Lifeboat Foundation

China’s national share of smart-computing power is 52%, compared to 19% in the U.S.

Recently, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) released a white paper on the country’s computing power. According to the paper, which was translated by ChinAI, the country’s computing power reached 135 exaFlops (EFlops), an increase of 48 EFlops from last year. One EFlop is equivalent to the computing power of roughly two million laptops.

So, what’s the point in all this computing speed? China is accelerating its computing power for a faster AI adoption. It is evident in the way it prioritizes its resources for next-generation computing. Beijing divides its AI needs into basic-, smart-, and super-computing. Between 2016 and 2,020 the country dropped its basic-computing share to 57% from 95% and increased smart-computing to 41% from 3%.

Continue reading “China’s closing the AI gap with U.S.” »

Researchers in Iceland are growing over 100,000 genetically modified barley plants inside a greenhouse for a very unusual purpose: creating lab-grown meat, the BBC reports.

The altered barley gets harvested and purified to extract “growth factor” proteins, which, in turn, can be used to cultivate lab-grown meat — an innovation that could make the lab-grown meat industry rely even less on live animals in the future.

The company behind the greenhouse, ORF Genetics, is growing the biogenetically engineered barley over 22,000 square feet using high-tech hydroponic cultivation methods.

In patients with severe lung disease caused by viral infections, physicians sometimes turn to ECMO—a life support machine that takes over the functions of the lungs, heart, or both when other support options appear to be failing. But initial reports of ECMO use in patients with COVID-19 described very high mortality, and some physicians recommended against its use.

New data from Columbia University and other ECMO centers throughout the world now show that more than 60% of severe COVID-19 patients who received ECMO have survived.

“The results of this large-scale international registry study, while hardly definitive evidence, provide a real-world understanding of the potential for ECMO to save lives in a highly select population of COVID-19 patients,” says senior author Daniel Brodie, MD, professor of medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and director of the Adult ECMO Program at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

NASA, along with the European Space Agency, is developing a campaign to return the Martian samples to Earth.

NASA is getting ready to launch a new science spacecraft Saturday (Oct. 16) to study asteroids near Jupiter, and you can watch mission coverage live all week.

Lucy — which will study Trojan asteroids, or asteroids that share the orbit of the giant planet — will fly to space from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. With blast-off targeting 5:34 a.m. EDT (0934 GMT), live launch coverage will begin at 5 a.m. EDT (0900 GMT) on NASA Television, the NASA app, NASA social media channels and here at Space.com.

An international team of researchers has made the world’s most precise measurement of the neutron’s lifetime, which may help answer questions about the early universe.

An international team of physicists led by researchers at Indiana University Bloomington has announced the world’s most precise measurement of the neutron’s lifetime.

The results from the team, which encompasses scientists from over 10 national labs and universities in the United States and abroad, represent a more than two-fold improvement over previous measurements — with an uncertainty of less than one-tenth of a percent.

Human Brain atlas.

From robotic hands to brain-like computers, the Human Brain Project has produced some intriguing results.

Continue reading “The Human Brain Project: six achievements of Europe’s largest neuroscience programme” »

Thanks to artificial intelligence, drones can now fly autonomously at remarkably high speeds, while navigating unpredictable, complex obstacles using only their onboard sensing and computation.

This feat was achieved by getting the drone’s neural network to learn flying by watching a sort of “simulated expert” – an algorithm that flew a computer-generated drone through a simulated environment full of complex obstacles. Now, this “expert” could not be used outside of simulation, but its data was used to teach the neural network how to predict the best trajectory, based only on the data from the sensors.

The robot AgnathaX is modeled on the lamprey, a jawless, blood-sucking fish that’s been largely unchanged by evolution for the past several hundred million years.