Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Cam & Dowel Jig is a collection of preset jigs and various tools that are designed to help guide users through designing and constructing their own bespoke furniture.

If you didn’t pick up woodworking as a hobby during the quarantine, chances are you at least tried. In a perfect world, we’d have the know-how to pick up some tools, some pieces of wood, and design our living rooms with our own collection of bespoke furniture. Alas, this is no perfect world so we’ll need some shortcuts. Luckily, David Needham of Kingfisher Design Studio has us covered with an intuitive tool kit designed to streamline bespoke, DIY furniture-building projects.

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Elon Musk announced that Tesla is going to be shifting its product development to make Tesla Bot, a humanoid robot also known as Optimus, a priority in 2022.

This is quite a surprising change of strategy.

When Tesla Bot was announced, Musk presented the project as something Tesla could do by leveraging existing work and parts from the development of self-driving technology, and if they don’t do it, someone else will, and they might not do it as well or as safely as Tesla can.

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Elon Musk recently said that Tesla’s humanoid robo t project is the “most important product development we’re doing this year.”

On Wednesday, during Tesla’s earnings call, Musk said Tesla’s humanoid robot has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time’ and it is the most important product development they are doing in 2022. Musk introduced the concept of Tesla’s humanoid robot back in August, 2021 during Tesla’s AI event.

Tesla’s humanoid robot aka Tesla Bot is a 5-foot-8-inch and 125-pounds robot aims to do the dangerous, repetitive, physical tasks in the future. Elon Musk joked that Tesla Bot will be friendly and also mentioned that it will be built from lightweight materials.

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At Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference today, the company made a major shift in their embrace of virtual reality with several new VR announcements during the event’s opening keynote.

Though well loved, Apple’s computer lineup got somewhat left in the dust at the launch of the Rift and Vive, both of which had hardware requirements that exceeded what Apple had on offer. To that end, the company largely steered clear of talking about VR publicly.

Today marks a major shift in Apple’s public support for virtual reality. VR was a recurrent theme throughout the keynote today, highlighting their belief in the importance of the medium. Here’s an overview of everything they announced:

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Although Christmas may be several weeks behind us, various colorful LED contraptions can nowadays be found in our houses at any time of year. [Tim] got his hands on an LED curtain that came with a remote control that allows the user to set not only the color of the LEDs as a whole but also to run simple animations. But these were not your standard WS2812B strips with data lines: all the LEDs were simply connected in parallel with just two wires, so how was this even possible?

[Tim] hooked up his oscilloscope to the LED strings to find out how they worked, detailing the results in a comprehensive blog post. As it turns out, the controller briefly shorts the LED strip’s supply voltage to generate data bits, similar to the way old pulse-dialing phones worked. A tiny chip integrated into each LED picks up these pulses, but retains its internal state thanks to a capacitor that keeps the chip powered when the supply line goes low.

After reverse-engineering the protocol, [Tim] went on to implement a similar design using an ATMega328P as a controller and an ATtiny10 as the LED driver. With just a few lines of code and a 100 nF buffer capacitor across the ATtiny’s power pins, [Tim] was able to turn an LED on and off by sending pulses through the supply lines. Some work still needs to be done to fully implement a protocol as used in the LED strings, but as a proof-of-concept it shows that this kind of power-line communication is possible with standard components.

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There’s an old joke about the Thermos bottle that keeps things hot and cold, so someone loaded it with soup and ice cream. That joke is a little close to home when it comes to FDM 3D printers.

You want to melt plastic, of course, or things won’t print, so you need heat. But if the plastic filament gets hot too early, it will get soft, expand, and jam. Heat crawling up the hot end like this is known as heat creep and there are a variety of ways that hot ends try to cope with the need to be hot and cold at the same time. Most hotends today are air-cooled with a small fan. But water-cooled hotends have been around for a while and are showing up more and more. Is it a gimmick? Are you using, planning to use, or have used (and abandoned) water cooling on your hot end?

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An exceptionally large grant will allow a team of Empa researchers to work on an ambitious project over the next ten years: The Werner Siemens Foundation (WSS) is supporting Empa’s CarboQuant project with 15 million Swiss francs. The project aims to lay the foundations for novel quantum technologies that may even operate at room temperature – in contrast to current technologies, most of which require cooling to near absolute zero.

“With this project we are taking a big step into the unknown,” says Oliver Gröning who coordinates the project. “Thanks to the partnership with the Werner Siemens Foundation, we can now move much further away from the safe shore of existing knowledge than would be possible in our ‘normal’ day-to-day research. We feel a little like Christopher Columbus and are now looking beyond the horizon for something completely new.”

The expedition into the unknown now being undertaken by Empa researchers Pascal Ruffieux, Oliver Gröning and Gabriela Borin-Barin under the lead of Roman Fasel was preceded by twelve years of intensive research activity. The researchers from Empa’s [email protected] laboratory, headed by Fasel, regularly published their work in renowned journals such as Nature, Science and Angewandte Chemie.

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Researchers from the University of Illinois developed GPU-accelerated software to simulate a cell that metabolizes and grows like a living cell.

Every living cell contains its own bustling microcosm, with thousands of components responsible for energy production, protein building, gene transcription and more.

Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have built a 3D simulation that replicates these physical and chemical characteristics at a particle scale — creating a fully dynamic model that mimics the behavior of a living cell.

Published in the journal Cell, the project simulates a living minimal cell, which contains a pared-down set of genes essential for the cell’s survival, function and replication. The model uses NVIDIA GPUs to simulate 7,000 genetic information processes over a 20-minute span of the cell cycle – making it what the scientists believe is the longest, most complex cell simulation to date.

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Parents Use AI To See One Last Message From Their Deceased Son ‘…what’s to keep me from showing face, Man?’

Feel Virtual Reality In Mid-Air! ‘…a pressure on the lips — warm and soft, moist and sweet.’ — Frederick Pohl, 1965.

Via Virtual Reality, Mother Encounters Deceased Daughter ‘But that barrier was going to melt away someday soon. The transhumanists had promised…’ — Stephen Baxter, 2008.

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