Lifeboat Foundation

Think about the last time that you found yourself driving a particularly treacherous blind curve.

Pretty darned scary, I’d bet.

Indeed, I realize that even the mere act of thinking about such an alarming encounter can be traumatic, so no need to reflectively linger on that reenactment in your mind. Go ahead and change your thought patterns to something less stressful such as mulling over the latest online cat videos or perhaps that delicious scoop of ice cream you recently consumed.

Continue reading “Here’s How Blind Curves Could Stir Up Knuckle-Gripping Jitters About AI Self-Driving Cars” »

No pressure.

We’re just weeks away from the next generation of astronomy.

Continue reading “NASA’s James Webb Telescope Could Detect Alien Life in Just 20 Hours” »

Including ‘cloud, AI, and machine learning-enabled automation’.

The US National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL) announced on Thursday that it has chosen Microsoft to build advanced chips for the military.

“Historically, the security requirements associated with developing microelectronics have limited the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) ability to leverage the latest innovations,” wrote in a blog Tom Keane, Corporate Vice President, Azure Global, Microsoft Azure.

Continue reading “It’s Official. Microsoft Will Build Advanced Chips for the US Military” »

Did you see the full “Beaver Moon?” Here it is, captured by photographers around the world as our satellite rose spectacularly—and from some locations was eclipsed by the Earth.

If you were in Europe it looked liked any other rising full Moon—spectacular, for sure, though nothing out of the ordinary… if you can call a glowing orbiting orb “ordinary.”

For those in North America, Australia, and eastern Asia the full Moon went a copper-reddish color at all but a slither of its surface entered Earth’s shadow in space.

As part of its recently announced rebranding, Facebook is doubling down on its vision of the metaverse, an immersive virtual-reality environment for gaming, work meetings, and socializing. In promotional materials, Mark Zuckerberg and his friends enter the metaverse via the company’s own Oculus headsets, and are transformed into cartoon-y animated torsos, often while arranged around a virtual boardroom.

According to Zuckerberg, the metaverse promises an at-work reality better than our own, with lush backdrops and infinite personal customization (as long as that customization stops at the waist for humanoid characters). Borrowing elements from world-building games and environments like Second Life and Fortnite, and inspiration from science-fiction referents like Ready Player One and the Matrix, the insinuation is that working within the metaverse will be fun. (This despite the irony that all of these virtual worlds are positioned as dystopias by their creators.)

Full Story:

This is a farm in China.
This is a Mcdonalds in New York.
This is an apartment complex in Mumbai.
And this is a skyscraper in London.

What do all these have in common? Well as it turns out. All of these places’ successes or failures…
Economic booms or collapses…
And even population growth or famines…
Might soon be decided by the nation of Morocco.

Continue reading “How Morocco Secretly Controls China, India, The United States, And the World” »

When we look into the night sky, we see the universe as it once was. We know that in the past, the universe was once warmer and denser than it is now. When we look deep enough into the sky, we see the microwave remnant of the big bang known as the cosmic microwave background. That marks the limit of what we can see. It marks the extent of the observable universe from our vantage point.

The cosmic background we observe comes from a time when the universe was already about 380,000 years old. We can’t directly observe what happened before that. Much of the earlier period is fairly well understood given what we know about physics, but the earliest moments of the big bang remain a bit of a mystery. According to the standard model, the earliest moments of the universe were so hot and dense that even the fundamental forces of the universe acted differently than they do now. To better understand the big bang, we need to better understand these forces.

One of the more difficult forces to understand is the weak force. Unlike more familiar forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, the weak is mostly seen through its effect of radioactive decay. So we can study the weak force by measuring the rate at which things decay. But there’s a problem when it comes to neutrons.

Freshwater is scarce in many parts of the world. While currently there is enough fresh water on earth to support consumption, it is not available in a way where supply meets demand. To solve this issue, engineers at ETH Zurich have developed a new device that can harvest drinking water 24 hours around the clock, with no energy input, even under the blazing sun.

It consists of a specially coated glass pane, which both reflects solar radiation and also radiates away its own heat through the atmosphere to outer space. The resulting device thus cools itself down to as much as 15 degrees Celsius below the ambient temperature. At the bottom of the pane, the moisture in the air condenses into the water which is collected.

The glass pane is coated with layers of a specially designed polymer and silver, which allows it to firstly reflect sunlight away to prevent it from heating up. The coating causes the pane to emit infrared radiation at a specific wavelength window to the outer space, with no absorption by the atmosphere nor reflection back onto the pane.

Commercial storage: Many customers want as many functions and high performance as possible, but want to pay as little as possible. Franz-Josef Feilmeier, CEO of Fenecon, explains how this fits together.