Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 5996

And it’s down for tests this year.

Last month, Pantuo Aviation revealed the PANTALA Concept H, a sleek-looking flying taxi concept that has strong similarities to Lilium’s ducted fan eVTOL aircraft at the same time as featuring some key design differences.

As little was announced in the way of specifications or development progress at the time, we reached out to Pantuo, who sent us information on their new concept via a company spokesperson.

According to Pantuo Aviation’s representative, the all-electric PANTALA Concept H has a range of 155 miles (250 km) and will be able to travel at speeds of over 186 mph (300 km/h). The aircraft uses lithium-ion batteries and features 22 large-diameter electric ducted fans rather than open rotors. Much in the same fashion as Lilium’s seven-seater aircraft, which the German company aims to bring into service by 2024, the PANTALA’s fans provide added redundancy, meaning an enhanced level of safety for passengers. One factor that sets the PANTALA Concept H apart from the Lilium flying taxi, however, is the fact that its entire wing tilts to change from vertical to normal flight mode.

Continue reading “The PANTALA Concept H Travels at 186 MPH and Has a 155 Mile Range” | >

The original 2017 transformer model was designed for natural language processing (NLP), where it achieved SOTA results. Its performance intrigued machine learning researchers, who have since successfully adapted the attention-based architecture to perception tasks in other modalities, such as the classification of images, video and audio. While transformers have shown their power and potential in these areas, achieving SOTA performance requires training a separate model for each task. Producing a single transformer model capable of processing multiple modalities and datasets and sharing its learnable parameters has thus emerged as an attractive research direction.

To this end, a team from Google Research, University of Cambridge and Alan Turing Institute has proposed PolyViT; a single transformer architecture co-trained on image, audio and video that is parameter-efficient and learns representations that generalize across multiple domains.

The PolyViT design is motivated by the idea that human perception is inherently multimodal and previous studies that have demonstrated transformers’ ability to operate on any modality that can be tokenized. PolyViT shares a single transformer encoder across different tasks and modalities, enabling up to a linear reduction in parameters with the number of tasks.

Read more | >

We continue our overview of the Longevity Forum’s Science Summit at Oxford’s Oriel College, part of Longevity Week and hosted by Professor Lynne Cox and Jim Mellon.

Longevity. Technology: Severe community-acquired infections (such as community-acquired pneumonia and COVID-19) are more common in older adults, and overall outcomes are worse. But why as we get older are we more susceptible and can we harness the immune system to improve clinical trajectories in older adults?

Professor Liz Sapey is the Chair of Acute Medicine and an academic acute and respiratory medicine physician at the University of Birmingham and University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust. Sapey presented on what is known about susceptibility to infection as we age.

Read more | >

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, right? Normally we’d say yes, but experts around the globe say nuclear fusion power, which holds the promise of clean and virtually limitless electricity, could be just around the corner. After nearly six decades with many promises but few results, new advancements may finally tip the scale, according to the Financial Times.

“Fusion is coming, faster than you expect,” Fusion Industry Association exec Andrew Holland told the publication.

There could be many benefits to nuclear fusion. Unlike nuclear fission it would create little waste and, as far as we know, could never result in an accident like Chernobyl. Insert a side-eye here for plans to dump radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay and the Pacific.

Read more | >

There is a huge global effort to engineer a computer capable of harnessing the power of quantum physics to carry out computations of unprecedented complexity. While formidable technological obstacles still stand in the way of creating such a quantum computer, today’s early prototypes are still capable of remarkable feats.

For example, the creation of a new phase of matter called a “time crystal.” Just as a crystal’s structure repeats in space, a time crystal repeats in time and, importantly, does so infinitely and without any further input of energy—like a clock that runs forever without any batteries. The quest to realize this phase of matter has been a longstanding challenge in theory and experiment—one that has now finally come to fruition.

In research published Nov. 30 in Nature, a team of scientists from Stanford University, Google Quantum AI, the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems and Oxford University detail their creation of a time crystal using Google’s Sycamore quantum computing hardware.

Read more | >

Disney’s AI research division has developed a hybrid method for movie-quality facial simulation, combining the strengths of facial neural rendering with the consistency of a CGI-based approach. The pending paper is titled Rendering with Style: Combining Traditional and Neural Approaches for High Quality Face Rendering, and is previewed in a new 10-minute video at the […].

Read more | >