Lifeboat Foundation

A community of rationally-minded people, seeking radical life extension.

Things are starting to get a bit strange in the world of the offshore wind industry in Australia. Nothing has been built yet – in fact legislation allowing even a feasibility study is yet to be finalised – but the sheer scale of the proposals is jaw-dropping.

In total, according to RenewEconomy’s own offshore wind map of Australia, nearly 40GW of project proposals scattered around the southern half of the country (the offshore wind resource is not nearly as interesting in the northern part of the island continent) have been unveiled by various developers.

Some 12GW of proposals, and accompanying headlines, have come from a little known Danish outfit called Copenhagen Energy, not to be confused with Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, which is the biggest shareholder in the country’s most advanced wind project, the 2.2GW Star of the South proposal in Victoria.

Jojo Punnackal from Ernakulam, Kerala has been growing the gac fruit — an exotic and nutritious fruit from Vietnam — for the past four years. He earns around Rs 2 lakh by selling its seeds alone.

The European nuclear research facility CERN announced on Tuesday that scientists using the upgraded Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had identified three previously unknown particles.

After a three-year suspension for improvements, the world’s biggest and most powerful particle collider resumed operation. The modernized LHC enables researchers to analyze twenty times more collisions than previously.

Using the improved collider, CERN researchers discovered a “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks.”

University of Texas at Dallas physicists and their collaborators at Yale University have demonstrated an atomically thin, intelligent quantum sensor that can simultaneously detect all the fundamental properties of an incoming light wave.

The research, published April 13 in the journal Nature, demonstrates a new concept based on quantum geometry that could find use in health care, deep-space exploration and remote-sensing applications.

“We are excited about this work because typically, when you want to characterize a wave of light, you have to use different instruments to gather information, such as the intensity, wavelength and polarization state of the light. Those instruments are bulky and can occupy a significant area on an optical table,” said Dr. Fan Zhang, a corresponding author of the study and associate professor of physics in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

Researchers at Oxford University’s Department of Computer Science, in collaboration with colleagues from Bogazici University, Turkey, have developed a novel artificial intelligence (AI) system to enable autonomous vehicles (AVs) achieve safer and more reliable navigation capability, especially under adverse weather conditions and GPS-denied driving scenarios. The results have been published today in Nature Machine Intelligence.

Yasin Almalioglu, who completed the research as part of his DPhil in the Department of Computer Science, said, “The difficulty for AVs to achieve precise positioning during challenging adverse weather is a major reason why these have been limited to relatively small-scale trials up to now. For instance, weather such as rain or snow may cause an AV to detect itself in the wrong lane before a turn, or to stop too late at an intersection because of imprecise positioning.”

To overcome this problem, Almalioglu and his colleagues developed a novel, self-supervised deep learning model for ego-motion estimation, a crucial component of an AV’s driving system that estimates the car’s moving position relative to objects observed from the car itself. The model brought together richly-detailed information from visual sensors (which can be disrupted by adverse conditions) with data from weather-immune sources (such as radar), so that the benefits of each can be used under different weather conditions.

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The World Robot Conference 2022 was held in Beijing. Due to the ongoing offline pandemic, only Chinese robotics companies were represented, and the rest of the world joined in the online format. But the Chinese booths were also, as always, a lot to see. We gathered for you all the most interesting things from the largest robot exhibition in one video!

Continue reading “WRC 2022 — China’s largest robot exhibition | Robots and technologies at the exhibition in China” »

Neuralink cofounder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk allegedly approached Synchron, a company that manufactures chips that can be implanted in patient’s brains.

When Neuralink co-founder Max Hodak announced his enigmatic departure from the company earlier this year, it was unclear whether he quit due to disagreements with fellow co-founder Elon Musk or if he was fired for moving too slow on clinical trials.

Now, Futurism has learned, Hodak is working on what appears to be a well-funded new brain interface venture called Science Corp. According to an SEC filing from July, Hodak has already raised more than $47 million from 14 investors for the new company — not quite as much as Neuralink’s $363 million to date, but a rousing start that could signal growing competition in the nascent neurotech market.

Moreover, Hodak appears to be taking some talent from Neuralink with him. Alan Mardinly, Neuralink’s longtime director of biology, recently changed his LinkedIn account to say that he has been working at a “stealth startup” since July 2021 and left his position at Neuralink in August 2021 — and posted a link to Science Corp’s hiring page along with an exhortation to “join early,” strongly suggesting that he’s on board the venture.