Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk is at it again on Twitter, this time taking shots at the White House’s plan to impose a “billionaires’ tax” in the U.S.

Musk agreed with another tweeter’s statement by writing “SpaceX & Tesla would probably have died,” if there was a similar tax initiative in 2008, as “both narrowly escaped bankruptcy in 2008.”

## Elon Musk could pay an additional $50 billion in taxes.

Continue reading “Musk claims SpaceX and Tesla wouldn’t have flourished under them in 2008” »

JWST recently snapped this infrared test image of a star, which also shows fainter background stars and galaxies — a testament to the telescope’s power.

In early February, NASA engineers began to remotely align the 18 hexagonal segments of the James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror, which had been folded away for launch. The goal of this meticulous, three-month-long process is to perfectly position the mirror segments relative to each other, creating a single, smooth, 6.5-meter-wide surface that can gather and focus light from the distant cosmos.

You may recall earlier snapshots that marked previous milestones. For example, the second of seven milestones was punctuated with a shot taken before the mirrors were fully aligned; it featured multiple images of a single star. Now, NASA has announced the fifth major alignment milestone is complete. Called fine phasing, this step helped to identify and correct small differences between individual mirror segments to bring the infrared universe into sharp, clear focus.

Continue reading “James Webb releases sharpest IR image ever taken from space” »

A newly discovered data wiper malware that wipes routers and modems has been deployed in the cyberattack that targeted the KA-SAT satellite broadband service to wipe SATCOM modems on February 24, affecting thousands in Ukraine and tens of thousands more across Europe.

The malware, dubbed AcidRain by researchers at SentinelOne, is designed to brute-force device file names and wipe every file it can find, making it easy to redeploy in future attacks.

SentinelOne says this might hint at the attackers’ lack of familiarity with the targeted devices’ filesystem and firmware or their intent to develop a reusable tool.

Alpha Centauri seems almost within grasp as promising research soars into reality.

Lightsails were once a thing of science fiction, evolving through several variations over the last 40 years. Now, science fiction is becoming reality. Advances in laser technology and new ultrastrong, ultralight materials open up the possibility of venturing beyond our solar system in the not-too-distant future.

Researchers from UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania recently published two papers outlining various shapes and heat-dissipating materials they tested to evaluate lightsails beyond previous limits. The research was conducted in conjunction with the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, a project with the goal of sending a microchip-sized probe to the Alpha Centauri system, which, at just over 4 light-years away, is the closest and possibly most habitable neighboring star system. Breakthrough Starshot plans to use a high-powered laser array to propel tiny lightsail probes through space at a top speed of some 20 percent the speed of light. Incorporated into the sails would be minuscule scientific instruments, such as cameras, magnetometers, and communicators that could beam information back to Earth as they fly through the Alpha Centuari system.

Continue reading “Lightsail technology billows into the future” »

Almost 1,000 adults and children with type 1 diabetes have been given a potentially life-altering ‘artificial pancreas’ by the NHS in England as part of the first nationwide test into the effectiveness of this technology in the world.

Health and high quality care for all, now and for future generations.

NVIDIA says their 3D scene rendering AI runs up to 1,000 times faster than older models without sacrificing image quality.

We’ve seen this funky dual disk polar printer already recently, but [Heinz Loepmeier] has been busy working on it, so here’s an update. The primary focus here is nozzleboss, a blender plugin which enables the surface textures of already sliced objects to be manipulated. The idea is to read in the gcode for the object, and convert it to an internal mesh representation that blender needs in order to function. From there the desired textures can be applied to the surfaces for subsequent stages to operate upon. One trick that nozzleboss can do is to create weight maps to tweak the extrusion flow rate or print velocity value according to the pixel value at the surface — such ‘velocity painting’ can produce some very subtle surface effects on previously featureless faces. Another

Continue reading “Texture Map GCode Directly In Blender With NozzleBoss” »

The young man has made several statements that compromise the scientific community, but the most shocking is related to CERN and how it could have destroyed our universe.

Regarded as a genius child and listed as the “most intelligent young man in the world”, Max Laughlin surprised the world with his great intellectual abilities.

With only 13 years old he could develop from scratch its own device for energy access. A system that is capable of providing all the necessary energy without the need for oil, coal or solar energy.

Training datasets are very important for experimenting with varied data to train new AI models. However, many commonly used public data sets contain labeling errors. This makes it challenging to train robust models, particularly for novel tasks. Many researchers use techniques such as employing a variety of data quality control procedures to overcome these shortcomings. However, there is no centralized repository consisting of examples of using these strategies.

Meta AI researchers have recently released Mephisto. It is a new platform to collect, share, and iterate on the most promising approaches to collecting training datasets for AI models. Researchers can exchange unique collecting strategies with Mephisto in a reusable and iterable format. It also allows them to change out components and quickly locate the exact annotations required, minimizing the barrier to custom task creation.

The team uncovers many common pathways for driving a complex annotation activity from concept to data collection in Mephisto. In addition to improving the quality of datasets, Mephisto also enhances the experience of the researchers and annotators who created the data set.