Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) have harnessed a technique that helps telescopes see objects in the night sky more clearly to fight against dangerous and costly space debris.

“Adaptive optics is like removing the twinkle from the stars.”

The researchers’ work on adaptive optics — which removes the haziness caused by turbulence in the atmosphere — has been applied to a new ‘guide star’ laser for better identifying, tracking and safely moving space debris.

Fully autonomous exploration and mapping of the unknown is a cutting-edge capability for commercial drones.

Drone autonomy is getting more and more impressive, but we’re starting to get to the point where it’s getting significantly more difficult to improve on existing capabilities. Companies like Skydio are selling (for cheap!) commercial drones that have no problem dynamically path planning around obstacles at high speeds while tracking you, which is pretty amazing, and it can also autonomously create 3D maps of structures. In both of these cases, there’s a human indirectly in the loop, either saying “follow me” or “map this specific thing.” In other words, the level of autonomous flight is very high, but there’s still some reliance on a human for high-level planning. Which, for what Skydio is doing, is totally fine and the right way to do it.

Continue reading “Exyn Brings Level 4 Autonomy to Drones” »

Thoughts?

Getting past the cult of Genius and the bleakness of capitalist futurism.

The Pacific Northwest is known for its spectacular views and dark and rainy beaches. There are deep green rainforests filled with redwoods and tall trees. With its miles and miles of hiking trails, it’s known for its mountains, the Columbia River Gorge, and Lewis and Clark’s expedition.

I think it’s also the perfect area for writers and mysteries—and that’s the reason why I set my latest cozy series along the Oregon Coast. I had the privilege of living in Oregon for two years and took multiple trips to the coast to enjoy the water, wildlife, and hiking.

In Death Bee Comes Her, the first installment in my new Oregon Honeycomb mysteries, Wren Johnson lives in a fictional coastal town that combines the charms of several of my favorite places to visit. The people there are quirky, smart, and from sturdy pioneer stock, from Wren’s Aunt Eloise, to loggers, surfers, and crab and whale boat operators.

The California-based EV company has lofty dreams of using its new platform to convert droves classic vehicles.

Perovskite has a lot going for it in our search for a cheap, efficient way to harvest solar energy. With a dusting of organic molecules, these crystalline structures have been able to convert more than a quarter of the light falling onto them into electricity.

Theoretically, perovskite crystals made with the right mix of materials could push this limit beyond 30 percent, outperforming silicon-based solar cells (which is currently the most abundant solar panel technology), and at a much lower cost. It’s all good on paper, but in reality, something has been holding the technology back.

Combine calcium, titanium, and oxygen under the right conditions and you’ll form repeating cages of molecules that look like a bunch of boxes joined at their corners.

For the first time, scientists have succeeded in extracting and analyzing Neandertal chromosomal DNA preserved in cave sediments.

The field of ancient DNA has revealed important aspects of our evolutionary past, including our relationships with our distant cousins, Denisovans, and Neandertals. These studies have relied on DNA from bones and teeth, which store DNA and protect it from the environment. But such skeletal remains are exceedingly rare, leaving large parts of human history inaccessible to genetic analysis.

To fill these gaps, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology developed new methods for enriching and analyzing human nuclear DNA from sediments, which are abundant at almost every archaeological site. Until now, only mitochondrial DNA has been recovered from archaeological sediments, but this is of limited value for studying population relationships. The advent of nuclear DNA analyses of sediments provides new opportunities to investigate the deep human past.

The silicon Ouroboros.

TSMC produces chips for AMD, but it also now uses AMD’s processors to control the equipment that it uses to make chips for AMD (and other clients too). Sounds like a weird circulation of silicon, but that’s exactly what happens behind the scenes at the world’s largest third-party foundry.

There are hundreds of companies that use AMD EPYC-based machines for their important workloads, sometimes business-critical workloads. Yet, when it comes to mission-critical work, Intel Xeon (and even Intel Itanium and mainframes) rule the world. Luckily for AMD, things have begun to change, and TSMC has announced that it is now using EPYC-based servers for its mission-critical fab control operations.

Continue reading “TSMC Uses AMD’s EPYC Chips to Make Chips” »

Seems very biased, but worth a glance.

“Misfired” neurons might be a brain feature, not a bug — and that’s something AI research can’t take into account.