, organs in embryos. However, despite extensive efforts, getting cells to properly develop in the lab has been very difficult. But they may have overlooked an important step and maybe missing another type of stem cells, suggests a new study from the University of Copenhagen.

“Very simply put, a number of recent studies have attempted make a gut from stem cells in a dish. We have found a new way to do this, a way which follows different aspects of what happens in the embryo. Here, we found a new route that the embryo uses, and we describe the intermediate stage that different types of stem cells could use to make the gut and other organs,” says Ph.D. student at Martin Proks, one of the primary authors of the study from Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Copenhagen (reNEW).

SpaceX has already launched around 2,000 satellites for its Starlink internet service and is now prepared to take it to the next level. Elon Musk has announced that the company will turn on laser inter-communication between satellites to dramatically reduce latency.

Charging technology provider EV Safe Charge has unveiled ZiGGY – a mobile robot that can charge an EV wherever it’s parked. Through its ability to recharge itself via different energy sources and its summoning feature, ZiGGY can alleviate the need to install specific parking stalls for EV charging, as any spot can now become a spot to recharge.

EV Safe Charge currently provides end-to-end charging solutions, particularly as it pertains to mobile charging. The company created a mobile rental charging solution for the launch of Jaguar’s I-PACE EV and works with several other OEMs like Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Porsche, and Stellantis.

Previously, EV Safe Charge has helped find its clients ideal charging solutions based on their needs, recommending charging technology from a multitude of partners including ABB, Enel X, evconnect, and Bosch.

Everything is about to be illuminated.

A team of researchers from Imperial College London and Newcastle University has just observed what happens after light strikes solar cells.

Continue reading “What happens when light hits solar cells? Scientists just observed the first moments” »