Lifeboat Foundation

Fusion – combining atomic nuclei to release energy – is a clean and safe way to power our homes and industry. This ‘holy grail’ of energy has eluded physicists for decades, but there are signs that a bright future could be on the horizon.

One of the largest weaknesses of the U.S. military is its dependence on fuel. During the Global War on Terror, fuel convoys were easy targets for insurgent attacks. They will likely be targeted in future conflicts as well. This supply chain vulnerability is critical since, without access to fuel, military aircraft cannot maintain air superiority, a major requirement for winning wars.

Last week, the Air Force Operational Energy office awarded a contract to the energy company Twelve to develop the technology necessary to produce jet fuel from air. While this may sound unrealistic, the process is actually fairly straightforward. Indeed, Twelve has already shown that this process can be done at small levels. However, there are significant challenges involved in using this process at scale.

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Many job-seekers with valuable skills are disregarded by employers due to a fear of reduced intelligibility, removing the accent barrier could help.

In today’s multicultural societies, accents should not be a problem. But it turns out they still are due to a lack of coherence. Three Stanford students encountered this problem when one of their friends lost a customer support job due to his accent.

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A new machine-learning system helps robots understand and perform certain social interactions. Robots can deliver food on a college campus and hit a hole-in-one on the golf course, but even the most sophisticated robot can’t perform basic social interactions that are critical to everyday human life. MIT researchers have now incorporated certain social interactions into a framework for robotics, enabling machines to understand what it means to help or hinder one another, and to learn to perform these social behaviors on their own. In a simulated environment, a robot watches its companion, guesses what task it wants to accomplish, and then helps or hinders this other robot based on its own goals. The researchers also showed that their model creates realistic and predictable social interactions. When they showed videos of these simulated robots interacting with one another to humans, the human viewers mostly agreed with the model about what type of social behavior was occurring. Full Story:

A century of sci-fi films that chart our changing attitudes to AI — from Fritz Lang to Finch.

“Old-fashioned” is generally not a term you want to hear applied to science fiction, a genre from which one tends to expect the futuristic and unfamiliar. But old-fashioned is very much how Finch (Apple TV+) feels, and not just because of the reassuring elder-statesman presence of Tom Hanks in the title role: a post-apocalyptic drama built from the scraps of a thousand others before it, it’s about as nostalgically cuddly as a vision of a barren, desolate future can be. Hanks is seemingly the last surviving human on the planet; an inventor, he assembles an AI robot (voiced by Caleb Landry Jones) to mind his adorable dog when he’s gone. Awww.

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The dramatic rise of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has spotlit concerns about the role of technology in exam surveillance — and also in student cheating.

Some universities have reported more cheating during the pandemic, and such concerns are unfolding in a climate where technologies that allow for the automation of writing continue to improve.

Over the past two years, the ability of artificial intelligence to generate writing has leapt forward significantly, particularly with the development of what’s known as the language generator GPT-3. With this, companies such as Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA can now produce “human-like” text.

Deploying autonomous mini-rovers could help us explore places where conventional ones can’t go.

Intel senior vice president Keyvan Esfarjani and Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger at the groundbreaking of two new chip fabrication plants in Chandler, Arizona, on Friday, Sept. 24 2021.

Intel Corporation.

The world’s smallest and most-efficient chips are usually referred to as 5 nanometer, a nomenclature that once referred to the width of transistors on the chip. They power cutting-edge data processing and the latest generation of Apple iPhones. TSMC and Samsung make all of these 5-nanometer chips at fabs in Asia.

Microsoft is entering the race to build a metaverse inside Teams, just days after Facebook rebranded to Meta in a push to build virtual spaces for both consumers and businesses. Microsoft is bringing Mesh, a collaborative platform for virtual experiences, directly into Microsoft Teams next year. It’s part of a big effort to combine the company’s mixed reality and HoloLens work with meetings and video calls that anyone can participate in thanks to animated avatars.

With today’s announcement, Microsoft and Meta seem to be on a collision course to compete heavily in the metaverse, particularly for the future of work.

Microsoft Mesh always felt like the future of Microsoft Teams meetings, and now it’s starting to come to life in the first half of 2022. Microsoft is building on efforts like Together Mode and other experiments for making meetings more interactive, after months of people working from home and adjusting to hybrid work.