Lifeboat Foundation

Excerpts from the Red Folder.

Long charging times and limited access to fast chargers can be the dealbreakers for electric vehicle buyers today. But technology advancements are often fast-paced, and it’s hard to predict how close, or far, we are from the next big breakthrough. However, battery scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) might have a solution for charging speeds.

ORNL’s paper highlights a new lithium-ion battery that can not only recharge to 80 percent in 10 minutes but also sustain the fast charging ability for 1,500 cycles. For those new to the EV language, battery charge, and discharge occur when ions travel between the positive and negative electrodes through a medium called an electrolyte.

Getting to fifteen hundred charging cycles isn’t a new development. Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted in 2019 that the Model 3’s battery modules were designed to last 1,500 cycles or between 300,000 and 500,000 miles.

Google’s new Bard extension will apparently summarize emails, plan your travels, and — oh, yeah — fabricate emails that you never actually sent.

Last week, Google plugged its large language model-powered chatbot called Bard into a bevy of Google products including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Maps, and the Google-owned YouTube, among other apps and services. While it’s understandable that Google would want to marry its newer generative AI efforts with its already-established product lineup, it seems that Google might have moved a little too fast.

According to New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, Bard isn’t the helpful inbox assistant that Google apparently wants it to be — at least yet. In his testing, says Roose, the AI hallucinated entire email correspondences that never took place.

The actor told The Telegraph what he could offer NASA while promoting his immersive film “The Moonwalkers.”

Upgraded laser in California will produce one million X-ray pulses per second to study ultrafast processes at the atomic level.

Professor Geoff Duller from Aberystwyth University explained that, given the considerable age of these artifacts, assigning precise dates to them presented a significant challenge. To address this issue, luminescence dating techniques were employed. These innovative dating methods have broad-ranging implications, enabling the dating of much older materials and facilitating the reconstruction of sites that offer insights into human evolution—in the case of Kalambo Falls, an excavation conducted in the 1960s yielded comparable wooden fragments. Still, their dating had remained elusive, leaving the true importance of the site uncertain until now.

Kalambo Falls is located on the Kalambo River above a 772-foot (235-meter) waterfall on the border of Zambia and Tanzania near Lake Tanganyika. The area is on a ‘tentative ‘list from UNESCO for becoming a World Heritage site because of its archaeological significance.

The SpaceX Super Heavy Starship is already the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. Elon tweeted that future versions will be 10% to 20% longer. If the 20% longer development happens then the stacked rocket will be 144 meters long. Adding 24 meters would be over 60% of the length of the Space Shuttle orbiter which was 37 meters long.

Likely to be 10% to 20% longer in later versions.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 9, 2023

Scientists have been exploring both experimental and theoretical ways to prove quantum supremacy.

Ramis Movassagh, a researcher at Google Quantum AI, recently had a study published in the journal Nature Physics. Here, he has reportedly demonstrated in theory that simulating random quantum circuits and determining their output will be extremely difficult for classical computers. In other words, if a quantum computer solves this problem, it can achieve quantum supremacy.

Continue reading “How can quantum computers be better than classical computers?” »