Lifeboat Foundation

Chinese spies are different from those of most other wealthy and developed countries where the majority of spies are highly trained, with some serving under diplomatic cover and others operating under what the US Intelligence Community calls Non Official Cover (NOC).

Chinese intelligence operations are the first in modern times to use, as a foundation, the whole of society. Because of this, China’s espionage tactics are sometimes artless, operating with little in the way of standard spy-fare, (encrypted communication, dead drops, etc.) instead relying on an overwhelming volume of espionage operations conducted by all manner of citizen and a sort of impunity inherent in the lack of substantive penalty for when a Chinese agent is discovered, a study I recently published analyzing 595 cases of intelligence collection efforts sanctioned and abetted by the Chinese Communist Party.

“The mobile gravity suit is a small, untethered, and flexible intravehicular activity (IVA) suit,” the researchers wrote in their paper published in the Frontiers in Physiology journal.

The idea is to give astronauts maximum flexibility while on board a spacecraft, without reducing crew time. “With the gravity suit, astronauts will be able to float freely around the space station while adhering to their every day tasks,” the paper reads.

“The negative pressure is generated by its own portable vacuum system, ensuring full mobility, and user-control,” the paper reads.

The hugely expensive TV will go on sale in select premium electronics stores throughout South Korea.

IBM’s concept of quantum volume tries to measure quantum computing progress in ways beyond counting qubits.

This starts at 10AM Eastern time Oct. 22, for anyone wants to watch this.

A robot controlled by a neural network algorithm that was trained in a video game-like simulation is better able to navigate difficult terrain in real life.

Tesla’s Autopilot is about to get a major update.

Boston Dynamics has reportedly already sold more than 250 of its $75,000 Spot robots since starting commercial sales back in June. Interested and deep-pocketed parties can purchase one directly from the company’s website as well as a host of accessories, from $1,650 charging bricks to $34,570 lidar and camera kits. But one add-on which we’ve seen Spot with since some of its earliest demo videos was the prehensile arm sprouting from between its shoulder blades. But come next January, Spots around the world are going to get a whole lot more handsy.

“The next thing on the future Spot is that we’re going to make it available with a robot arm in a few months,” Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert told the virtual crowd at the Collision from Home conference in June. “We have prototypes working, but we don’t have them available as a product yet. Once you have an arm on a robot, it becomes a mobile manipulation system. It really opens up just vast horizons on things robots can do. I believe that the mobility of the robot will contribute to the dexterity of the robot in ways that we just don’t get with current fixed factory automation.”

Circa 2016

Never let anyone crush your dreams. Last week the results of a University of Cambridge study spread through the news, claiming that the dream of Spider-Man-like abilities for humans is simply impossible. By their reasoning, sticky pads need to scale up in order to support increased weight, and as a result, the size of a gecko is about as big as a vertical climber can be. The only problem? An engineer at Stanford showed off a way around that problem back in 2014. Now Elliot Hawkes has dropped a diss track on YouTube firing shots at Cambridge and Stephen Colbert, showing off his climbing skills thanks to a “Gecko Glove.”

Continue reading “Stanford’s ‘Gecko Glove’ makes Spider-Man climbing possible” »