Lifeboat Foundation

It feels a bit like a headline ripped from the plotline of the 2013 flick “Gravity” — NASA astronauts suddenly find themselves having to worry more about the threat of space debris whipping around Earth at over 17,000 miles per hour.

Just two weeks after the current crew of the International Space Station had to take emergency shelter in the Russian Soyuz and SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules that are docked to the ISS, NASA has now postponed a planned spacewalk because of the threat.

One source of the increased threat is Russia’s recent anti-satellite missile test that created hundreds, if not thousands, of new pieces of debris in low-earth orbit. On November 15 it was reported that Russia blasted one of its own defunct satellites to smithereens, a move that drew global condemnation.

Most times when we think of deepfakes, we think of the myriad negative applications. From pornography to blackmail to politics, deepfakes are a product of machine learning. They create a lie that is so realistic that it is hard to believe it is not the real thing. In a society plagued by fake news, deepfakes have the potential to do a substantial amount of harm.

But a recent team of researchers found another use for deepfakes — to deepfake the mind. And using machine learning to simulate artificial neural data in this way may make a world of difference for those with disabilities.

For people with full body paralysis, the body can seemingly become a prison. Communicating and the simplest of tasks may appear to be an insurmountable challenge. But even if the body is frozen, the mind may be very active. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a way for these patients to interact with the world.

Continue reading “Benefits Of ‘Deepfaking’ The Mind In Creating Brain-Computer Interfaces” »

And it uses components already commercially available.

Engineers at Stanford University have demonstrated a new, simpler design for a quantum computer that could help practical versions of the machine finally become a reality, a report from New Atlas reveals.

The new design sees a single atom entangle with a series of photons, allowing it to process and store more information, as well as run at room temperature — unlike the prototype machines being developed by the likes of Google and IBM.

Continue reading “A New, Simpler Quantum Computer Runs at Room Temperature” »

And it’s down for tests this year.

Last month, Pantuo Aviation revealed the PANTALA Concept H, a sleek-looking flying taxi concept that has strong similarities to Lilium’s ducted fan eVTOL aircraft at the same time as featuring some key design differences.

Continue reading “The PANTALA Concept H Travels at 186 MPH and Has a 155 Mile Range” »

The original 2017 transformer model was designed for natural language processing (NLP), where it achieved SOTA results. Its performance intrigued machine learning researchers, who have since successfully adapted the attention-based architecture to perception tasks in other modalities, such as the classification of images, video and audio. While transformers have shown their power and potential in these areas, achieving SOTA performance requires training a separate model for each task. Producing a single transformer model capable of processing multiple modalities and datasets and sharing its learnable parameters has thus emerged as an attractive research direction.

To this end, a team from Google Research, University of Cambridge and Alan Turing Institute has proposed PolyViT; a single transformer architecture co-trained on image, audio and video that is parameter-efficient and learns representations that generalize across multiple domains.

The PolyViT design is motivated by the idea that human perception is inherently multimodal and previous studies that have demonstrated transformers’ ability to operate on any modality that can be tokenized. PolyViT shares a single transformer encoder across different tasks and modalities, enabling up to a linear reduction in parameters with the number of tasks.

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We continue our overview of the Longevity Forum’s Science Summit at Oxford’s Oriel College, part of Longevity Week and hosted by Professor Lynne Cox and Jim Mellon.

Longevity. Technology: Severe community-acquired infections (such as community-acquired pneumonia and COVID-19) are more common in older adults, and overall outcomes are worse. But why as we get older are we more susceptible and can we harness the immune system to improve clinical trajectories in older adults?

Professor Liz Sapey is the Chair of Acute Medicine and an academic acute and respiratory medicine physician at the University of Birmingham and University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust. Sapey presented on what is known about susceptibility to infection as we age.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, right? Normally we’d say yes, but experts around the globe say nuclear fusion power, which holds the promise of clean and virtually limitless electricity, could be just around the corner. After nearly six decades with many promises but few results, new advancements may finally tip the scale, according to the Financial Times.

“Fusion is coming, faster than you expect,” Fusion Industry Association exec Andrew Holland told the publication.

There could be many benefits to nuclear fusion. Unlike nuclear fission it would create little waste and, as far as we know, could never result in an accident like Chernobyl. Insert a side-eye here for plans to dump radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay and the Pacific.