Lifeboat Foundation

[TIME SUBJECT TO CHANGE] This is the third fully integrated full stack test flight of Starship and the mighty Super Heavy booster, the largest and most powerful rocket to ever fly. It produces over twice as much thrust as the Saturn V that took humans to the moon.

The goal of the test is to get further along than IFT-2 in November, 2023, which didn’t see either the ship or the booster make it to reentry. If all goes well, Starship will re-enter in the Indian Ocean about 65 minutes after it lifts off from Starbase, TX, on a suborbital trajectory.

Continue reading “[4K] Watch SpaceX launch Starship, LIVE up close and personal!” »

SpaceX is targeting Thursday for the third flight of Starship. The license from the FAA was acquired. The flight will feature several upgrades to Booster and Ship, as well as a modification of the flight path to the Indian Ocean, instead of Hawaii. In space, SpaceX plans to demonstrate the payload dispenser door, and the capability to relight a Raptor in Space. Additionally, SpaceX wants to demonstrate the capability of in-space cryogenic propellant transfer.

The mission will attempt a soft splashdown of Booster 10 in the Gulf of Mexico, and a splashdown of Ship 28 in the Indian Ocean.

Continue reading “SpaceX Launches Third Starship Flight Test” »

The advent of AI has ushered in transformative advancements across countless industries. Yet for all its benefits, this technology also has a downside. One of the major challenges AI brings is the amount of energy required to power the GPUs that train large-scale AI models. Computing hardware needs significant maintenance and upkeep, as well as uninterruptible power supplies and cooling fans.

One study found that training some popular AI models can produce about 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, the rough equivalent of 300 cross-country flights in the U.S. A single data center can require enough electricity to power 50,000 homes. If this energy comes from fossil fuels, that can mean a huge carbon footprint. Already the carbon footprint of the cloud as a whole has surpassed that of the airline industry.

As the founder of an AI-driven company in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry, I am acutely aware of the environmental impact of our business. Here are a few ways we are trying to reduce that effect.

Physicists at the University of Regensburg have choreographed the shift of a quantized electronic energy level with atomic oscillations faster than a trillionth of a second.

Throwing a ball into the air, one can transfer arbitrary energy to the ball such that it flies higher or lower. One of the oddities of quantum physics is that particles, e.g., electrons, can often only take on quantized energy values—as if the ball was leaping between specific heights, like steps of a ladder, rather than flying continuously.

Qubits and quantum computers as well as light-emitting quantum dots (Nobel Prize 2023) make use of this principle. However, electronic energy levels can be shifted by collisions with other electrons or atoms. Processes in the quantum world usually take place on atomic scales and are also incredibly fast.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is teaming up with Larry Ellison’s Oracle to help farms plan and predict their agricultural output using an AI tool.

Larry Ellison said on Oracle’s earnings call on Monday that it’s collaborating with Musk and SpaceX to create the AI-powered mapping application for governments. The tool creates a map of a country’s farms and shows what each of them is growing.

The Oracle executive chairman said the tool could help farms assess the steps needed to increase their output, and whether fields had enough water and nitrogen.

Ultimately, every problem in the constantly evolving IT software stack becomes a database problem, which is why there are 418 different databases and datastores in the DB Engines rankings and there are really only a handful of commercially viable operating systems. But what if the operating system is the problem?

We are so used to thinking of the operating system as the foundation of the system that this kind of talk seems more weird than it does heresy, but make no mistake. When Michael Stonebraker and Matei Zaharia and a team of techies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University are involved in creating a new operating system, it is definitely going to be heresy.

Stonebraker says that the spark for the idea for DBOS, which is short for database operating system, came when he was listening to a talk by Zacharia, who among other things was the creator of the Spark in-memory database while at the AMPLab at the University of California Berkeley and the co-founder and chief technology officer of Databricks, which has commercialized Spark.

The patch might offer a non-invasive communication tool for people who cannot speak due to vocal cord problems.

GaussianImage.

1000 FPS Image Representation and Compression by 2D Gaussian Splatting.

Implicit neural representations (INRs) recently achieved great success in image representation and compression, offering high visual quality and fast rendering speeds with…

Continue reading “Paper page — GaussianImage: 1000 FPS Image Representation and Compression by 2D Gaussian Splatting” »

There’s a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIs help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs. In recent years, the devices have even gone wireless. If mind-reading computers become part of everyday life, we’ll need doctors to install the tiny electrodes and transmitters that make them work. So if you have steady hands and don’t mind a little blood, being a BCI surgeon might be a job for you.

Shahram Majidi, a neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, began operating in clinical trials for a BCI called the Stentrode in 2022. (That’s “stent” as in a tube that often sits inside a vein or artery.) Here he talks about a not-too-distant future where he’s performing hundreds of similar procedures a year.

Brain-computer interfaces have been around for a few decades, and there are different kinds of implants now. Some have electrodes attached to your brain with wires sticking out of your head and connecting to a computer. I think that’s great as a proof of concept, but it requires an engineer sitting there and a big computer next to you all the time. You can’t just use it in your bedroom. The beauty of a BCI like the Stentrode, which is what I’ve worked with, is that nothing is sticking out of your brain. The electrodes are in blood vessels next to the brain, and you get there by going through the patient’s jugular. The receiver is underneath the skin in their chest and connected to a device that decodes the brain signals via Bluetooth. I think that’s the future.