Lifeboat Foundation

But what struck me about his essay is that last clause: “if we as a society manage it responsibly.” Because, as Altman also admits, if he is right then A.I. will generate phenomenal wealth largely by destroying countless jobs — that’s a big part of how everything gets cheaper — and shifting huge amounts of wealth from labor to capital. And whether that world becomes a post-scarcity utopia or a feudal dystopia hinges on how wealth, power and dignity are then distributed — it hinges, in other words, on politics.

Will A.I. give us the lives of leisure we long for — or usher in a feudal dystopia? It depends.

Using an ultrafast transmission electron microscope, researchers from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have, for the first time, recorded the propagation of combined sound and light waves in atomically thin materials.

The experiments were performed in the Robert and Ruth Magid Electron Beam Quantum Dynamics Laboratory headed by Professor Ido Kaminer, of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Solid State Institute.

Continue reading “Nano Optics Breakthrough: Researchers Observe Sound-Light Pulses in 2D Materials for the First Time” »

“It was so easy to get support from Northeastern, especially considering that we were fresh out of college,” Gurijala says. Through the Venture Mentoring Network, the co-founders were advised on how to create a business model and pitch investors. “They even connected us to our first investor. I’m not sure we could have started Boston Materials without the support of the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem at Northeastern.”

Boston Materials, which recently raised $8 million from investors, is looking to expand its team.

“We’re looking to grow across the company, from the manufacturing team, to the engineering team, to the technical sales team,” Gurijala says. “It’s an exciting time. There’s so much momentum behind us right now.”

With the established success of flexible computer screen displays, many users are wondering how display technology will advance next. So far, free-form displays have grown popular as a next-generation product that offers both portability and high-resolution visuals.

While this technology is still quite new, a wealth of research already exists into the stretchable displays that make up free form displays, products that can stretch into any direction like rubber.

On June 4, 2021, research at Samsung appeared in the well-known journal Science Advances discussing a technology that bypasses the limitations of stretchable devices. The associated experiment showed stable performance even when the display was significantly elongated. As these products can already be used in existing semiconductor processes, Samsung researchers have high hopes about what this could mean for the commercialization and salability of stretchable devices.

Norway’s Wind Catching Systems (WCS) has made a spectacular debut with a colossal floating wind turbine array it says can generate five times the annual energy of the world’s biggest single turbines – while reducing costs enough to be immediately competitive with grid prices.

Standing more than 1000 ft (324 m) high, these mammoth Windcatcher grids would deploy multiple smaller turbines (no less than 117 in the render images) in a staggered formation atop a floating platform moored to the ocean floor using established practices from the oil and gas industry.

Just one of these arrays, says WCS, could offer double the swept area of the world’s biggest conventional wind turbines – the 15 MW Vestas V236 – and its smaller rotors could perform much better in wind speeds over 40 to 43 km/h (25 to 27 mph), when larger turbines tend to start pitching their blades to limit production and protect themselves from damage. The overall effect, says WCS, is a 500 percent boost in annual energy output, with each array making enough power to run 80000 European homes.

BMW Motorrad may not have arrived very early to the electric motorcycle party, but the company is making up for it now with what could become an industry first electric motorcycle with a driveshaft.

BMW loves its driveshaft motorcycles, but the electric motorcycle industry hasn’t been as keen on them.

Electric motors and batteries have freed motorcycle manufacturers from the typical design constraints of gas-powered drivetrains. Unshackled from traditional gas tanks and bulky internal combustion engines, designers have been granted unprecedented levels of freedom thanks to the modularity of electric motorcycle components.

Deep neural networks have achieved highly promising results on several tasks, including image and text classification. Nonetheless, many of these computational methods are prone to what is known as catastrophic forgetting, which essentially means that when they are trained on a new task, they tend to rapidly forget how to complete tasks they were trained to complete in the past.

Researchers at Université Paris-Saclay-CNRS recently introduced a new technique to alleviate forgetting in binarized neural networks. This technique, presented in a paper published in Nature Communications, is inspired by the idea of synaptic metaplasticity, the process through which synapses (junctions between two nerve cells) adapt and change over time in response to experiences.

“My group had been working on binarized neural networks for a few years,” Damien Querlioz, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “These are a highly simplified form of deep neural networks, the flagship method of modern artificial intelligence, which can perform complex tasks with reduced memory requirements and energy consumption. In parallel, Axel, then a first-year Ph.D. student in our group, started to work on the synaptic metaplasticity models introduced in 2005 by Stefano Fusi.”

There may be life in Enceladus’ deep sea plumes.

The Cassini probe revealed a subsurface ocean beneath Enceladus’ icy surface that may be habitable. A new analysis shows that the chemistry has the right stuff.

Calico has made some important discoveries about Yamanaka factors.

In a preprint paper, scientists from Calico, Google’s longevity research behemoth, suggest that contrary to our previous understanding, transient reprogramming of cells using Yamanaka factors involves suppressing cellular identity, which may open the door to carcinogenic mutations. They also propose a milder reprogramming method inspired by limb regeneration in amphibians [1].

Rejuvenation that can give you cancer

Continue reading “Calico Scientists Develop Safer Cellular Reprogramming” »