Lifeboat Foundation

A hand-held laser pointer produces no noticeable recoil forces when it is “fired” — even though it emits a directed stream of light particles. The reason for this is simply because of its relatively enormous mass compared to the very tiny recoil impulses that the light particles cause when they leave the laser pointer.

However, it has long been clear that optical recoil forces can indeed have a significant effect on correspondingly small particles. For example, the tails of comets point away from the Sun partly due to light pressure. The propulsion of light spacecraft via light sails has also been discussed repeatedly, most recently in connection with the “starshot” project, in which a fleet of miniature spacecraft is to be sent to Alpha Centauri.

This week, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a multibillion-dollar program to develop carbon dioxide removal technologies.

Does the breakthrough to general AI need more data and computing power above all else? Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Metaon the recent debate about scaling sparked by Deepmind’s Gato.

The recent successes of large AI models such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, Google’s PaLM and Deepmind’s Flamingo have sparked a debate about their significance for progress towards general AI. Deepmind’s Gato has recently given a particular boost to the debate, which has been conducted publicly, especially on Twitter.

Gato is a Transformer model trained with numerous data modalities, including images, text, proprioception or joint moments. All training data is processed by Gato in a token sequence similar to those of large language models. Thanks to the versatile training, Gato can text, describe images, play video games or control robotic arms. Deepmind tested the AI model with over 600 benchmarks.

Researchers have created autonomous particles covered with patches of protein “motors.” They hope these bots will tote lifesaving drugs through bodily fluids.

Should we send robots on space missions instead of humans?

The cost differences are huge. In fact, NASA could pursue dozens of robotic missions for the cost of a single human mission. Also worth considering–wealthy entrepreneurs have made great advances recently with private space efforts.

Given the large ambitions for private human space flight, isn’t it time to phase out NASA’s human missions? The private sector has gained ground, and so the government should yield.

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In over six decades since the first satellite, the mode of communication hasn’t changed. Now, this technology will herald a new era of secure, faster connections.

Cryptocurrency scammers are using deep fake videos of Elon Musk and other prominent cryptocurrency advocates to promote a BitVex trading platform scam that steals deposited currency.

This fake BitVex cryptocurrency trading platform claims to be owned by Elon Musk, who created the site to allow everyone to earn up to 30% returns on their crypto deposits.

This scam campaign started earlier this month with threat actors creating or hacking existing YouTube accounts to host deep fake videos of Elon Musk, Cathie Wood, Brad Garlinghouse, Michael Saylor, and Charles Hoskinson.

Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) says that state-backed threat actors used five zero-day vulnerabilities to install Predator spyware developed by commercial surveillance developer Cytrox.

In these attacks, part of three campaigns that started between August and October 2021, the attackers used zero-day exploits targeting Chrome and the Android OS to install Predator spyware implants on fully up-to-date Android devices.

“We assess with high confidence that these exploits were packaged by a single commercial surveillance company, Cytrox, and sold to different government-backed actors who used them in at least the three campaigns discussed below,” said Google TAG members Clement Lecigne and Christian Resell.

THE #QUANTUM #PHYSICISTS Sandu Popescu, Yakir Aharonov and Daniel Rohrlich have been troubled by the same scenario for three decades.

It started when they wrote about a surprising #wave #phenomenon called #superoscillation in 1990. “We were never able to really tell what exactly was bothering us,” said Popescu, a professor at the University of Bristol. “Since then, every year we come back and we see it from a different angle.”

Finally, in December 2020, the trio published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explaining what the problem is: In #quantumsystems, superoscillation appears to violate the law of conservation of #energy. This law, which states that the energy of an isolated system never changes, is more than a bedrock physical principle. It’s now understood to be an expression of the fundamental symmetries of the universe—a “very important part of the edifice of physics,” said Chiara Marletto, a physicist at the University of Oxford.

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