Lifeboat Foundation

Supermassive black holes, which likely reside at the centers of virtually all galaxies, are unimaginably dense, compact regions of space from which nothing — not even light — can escape. As such a black hole, weighing in at millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun, devours material, it is surrounded by a swirling disk of gas. When gas from this disk falls towards the black hole, it releases a tremendous amount of energy. This energy creates a brilliant and powerful galactic core called a quasar, whose light can greatly outshine its host galaxy.

Astronomers widely believe that the energy from quasars is responsible for limiting the growth of massive galaxies. Shortly after the launch of NASA ’s James Webb Space Telescope, scientists plan to study the effect of three carefully selected quasars on their host galaxies in a program called Q3D.

Continue reading “NASA’s New $10 Billion Telescope to Study Quasars and Their Host Galaxies in Three Dimensions” »

Your accent can nod to where you come from; the pace of your speech can reveal your emotional state; your voiceprint can be used to identify you.

Linguists, companies and governments are now parsing our voices for these details, using them as biometric tools to uncover more and more information about us.

While a lot of this information is used to make our lives easier, it has also been used to controversial and worrying effect.

A new system called GPT-3 is shocking experts with its ability to use and understand language as well as human beings do.

In June 2019, Facebook’s AI lab, FAIR, released AI Habitat, a new simulation platform for training AI agents. It allowed agents to explore various realistic virtual environments, like a furnished apartment or cubicle-filled office. The AI could then be ported into a robot, which would gain the smarts to navigate through the real world without crashing.

In the year since, FAIR has rapidly pushed the boundaries of its work on “embodied AI.” In a blog post today, the lab has announced three additional milestones reached: two new algorithms that allow an agent to quickly create and remember a map of the spaces it navigates, and the addition of sound on the platform to train the agents to hear.

Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) has reached the $2,000 a share price point, but one investor says that its value could be looked at as “fairly low priced” in a year or two.

It’s hard to imagine that $2,000 for a share of an automaker’s stock could look like a bargain in the current economic climate. However, the CEO of AdvisorShares, Noah Hamman, thinks that TSLA’s price now could very well be looked at as a steal in a year or two.

“It’s possible a year or two from now we think that $2,000 a share was still fairly low priced, but who knows,” Hamman said to The First Trade, which is Yahoo Finance’s opening bell show.

An international team of researchers have discovered a dense, cold gas that’s been shot out from the center of the Milky Way “like bullets”.

Exactly how the gas has been ejected is still a mystery, but the research team, including Professor Naomi McClure-Griffiths from The Australian National University (ANU), say their findings could have important implications for the future of our galaxy.

“Galaxies can be really good at shooting themselves in the foot,” Professor McClure-Griffiths said.

Astronomers have bounced lasers of mirrors left by Apollo astronauts on the lunar surface for decades. But this is the first time bouncing one off a lunar orbiter — after a decade of trying.

Well, they were right about the North Pole being warmer.

Hackers are calling employees working from home and tricking them into accessing phishing pages for corporate domains.