Lifeboat Foundation

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SpaceX founder Elon Musk recently shared that the company is already providing Starlink Beta broadband internet service to over 69420 users globally out of over half-a-million customers who pre-ordered the internet service via Starlink.com. According to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, the Starlink constellation is currently actively beaming its signal to users in 11 countries (now 12), including portions of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, France, Austria, Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand. More European countries and regions in the United States will have coverage during the second half of 2021 and early 2022.

This week, SpaceX e-mailed potential customers in the European country of Denmark –“Starlink is now available in limited supply in Denmark!” the e-mail reads. “Users can expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s [megabits per second] over the next several months as we enhance the Starlink system. There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all,” SpaceX wrote in the e-mail. “As we launch more satellites, install more ground stations and improve our networking software, data speed, latency and uptime will improve dramatically.” To date, SpaceX has launched approximately 1740 internet-beaming Starlink satellites out of over 12000 that will be part of the global broadband constellation.

Municipalities regularly have to check for pollution in local waterways, often utilizing crews of workers in boats. The new Nixie system is intended to make things much quicker, simpler and ultimately cheaper, using a water-sampling drone instead.

Developed by New York-based startup Reign Maker, the hardware end of the setup consists of the pole-like Nixie Base sampling device, that has a docking mechanism at the top and a 500-ml (16.9-oz) water collection bottle in a lockable holder at the bottom. It’s designed to work with a client-supplied and-operated DJI Matrice 600 or Matrice 300 RTK multicopter drone – for an extra fee, Reign Maker will provide a pilot and drone.

In either scenario, the drone’s operator begins by hovering the copter over another shore-based worker, who attaches the Base to the undercarriage of the unmodified aircraft. Attaching it involves simply pulling down on a lever at the bottom of the Base to open its docking mechanism, making sure that the mechanism is properly engaged with the drone, then releasing the lever to close and secure it.

In a new patent from AMD, researchers have highlighted techniques for performing machine learning operations using one or more dedicated ML accelerator chiplets. The resulting device is called an Accelerated Processing Device or APD which can be used for both gaming and data center GPUs via different implementations. The method involves configuring a part of the chiplet memory as a cache while the other as directly accessible memory.

The sub-portion of the former is then used by the machine learning accelerators on the same chiplet to perform machine learning operations. The patent is very open-ended with respect to its uses, indicating possible use in CPUs, GPUs, or other caching devices, but the primary target appears to be GPUs with several thousand SIMD units.

One implementation of the APD is configured to accept commands via both graphics and compute pipelines from the command processor, showing the ability to both render graphics as well as compute-intensive workloads required by convolution networks. The APD contains several SIMDs capable of performing vector operations alongside limited scalar and SP tasks similar to existing AMD GPUs.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQfV2_sROBw

On June 25, 2021 NASA published detail description of future missions for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter considering 2nd software update because of HD imaging issue. Ingenuity’s team determined that capturing color images may have been inducing the imaging pipeline glitch, which resulted in the instability (Flight 6 anomaly). So Mars Helicopter needs 2nd software update to make thing going well within upcoming 9th flight. Ingenuity’s first bug was solved by software update (watchdog timer issue). Another software update for Mars Helicopter is intended to return ability to make 13 Megapixels photos on mars without flight anomalies for Ingenuity. Last week Mars Helicopter completed 8th flight on flying to 160 meters South and Perseverance goes to new location Séítah as well. Black and white images are from Ingenuity’s onboard camera directly. Mars Helicopter flew for 77.4 seconds. Maximal horizontal speed was 4 meters per second. Altitude was 10 meters. Ingenuity made amazing work to live on Mars autonomously.

Credit: nasa.gov, NASA/JPL-Caltech, NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

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Plus: SoftBank halts Pepper the robot production.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in observing a crystal that consists only of electrons. Such Wigner crystals were already predicted almost ninety years ago but could only now be observed directly in a semiconductor material.

Crystals have fascinated people through the ages. Who hasn’t admired the complex patterns of a snowflake at some point, or the perfectly symmetrical surfaces of a rock crystal? The magic doesn’t stop even if one knows that all this results from a simple interplay of attraction and repulsion between atoms and electrons. A team of researchers led by Ataç Imamoğlu, professor at the Institute for Quantum Electronics at ETH Zurich, have now produced a very special crystal. Unlike normal crystals, it consists exclusively of electrons. In doing so, they have confirmed a theoretical prediction that was made almost ninety years ago and which has since been regarded as a kind of holy grail of condensed matter physics. Their results were recently published in the scientific journal Nature.

Our generation will certainly not be around by then, and it’s unclear what will happen to humanity as a species, but in about 4.5 billion years, our galaxy will not be anything like we know it, thanks to a mammoth galactic event that will see the Milky Way merging with nearby Andromeda.

On July 11, when billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson, along with a crew, travels to the edge of space on a Virgin Galactic test flight, astronaut Sirisha Bandla will be taking care of theresearcher experience on the Unity22 mission.

Businesses around the world rushed Saturday to contain a ransomware attack that has paralyzed their computer networks, a situation complicated in the U.S. by offices lightly staffed at the start of the Fourth of July holiday weekend.

It’s not yet known how many organizations have been hit by demands that they pay a ransom in order to get their systems working again. But some cybersecurity researchers predict the attack targeting customers of software supplier Kaseya could be one of the broadest ransomware attacks on record.

It follows a scourge of headline-grabbing attacks over recent months that have been a source of diplomatic tension between U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin over whether Russia has become a safe haven for cybercriminal gangs.