Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Nairobi, Kenya - Opibus has just introduced the first all-electric bus in Kenya as well as the first African designed electric bus ever. This is the first major step in the company’s vision to provide a locally designed and developed electric bus that can be mass-produced for the pan-African market, by the end of 2023. This is a step towards realizing Opibus goal of electrifying Africa’s public transport system, deploying products tailored for the local use case. The bus is designed and developed in-house with local engineering talent, while at the same time utilizing local manufacturing partners.

The key to the technology is the Opibus proprietary electric vehicle platform, which is modular and can be the foundation for several types of vehicles. This enables the creation of a bus that is suitable for the African use case, in its reliability, durability and price point. This also means local and global contract manufactures can be used to create a globally competitive product, with a rapid scale-up.

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Associate Professor Jonathan Boreyko and graduate fellow Mojtaba Edalatpour have made a discovery about the properties of water that could provide an exciting addendum to a phenomenon established over two centuries ago. The discovery also holds interesting possibilities for cooling devices and processes in industrial applications using only the basic properties of water. Their work was published today (January 21, 2022) in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

Water can exist in three phases: a frozen solid, a liquid, and a gas. When heat is applied to a frozen solid, it becomes a liquid. When applied to the liquid, it becomes vapor. This elementary principle is familiar to anyone who has observed a glass of iced tea on a hot day, or boiled a pot of water to make spaghetti.

When the heat source is hot enough, the water’s behavior changes dramatically. According to Boreyko, a water droplet deposited onto an aluminum plate heated to 150 degrees Celsius.

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Another major player in the cryptocurrency world is forecasting a dismal year for Bitcoin (BTC) in 2022. Following the United States Federal Reserve’s and other central banks’ tightening of liquidity measures, Huobi Research believes that BTC will enter a bear market. On the brighter side, decentralized finance (DeFi) will continue to expand and adapt, with decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance eventually becoming a major driver of activity on the chain.

Following the Federal Reserve’s and other central banks’ tightening of liquidity measures, Huobi Research believes that Bitcoin will enter a bear market.

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Coffman said he could not elaborate on many of the specifics related to advanced degrees of autonomy, but he did point out a few distinct and significant advantages newer applications of robotic autonomy will bring to the force. For example, perhaps an autonomous vehicle could benefit from force-wide, cross-domain networking and learn of upcoming barriers, obstacles or even enemy force locations? Perhaps artificial-intelligence-enabled forward robots can gather large volumes of sensor data, process and organize the critical information during operations and make adjustments and determinations as needed according to certain variables.

“What we learned is based on their mobility, their excellent mobility and their autonomous behaviors, we can actually have them move on a separate axis of advance and link up with the humans on the objective. So they can autonomously move without humans, link up with the humans, transfer back control, and then execute the mission. This gives the enemy multiple dilemmas,” Coffman said.

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It is clear to see that the variety of businesses, individuals, and entities that could potentially operate in the metaverse is vast. The widespread use and acceptance of decentralization through the growth of crypto, NFTs, and DeFi point to a fully-realized future operating outside of the parameters of today’s established markets.

Evidently, therefore, the metaverse is not a sci-fi fantasy conjured up in a dystopian novel, but a more tangible and natural progression for the current structuring of the internet. The founding principles of the metaverse have already been introduced in many ways. Now its development centers on blockchain technology and DeFi to propel it from the conceptual stage towards the implementation phase. This development will allow us to firmly realize the true extent that the metaverse will impact our lives.

The gaming industry is one such sector that stands to benefit greatly from developments arising in the metaverse. Gaming skins, which are in-game avatar outfits, are expected to trade at a level of $40 billion every year. Eighty-one percent of players aware of these skins want to trade them for real-world money, according to a report from DMarket. Currently, there is no method of transferring skins across gaming universes or trading them for currency. In the metaverse, however, as every separate gaming universe is connected through a decentralized economy, this would be possible. The use of metaverse-based banks would also enable transactions like these.

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Google Earth VR is a fun and useful way of seeing the world—it’s easy to lose yourself visiting your hometown, or mapping out new adventures thanks to the company’s extensive 3D building scans. Unfortunately Google Earth VR is a PC VR only app, meaning it doesn’t work natively on Quest. That’s not set to change anytime soon, although a third-party Quest app is looking to offer up much of the magic of Earth VR while also making it a multiplayer experience.

Wooorld (that’s three ‘o’s) isn’t being developed by Google, however it appears to be making good use of Google Maps APIs, giving it access to all the 2D and 3D data you’d find on Google Earth VR.

One of the biggest differences is that Wooorld offers up a more limited rendering of Earth 3D data, which was undoubtedly done to lighten the load on Quest’s more modest mobile chipset.

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As NASA prepares to send astronauts further into the cosmos than ever before, the agency aims to upgrade production of a critical fuel source: food. Giving future explorers the technology to produce nutritious, tasty, and satisfying meals on long-duration space missions will give them the energy required to uncover the great unknown.

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We will soon need to make some difficult choices.

Given current trends, that number will be reached within a year or so. There are ways to mitigate the effect of these streaks. Painting the satellites and adding reflective panels could reduce their brightness, particularly at infrared wavelengths that are important for near-Earth asteroid detection.

But the study points out that the mitigation strategy currently proposed by Starlink won’t be sufficient to avoid an impact on astronomy.

It is clear we will soon need to make some difficult choices about satellite Internet. While it could broaden human connection to even the poorest and most remote regions of the world, it could also destroy our ability to view the heavens and more deeply understand the universe we call home.

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