Lifeboat Foundation

The Lucy spacecraft continues to operate in cruise mode – the standard mode for outbound orbit. The team has begun turning on instruments. L’TES and L’Ralph have been powered on and are working normally. Turning on L’LORRI is scheduled for November 8 2021. Other than the solar array, all subsystems continue to work normally.

The joint Anomaly Response Team has been studying the array using an engineering model. Initial tests indicate that the lanyard that pulls out the solar array may not have completed the process successfully; however, it is still uncertain what caused this condition. The team is conducting more tests to determine if this is indeed the case, and what the root cause might be.

An attempt to characterize the array deployment by attempting to move it would occur no earlier than November 16.

A former SpaceX executive, who worked at the aerospace company for 19 years, said the public has a different perception of CEO Elon Musk.

“We see him differently during work and I think the public has a different perception,” Hans Koenigsmann, a SpaceX vice president, told Insider.

As the richest man in the world, with a fortune of $292 billion, Musk is constantly in the public eye.

When most of us pick up an object, we don’t have to think about how to orient it in our hand. It’s something that comes naturally to us as we learn to navigate the world. That’s something that allows young children to be more deft with their hands than even the most advanced robots available today.

But that could quickly change. A team of scientists from MIT’s has developed a system that could one day give robots that same kind of dexterity. Using a AI algorithm, they created a simulated, anthropomorphic hand that could manipulate more than 2,000 objects. What’s more, the system didn’t need to know what it was about to pick up to find a way to move it around in its hand.

The system isn’t ready for real-world use just yet. To start, the team needs to transfer it to an actual robot. That might not be as much of a roadblock as you might think. At the start of the year, we saw researchers from Zhejiang University and the University of Edinburgh successfully transfer an AI reinforcement approach to their robot dog. The system allowed the robot to learn how to walk and recover from falls on its own.

The widow learned of the dissection from a news reporter.

Glass tables, glass desks, and even glass kitchen counters could one day be completely free of wires.

Germany’s COVID infections are now higher than ever. And the numbers keep growing.

That’s despite a relatively high vaccination rate. Almost 70 percent of Germans are fully vaccinated against the virus.

Continue reading “COVID-19 infections are rising dramatically in Germany | COVID-19 Special” »

Brent Oster is the President and CEO of ORBAI. He has 28 years experience in 3D computer graphics, animation, simulation, and AI with Bioware, Electronic Arts, Autodesk, and NVIDIA. He was the co-founder Bioware and Check Six, and he has completed the Stanford Continuing Studies curriculum of classes in entrepreneurial business, along with his degrees in Aerospace Engineering at University of Toronto and Scientific Computing at UC Santa Barbara.

As a Sr Solution Architect at NVIDIA, Brent helped Fortune 500 companies (and startups) looking to adopt ‘AI’, but consistently found that DL architectures tools fell far short of their expectations for ‘AI’. Brent started ORBAI to develop something better for them.

In 2,020 several powerful AI programs were developed which have the potential to alter many aspects of our everyday life. What are these programs, and who is behind them?

Discord link: https://discord.gg/bQrBVb6

Continue reading “Progress Towards an Artificial General Intelligence” »

Last week, TechCrunch ran my TC-1 about Bowery Farming. What began as a piece about a heartily financed New York startup ballooned into an exploration about an emerging field with a rich and fascinating history. I sought to answer some big questions about the efficacy, profitability and sustainability of vertical farming. I would be lying if I told you that I emerged from the other side with satisfactory answers — no doubt all of the above will be clear over time.

I did, however, get the opportunity to talk to several fascinating folks with myriad views on all of the above. One of the folks I kept coming back to was Dickson Despommier — widely regarded as the godfather of vertical farming. It was in his Columbia University courses that many of the fundamental concepts around vertical farming were developed over a number of years.