Lifeboat Foundation

We’re sending a new pair of X-ray eyes into the universe!

NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) is our first satellite dedicated to measuring the polarization of X-rays. Polarized light is made up of electric fields that vibrate in a single direction—and IXPE’s state-of-the-art X-ray vision will help scientists study the spin of black holes, the magnetic fields of pulsars, and other cosmic phenomena.

Continue reading “Watch NASA’s IXPE Observatory Launch Into Space — Official Live Broadcast” »

China is now making every effort to gain silicon independence. According to the plan of the ruling party, by 2025 at least 70% of chips in Chinese products should be local production. A special role in achieving this goal is assigned to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), which is actively developing advanced technologies in the production of semiconductor products.

We talk a lot about electric cars, and it’s evident that engineers are working toward fossil fuel alternatives for our land-based travel. But what about airplanes? In 2019, 18.27 billion gallons of fuel were used by planes. That’s far from carbon-neutral.

Soon though, we could feel less guilty about flying. A team of researchers has created a prototype jet engine that’s able to propel itself forward using only electricity. Their study was published in AIP Advances in May 2020.

Synthesia, a startup using AI to create synthetic videos, is walking a fine, but thus far prosperous, line between being creepy and being pretty freakin’ cool.

Today, it announced the close of a $50 million Series B funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from GV and existing investors Firstmark Capital, LDV Capital, Seedcamp and MMC Ventures.

Synthesia allows anyone to turn text or a slide deck presentation into a video, complete with a talking avatar. Customers can leverage existing avatars, created from the performance of actors, or create their own in minutes by uploading some video. Users also can upload a recording of their voice, which can be transformed to say just about anything under the sun.

Engineers have made bendable solar cells from ultra thin semiconductors—which for all their elasticity still boast a power-per-weight ratio on par with established thin-film solar cells.

The tech-themed Beyond Expo saw hundreds of mainland tech investors and executives cross the border to discuss their visions for Macau.

Published: 10:00pm, 3 Dec, 2021.

The DeepMind team has made probably the most ambitious attempt yet to deploy AI to calculate electron density, the end result of DFT calculations. “It’s sort of the ideal problem for machine learning: you know the answer, but not the formula you want to apply,” says Aron Cohen, a theoretical chemist who has long worked on DFT and who is now at DeepMind.

A team led by scientists at the London-based artificial-intelligence company DeepMind has developed a machine-learning model that suggests a molecule’s characteristics by predicting the distribution of electrons within it. The approach, described in the 10 December issue of Science¹, can calculate the properties of some molecules more accurately than existing techniques.

“To make it as accurate as they have done is a feat,” says Anatole von Lilienfeld, a materials scientist at the University of Vienna.

Continue reading “DeepMind AI tackles one of chemistry’s most valuable techniques” »

I wonder how many iterations of “kinematic reproduction” would result in sentience.

Artificial Intelligence has made a landmark achievement by creating robots that can reproduce. US scientists who created the first living robots claim they can now reproduce on their own. Scientists now claim the discovery is a new form of biological reproduction that was not known to science yet. Experts say the parent robot and its babies, called Xenobots, are entirely biological.

Continue reading “Meet Xenobots 3.0 — World’s First Living Robots, Made of Frog Cells, That Can Reproduce” »

IBM and Samsung claim they’ve made a breakthrough in semiconductor design. On day one of the IEDM conference in San Francisco, the two companies unveiled a new design for stacking transistors vertically on a chip. With current processors and SoCs, transistors lie flat on the surface of the silicon, and then electric current flows from side-to-side. By contrast, Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET) sit perpendicular to one another and current flows vertically.

According to IBM and Samsung, this design has two advantages. First, it will allow them to bypass many performance limitations to extend Moore’s Law beyond the 1-nanometer threshold. More importantly, the design leads to less wasted energy thanks to greater current flow. They estimate VTFET will lead to processors that are twice as fast and use 85 percent less power than chips designed with FinFET transistors. IBM and Samsung claim the process may one day allow for phones that go a full week on a single charge. They say it could also make certain energy-intensive tasks, including cryptomining, more power-efficient and therefore less impactful on the environment.

IBM and Samsung haven’t said when they plan to commercialize the design. They’re not the only companies attempting to push beyond the 1-nanometer barrier., Intel said it aims to finalize the design for angstrom-scale chips by 2024. The company plans to accomplish the feat using its new “Intel 20A” node and RibbonFET transistors.