Lifeboat Foundation

Alignment of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is now complete. After full review, the observatory has been confirmed to be capable of capturing crisp, well-focused images with each of its four powerful onboard science instruments. Upon completing the seventh and final stage of telescope alignment, the team held a set of key decision meetings and unanimously agreed that Webb is ready to move forward into its next and final series of preparations, known as science instrument commissioning. This process will take about two months before scientific operations begin in the summer.

The alignment of the telescope across all of Webb’s instruments can be seen in a series of images that captures the observatory’s full field of view.

Continue reading “NASA’s Webb In Full Focus, Ready for Instrument Commissioning” »

When it comes to responding to emerging threats, the Pentagon’s director for electromagnetic warfare suggested today that the US military’s electronic warfare organization should borrow a leaf from SpaceX.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk said that Russia had jammed Starlink terminals in Ukraine for hours at a time after SpaceX shipped Starlink terminals to Ukraine in February in an apparent effort to help Ukraine preserve its internet connection amid the war with Russia. Starlink was back up and running after a software upgrade, according to Musk, who added on March 25 that the constellation had “resisted all hacking & jamming attempts” in Ukraine.

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s SpaceX Shuts Down Russian Jamming Attack!” »

For years, the brain has been thought of as a biological computer that processes information through traditional circuits, whereby data zips straight from one cell to another. While that model is still accurate, a new study led by Salk Professor Thomas Albright and Staff Scientist Sergei Gepshtein shows that there’s also a second, very different way that the brain parses information: through the interactions of waves of neural activity. The findings, published in Science Advances on April 22, 2022, help researchers better understand how the brain processes information.

“We now have a new understanding of how the computational machinery of the brain is working,” says Albright, the Conrad T. Prebys Chair in Vision Research and director of Salk’s Vision Center Laboratory. “The model helps explain how the brain’s underlying state can change, affecting people’s attention, focus, or ability to process information.”

Researchers have long known that waves of electrical activity exist in the brain, both during sleep and wakefulness. But the underlying theories as to how the brain processes information—particularly sensory information, like the sight of a light or the sound of a bell—have revolved around information being detected by specialized brain cells and then shuttled from one neuron to the next like a relay.

A 200-μm scale 3D reconstruction of the human brain was created based on ultrahigh-field quantitative MRI and light microscopy.

Eleuther AI developed GPT Neo, an open-source model, an autoregressive transformer using the mesh library.

Engineers have developed a way to mass-produce diamond wafers that could store the equivalent of a billion Blu-ray disks on a single device.

Elon talks about x-risks and making us a multi-planetary species, amongst other things.

What’s on Elon Musk’s mind? In this exclusive conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, Musk details how the radical new innovations he’s working on — Tesla’s intelligent humanoid robot Optimus, SpaceX’s otherworldly Starship and Neuralink’s brain-machine interfaces, among others — could help maximize the lifespan of humanity and create a world where goods and services are abundant and accessible for all. It’s a compelling vision of a future worth getting excited about. (Recorded at the Tesla Texas Gigafactory on April 6, 2022)

Continue reading “[Exclusive] Elon Musk: A future worth getting excited about | TED | Tesla Gigafactory interview” »

Last week, NASA’s Perseverance Rover captured a gorgeous view of Phobos eclipsing the Sun, from the surface of Mars. From the point of view of any Martian microbes lurking out there, the eclipse may have seemed more ominous (yeah ok, there might not be living organisms up there, let alone ones sentient enough to grasp the concept of an eclipse) as the moon is destined by physics to one day slam into the red planet.

Phobos – the closest of Mars’ two moons – is set to get ever closer to the planet, before its final descent, while Deimos will drift ever outwards until it leaves Mars’ orbit.

Alex Pourbaix, the CEO of Cenovus, Canada’s second-largest oil and gas company, spoke up in a call with industry analysts where he criticized the plan and the money being offered to the industry. He called for a much large commitment from governments if the industry were to build large-scale CCUS. Pourbaix suggested that there were examples from other countries where the industry was being given up to 70% of the capital costs on new CCUS projects and was receiving additional money to offset operating costs.

While Pourbaix was complaining about the lack of money to build CCUS projects, he also announced to analysts that Cenovus had earned a seven-fold jump in its quarterly profits, and was tripling dividend payments to shareholders. This wasn’t mentioned in Jones’ article but did appear in the same edition of the paper, two pages later, tucked away well below the fold. It reported Cenovus had announced per-share dividends rising from $0.14 US to $0.42, with earnings exceeding analyst estimates at $0.79 per share. In the same report, Cenovus announced production output of synthetic crude from oil sands operations growing from over 769 to almost 800,000 barrels a day. There was no mention of GHG emissions contributions. And when I went to look at the company’s annual and quarterly reports, there was no reporting on GHG emissions or even intensity per barrel or per cubic metre related to production although there was a pledge to sustainability and best ESG practices. A 2020 Bloomsberg report states that GHG emissions at Cenovus continue to rise.

Cenovus is one of the founding members of the Clean Resource Innovation Network (CRIN). Its mission is to keep Canadian oil and natural gas companies competitive in world markets. Other members are fossil fuel companies, think tanks, academics, and government departments. CRIN acknowledges a low-carbon future but seems to lack a roadmap to get there. As I perused the website there was little information on strategies for carbon emission reductions. There was content related to intensity per unit of production as well as discussion about cleaner fuel standards. But I found nothing about CCUS.