Lifeboat Foundation

The just-issued World Robotics Report announced an all-time high of 517,385 new industrial robots installed in 2021 in factories around the world, representing 31% year-on-year growth. That brought the current stock of operational robots around the globe to about 3.5 million, a new record.

This robot record was reached half a century after the development of SHAKEY, the world’s first “mobile intelligent robot.” According to the 2017 IEEE Milestone citation, it “could perceive its surroundings, infer implicit facts from explicit ones, create plans, recover from errors in plan execution, and communicate using ordinary English.

The robot that was going to start the Third Industrial Revolution.

Continue reading “History Of AI In 33 Breakthroughs: The First AI-Driven Robot” »

Could this be the reason why we haven’t spotted them yet?

Believers in the Drake Equation may have found just the right explanation for why alien civilizations haven’t been spotted by humanity yet. A new study published by U.S.-based researchers states that alien civilizations are likely looking for particular types of stars when trying to establish an intra-galactic base, and our Sun simply does not meet their criterion, Universe Today.

SETI does not make sense

Continue reading “Advanced alien civilizations haven’t contacted us because of the age of our Sun” »

Scientists with the University of Chicago have discovered a way to create a material that can be made like a plastic, but conducts electricity more like a metal.

The research, published Oct. 26 in Nature, shows how to make a kind of material in which the molecular fragments are jumbled and disordered, but can still conduct electricity extremely well.

This goes against all of the rules we know about for conductivity—to a scientist, it’s kind of like seeing a car driving on water and still going 70 mph. But the finding could also be extraordinarily useful; if you want to invent something revolutionary, the process often first starts with discovering a completely new material.

Just to return the emphasis to ‘out there’.

Upcoming launches and landings of crew members to and from the International Space Station, and launches of rockets delivering spacecraft that observe the Earth, visit other planets and explore the universe.

This spacecraft got a good look at Earth on its way to Jupiter.

For the first time, physicists have observed novel quantum effects in a topological insulator at room temperature. This breakthrough, published as the cover article of the October issue of Nature Materials, came when Princeton scientists explored a topological material based on the element bismuth.

The scientists have used topological insulators to demonstrate quantum effects for more than a decade, but this experiment is the first time these effects have been observed at room temperature. Typically, inducing and observing quantum states in topological insulators requires temperatures around absolute zero, which is equal to-459 degrees Fahrenheit (or-273 degrees Celsius).

This finding opens up a new range of possibilities for the development of efficient quantum technologies, such as spin-based electronics, which may potentially replace many current electronic systems for higher energy efficiency.

face_with_colon_three Tricorder from star trek here we come. #Singularity

An instrument found on workbenches around the world has been scaled down enough to be used in a smartphone.

Circa 2020 face_with_colon_three

The organism could be used to protect humans and equipment on the International Space Station.

Until recently, it was widely believed among physicists that it was impossible to compress light below the so-called diffraction limit (see below), except when using metal nanoparticles, which unfortunately also absorb light. It therefore seemed impossible to compress light strongly in dielectric materials such as silicon, which are key materials in information technologies and come with the important advantage that they do not absorb light.

Interestingly, it was shown theoretically in 2006 that the diffraction limit also does not apply to dielectrics. Still, no one has succeeded in showing this in the real world, simply because no one has been able to build the necessary dielectric nanostructures until now.

A research team from DTU has successfully designed and built a structure, a so-called dielectric nanocavity, which concentrates light in a volume 12 times below the diffraction limit. The result is groundbreaking in optical research and has just been published in Nature Communications.