Lifeboat Foundation

How entrepreneur Franco Perez is helping to fix the affordable housing crises with mobile homes.

The 14,207-square-foot home in Henderson features views of the Las Vegas Strip, smart-home technology, solar power and a 12-car garage.

This could be a game changer.

SpaceX wants to put an advertising billboard in space. The company will have to follow legal frameworks for doing so, experts explain.

Optical image stabilization combined with a lot more zoom.

Apple has been beaten to the periscope “folded” camera punch by pretty much every other smartphone manufacturer, but it continues to design and patent new takes on the now-commonplace tech. It was granted a patent for a new design that includes folded optics and “lens shifting” capabilities.

Folded optics, or more commonly known as periscope cameras, are a design that allows smartphones to gain considerably more optical zoom than a typical lens design by placing the lens array parallel to the long edge of a smartphone body and bending the transmission of light to the sensor by using one or more prisms. The design has been used by Samsung, Huawei, and others to make smartphone cameras that sport massive optical zooming capabilities compared to what Apple offers.

Continue reading “Apple Has Designed a ‘Folded’ Camera With Optical Image Stabilization” »

The Shenzhou-12 crew, astronauts Nie Haisheng (commander), Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo, prepares for the second extravehicular activity (EVA or spacewalk) planned during their three months mission on the Tianhe core module (天和核心舱), the first and main component of the China Space Station (中国空间站), informally known as Tiangong (天宫, Heavenly Palace). During the last 30 days, the Shenzhou-12 (神舟十二号) astronauts “activated the magnetic levitation experiment facility” that “includes a chamber of high-level micro-gravity”, “completed assembly of a space centrifuge, an equipment used for centrifugalizing samples”, and performed some “spring cleaning” in the Tianhe core module.

Credit: China Central Television (CCTV)/China National Space Administration (CNSA)

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/cyclones

# On the Opportunities and.
Risks of Foundation Models.

AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character.

This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles (e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations).

Continue reading “## Center for Research on Foundation Models • Aug 16 2021” »

Quantum matter can be solid and fluid at the same time—a situation known as supersolidity. Researchers led by Francesca Ferlaino have now created for the first time this fascinating property along two dimensions. They now report in the journal Nature on the realization of supersolidity along two axes of an ultracold quantum gas. The experiment offers many possibilities for further investigation of this exotic state of matter.

Quantum gases are very well suited for investigating the microscopic consequences of interactions in matter. Today, scientists can precisely control individual particles in extremely cooled gas clouds in the laboratory, revealing phenomena that cannot be observed in the every-day world. For example, the individual atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate are completely delocalized. This means that the same atom exists at each point within the condensate at any given time. Two years ago, the research group led by Francesca Ferlaino from the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck and the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck managed for the first time to generate supersolid states in ultracold quantum gases of magnetic atoms. The magnetic interaction causes the atoms to self-organize into droplets and arrange themselves in a regular pattern.

“Normally, you would think that each atom would be found in a specific droplet, with no way to get between them,” says Matthew Norcia of Francesca Ferlaino’s team. “However, in the supersolid state, each particle is delocalized across all the droplets, existing simultaneously in each droplet. So basically, you have a system with a series of high-density regions (the droplets) that all share the same delocalized atoms.” This bizarre formation enables effects such as frictionless flow despite the presence of spatial order (superfluidity).