Lifeboat Foundation

Digital waste is a growing environmental and health problem whether dumped in landfills in the Global North or South. Are there solutions?

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was a recent guest on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, and during the episode, he discussed, among other things, neural technology. During his conversation, Zuckerberg remarked that Elon Musk’s Neuralink would probably not be popular in the next 10–15 years because “normal people” would not want to have devices implanted in their brains that are made of non-mature technology.

Zuckerberg admitted that Meta is researching neural interface tech as part of the company’s push into the metaverse, though he also noted that the tech company is focusing on innovations that can receive signals from the brain but does not send any information back to it.

In later comments, the Meta CEO noted that companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which is developing a device that can be implanted into people’s skulls, is taking neural technology “super far-off.” Neuralink’s implant is designed to record and stimulate brain activity, which Musk has stated could help people address conditions such as obesity.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vIqVjEqEH78

Modern satellites are becoming a collection of mass-produced computers floating in space. By the end of the decade, thousands more will be out there. But with the increasing reliance on orbital technology comes a growing appetite for hacking it.

Data relayed via satellites is not immune to hacking. James Pavur, an Oxford PhD focusing on satellite systems security, has proven the above statement to be disturbingly evident. With his team, he used $300 worth of satellite TV equipment to intercept vast amounts of information distributed along the larger part of the Northern hemisphere.

Continue reading “Satellite hackers can see every email you get” »

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We’re in the midst of a data revolution. The volume of digital data created within the next five years will total twice the amount produced so far — and unstructured data will define this new era of digital experiences.

Unstructured data — information that doesn’t follow conventional models or fit into structured database formats — represents more than 80% of all new enterprise data. To prepare for this shift, companies are finding innovative ways to manage, analyze and maximize the use of data in everything from business analytics to artificial intelligence (AI). But decision-makers are also running into an age-old problem: How do you maintain and improve the quality of massive, unwieldy datasets?

Imagine two towns on two opposite sides of a mountain. People from these towns would probably have to travel all the way around the mountain to visit one another. But, if they wanted to get there faster, they could dig a tunnel straight through the mountain to create a shortcut. That’s the idea behind a wormhole.

A wormhole is like a tunnel between two distant points in our universe that cuts the travel time from one point to the other. Instead of traveling for many millions of years from one galaxy to another, under the right conditions, one could theoretically use a wormhole to cut the travel time down to hours or minutes.

Because wormholes represent shortcuts through space-time, they could even act like time machines. You might emerge from one end of a wormhole at a time earlier than when you entered its other end.

Plants use light waves from only a portion of the spectrum for photosynthesis—the remainder can be recovered and used to generate solar power. That’s the idea behind the solar modules developed by EPFL startup Voltiris. Following encouraging preliminary results, a new pilot installation was recently installed in Graubünden.

In Switzerland, growing tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other light-and heat-intensive vegetables requires building a greenhouse—but operating one consumes a huge amount of power. Farmers have to carefully balance crop yields and economics with environmental concerns. “It costs more than CHF 1.5 million a year to heat a 5-hectare greenhouse,” says Nicolas Weber, the CEO of Voltiris. “And a greenhouse of that size emits roughly the same amount of CO₂ per year as 2,000 people.”

The Swiss federation of fruit & vegetable growers, which cultivate several thousand hectares across the country, has set a target of eliminating all fossil-fuel-based energy from its farming processes by 2040. The system developed by Voltiris can go a long way towards reaching that goal. Its technology is based on the fact that plants don’t use all of the waves contained in sunlight; the remaining ones can be concentrated onto photovoltaic (PV) cells to generate solar power. Voltiris’ system is lightweight and designed to track the sun’s movement across the sky, and boasts daily yields on par with conventional solar panels. The first vegetables grown under Voltiris’ system were harvested this summer through pilot tests carried out at two greenhouses, in the cantons of Valais and Graubünden.

Nokia has re-engineered its 4G/LTE network to cope with extreme conditions on the Moon.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — When the human brain learns something new, it adapts. But when artificial intelligence learns something new, it tends to forget information it already learned.

As companies use more and more data to improve how AI recognizes images, learns languages and carries out other complex tasks, a paper published in Science this week shows a way that computer chips could dynamically rewire themselves to take in new data like the brain does, helping AI to keep learning over time.

“The brains of living beings can continuously learn throughout their lifespan. We have now created an artificial platform for machines to learn throughout their lifespan,” said Shriram Ramanathan, a professor in Purdue University’s School of Materials Engineering who specializes in discovering how materials could mimic the brain to improve computing.

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