Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 5632

Previously, aircraft ✈️ had to fly at 1,500 to 5,000 feet for airborne radars to detect illegal activity in our seas 🌊. With SeaVue Multi-Role, pilots can fly as… See more.

In some parts of the world, the sea is lawless, fraught with piracy, smuggling and illegal fishing.

To help navies and coastal authorities combat illegal activity, Raytheon Intelligence & Space has developed the SeaVue family of airborne radars, which detect small maritime targets such as illegal fishing vessels, go-fast boats and stateless ships—ships not registered to a country or government, on the high seas. RI&S engineers have added a new, upgraded radar to the family called SeaVue Multi-Role.

The radar works with RI&S’ AN/DAS-4 Multi-spectral Targeting System, an electro-optical/infrared sensor, to image the targets, providing operators with enhanced actionable intelligence.

Continue reading “Monitoring the high seas at high altitude” | >

In the quest for the perfect battery, scientists have two primary goals: create a device that can store a great deal of energy and do it safely. Many batteries contain liquid electrolytes, which are potentially flammable.

As a result, solid-state lithium-ion batteries, which consist of entirely solid components, have become increasingly attractive to scientists because they offer an enticing combination of higher safety and increased energy density—which is how much energy the battery can store for a given volume.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo, Canada, who are members of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), headquartered at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, have discovered a new solid electrolyte that offers several important advantages.

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A new shape-shifting material out of Virginia Tech can be used to give robots the power to transform smoothly between different shapes — like going from a drivable robot to a flying drone.

The challenge: Most of today’s robots are really good at one function — drones are designed to fly, but they can’t swim, and wheeled bots can drive, but they can’t fly.

The few exceptions typically use complex systems of motors, gears, and hinges to reconfigure themselves into different shapes suited for different tasks, but every extra part is a new potential point of failure.

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Soul Machines, a New Zealand-based company that uses CGI, AI and natural language processing to create lifelike digital people who can interact with humans in real time, has raised $70 million in a Series B1 round, bringing its total funding to $135 million. The startup will put the funds toward enhancing its Digital Brain technology, which uses a technique called “cognitive modeling” to recreate things like the human brain’s emotional response system in order to construct autonomous animated characters.

The funding was led by new investor SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with additional participation from Cleveland Avenue, Liberty City Ventures and Solasta Ventures. Existing investors Temasek, Salesforce Ventures and Horizons Ventures also participated in the round.

While Soul Machines does envision its tech will be used for entertainment purposes, it’s mainly pursuing a B2B play that creates emotionally engaging brand and customer experiences. The basic problem the startup is trying to solve is how to create personal brand experiences in an increasingly digital world, especially when the main interaction most companies have with their customers is via apps and websites.

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Researchers studying a protein that is strongly linked to the psychiatric disorder are the first to determine the protein’s function, tracing it to a structure in the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus.

In the process of solving a decades-long mystery about a particular protein, scientists have identified a specific location in the brain where schizophrenia may originate.

The news: Despite the identification of many genes that show some link to schizophrenia, identifying a part of the brain that is likely responsible for the disorder with a high level of certainty has proven to be extremely difficult — until now.

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