Lifeboat Foundation

“The Office of Racial Equity at the San Francisco Human Rights Commission will handle the program and artists from ”historically marginalized communities” are encouraged to apply.

Other basic income programs under development in San Francisco include funds for emergency medical technicians and Black and Pacific Islander expectant mothers, FOX 2 reported.

You could call it art for art’s sake — plus $1000 a month.

Continue reading “San Francisco to pay ‘essential’ artists $1,000 per month basic income in pilot program amid pandemic” »

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful type of AI technology that can learn strategies to optimally control large, complex systems.

MIT Haystack Observatory is one of the 13 stakeholder institutions that constitute the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, which produced the first-ever image of a black hole. The EHT revealed today a new view of the massive object at the center of the M87 galaxy: how it looks in polarized light. This is the first time astronomers have been able to measure polarization, a signature of magnetic fields, this close to the edge of a black hole. The observations are key to explaining how the M87 galaxy, located 55 million light-years away, is able to launch energetic jets from its core.

Haystack Research Scientist Vincent Fish says “Hundreds of people around the world in the EHT collaboration, including scientists and engineers at Haystack, have worked very hard to investigate the role of magnetic fields in shaping jets around black holes. Can magnetic fields build up and dominate over the intense pull of gravity? Our data provide an answer.”

3% of sunlight reaches Earth, while satellites in space could gather energy for 99% of the year.

Capturing the sun’s boundless light in space could revolutionize how we distribute energy around the world.

A new type of 3D-printed battery which uses electrodes made from vegetable starch and carbon nanotubes could provide mobile devices with a more environmentally-friendly, higher-capacity source of power.

A team of engineers led from the University of Glasgow have developed the battery in a bid to make more sustainable lithium-ion batteries capable of storing and delivering power more efficiently. The battery’s design and fabrication is outlined in a paper published in the Journal of Power Sources.

Lithium-ion batteries provide a useful combination of lightweight, compact form factors and the ability to withstand many cycles of charging and discharging. That has made them ideally suited for use in a wide array of devices, including laptops, mobile phones, smart watches, and electric vehicles.

We wrote about DroneUp’s drone delivery of Coke with Coffee to residents in Coffee, GA – but how exactly did that delivery work? The A2Z Rapid Delivery System allowed packages to be delivered without landing the drone – a method that solves a lot of problems in drone delivery.

CA-based A2Z Drone Delivery, LLC, has developed a patented tethered freefall drone delivery mechanism, the Rapid Delivery System (RDS1) used by DroneUp® for the project with Walmart and Coke. The RDS1 system lowers the delivery to the ground by tether – which means that homeowners don’t have to worry about a noisy landing or the potential for a landing drone to hit obstacles on its way down. “The RDS1 was chosen for its rapid delivery capabilities which reduced time-on-station to just 30 seconds per delivery, while minimizing intrusive rotor noise and limiting the window for risk to people on the ground,” says an A2Z press release.

“For our partners at DroneUp to put their trust in our system was the best proof of concept that we could imagine and was a memorable benchmark for our whole team,” said Aaron Zhang, founder of A2Z Drone Delivery, LLC. “The unique capabilities of the RDS1 were tailor-made for this type of residential delivery where our tethered freefall mechanism can accurately and quickly deposit payloads while hovering far from people, homes, trees and utility wires.”

“The quality of VR headsets has improved exponentially since the 1990s. These graphs illustrate how the rapid improvement is likely to continue in the coming decades, with graphical resolutions practically indistinguishable from real life by 2040.”

Virtual reality – future trends.

The quality of virtual reality (VR) headsets has improved exponentially since the 1990s. These graphs illustrate how the rapid improvement is likely to continue in the coming decades, with graphical resolutions practically indistinguishable from real life by 2040.

Continue reading “Virtual reality – future trends” »

Discovery “requires us to rethink everything we thought we knew about peroxisomes.”

In his first year of graduate school, Rice University biochemist Zachary Wright discovered something hidden inside a common piece of cellular machinery that’s essential for all higher order life from yeast to humans.

What Wright saw in 2015 — subcompartments inside organelles called peroxisomes — is described in a study published today in Nature Communications.

Deep neural networks exploit statistical regularities in data to carry out prediction or classification tasks. This makes them very good at handling computer vision tasks such as detecting objects. But reliance on statistical patterns also makes neural networks sensitive to adversarial examples.

An adversarial example is an image that has been subtly modified to cause a deep learning model to misclassify it. This usually happens by adding a layer of noise to a normal image. Each noise pixel changes the numerical values of the image very slightly, enough to be imperceptible to the human eye. But when added together, the noise values disrupt the statistical patterns of the image, which then causes a neural network to mistake it for something else.