Lifeboat Foundation

The U.S. Navy has invented a new device to prevent people from speaking, one that people with siblings will recognize instantly. The handheld acoustic hailing and disruption device records a person’s speech and spits it back out again, disrupting their concentration and discouraging them from speaking further. Although an interesting—and very familiar—concept it’s unlikely this tech will ever see use on the battlefield.

The handheld acoustic hailing and disruption (AHAD) was developed by engineers at Naval Surface Warfare, Crane Division, a Navy research and development facility in Indiana that develops handheld and crew-served weapons for the service. The patent, New Scientist reports, was issued in 2019.

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With NASA’s powerful new 322-foot-tall moon rocket fully stacked at Kennedy Space Center, managers said Friday that Feb. 12 is the soonest the unpiloted Artemis 1 mission could blast off toward lunar orbit, a date that hinges on the outcome of a critical fueling test on the launch pad in January.

The central bank of Israel chose Ethereum’s network to launch the stages of its CBDC trial program.

The Bank of Israel reportedly launched a digital currency pilot program, aiming to create its central bank digital currency based on the Ethereum blockchain. However, the project might face some significant challenges.

The ATLAS collaboration is breathing new life into its LHC Run 2 dataset, recorded from 2015 to 2018. Physicists will be reprocessing the entire dataset – nearly 18 PB of collision data – using an updated version of the ATLAS offline analysis software (Athena). Not only will this improve ATLAS physics measurements and searches, it will also position the collaboration well for the upcoming challenges of Run 3 and beyond.

Athena converts raw signals recorded by the ATLAS experiment into more simplified datasets for physicists to study. Its new-and-improved version has been in development for several years and includes multi-threading capabilities, more complex physics-analysis functions and improved memory consumption.

“Our aim was to significantly reduce the amount of memory needed to run the software, widen the types of physics analyses it could do and – most critically – allow current and future ATLAS datasets to be analysed together,” says Zach Marshall, ATLAS Computing Coordinator. “These improvements are a key part of our preparations for future high-intensity operations of the LHC – in particular the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) run beginning around 2,028 which will see ATLAS’s computing resources in extremely high demand.”

You have to know the past to understand the present.

Aptera says you’ll never need to charge its solar-powered three-wheeler. Lucid’s Air Pure sedan aims straight at Tesla. And many more are on the way.

Facebook outlines ambitions for augmented reality glasses.

Facebook is pouring a lot of time and money into augmented reality, including building its own AR glasses with Ray-Ban. Right now, these gadgets can only record and share imagery, but what does the company think such devices will be used for in the future?

A new research project led by Facebook’s AI team suggests the scope of the company’s ambitions. It imagines AI systems that are constantly analyzing peoples’ lives using first-person video; recording what they see, do, and hear in order to help them with everyday tasks. Facebook’s researchers have outlined a series of skills it wants these systems to develop, including “episodic memory” (answering questions like “where did I leave my keys?”) and “audio-visual diarization” (remembering who said what when).

Scientists ask the public for help in figuring out which signals are real.

A flight of the Space Launch System and Orion capsule without astronauts aboard is planned for early next year, a first, long-delayed step toward returning astronauts to the moon’s surface.