Lifeboat Foundation

A new version of Tesla’s Model 3 has arrived in Hong Kong. Driving UpCar shared a first look at it on YouTube. DDcar also reported that Hong Kong Tesla has officially brought the new 2021 Model 3 into the K11 Mall in Tsim Sha Tsui for public display. This batch of Model 3 cars was made in the Fremont factory and is expected to have basically the same configuration around the world.

Some of the changes discussed in the video include a minor change in the headlights, new design on the wheels, all-black trim, and door handles, of which they say, “I believe it’s not that easy to leave a fingerprint on them now.”

Intel, in its latest acquisition spree, has acquired Israel-based Cnvrg.io. The deal, like most of the deals in the past, is aimed at strengthening its machine learning and AI operations. The 2016-founded startup provides a platform for data scientists to build and run machine learning models that can be used to train, run comparisons and recommendations, among others. Co-founded by Yochay Ettun and Leah Forkosh Kolben, Cnvrg was valued at around $17 million in its last round.

According to a statement by Intel spokesperson, Cnvrg will be an independent Intel company and will continue to serve its existing and future customers after the acquisition. However, there is no information on the financial terms of the deal or who will join Intel from the startup.

The deal comes merely a week after Intel’s announcement of acquiring San Francisco-based software optimisation startup SigOpt, which it did to leverage SigOpt’s technologies across its products to accelerate, amplify and scale AI software tools. SigOpt’s software technologies combined with Intel hardware products could give it a major competitive advantage providing differentiated value for data scientists and developers.

What happens when you put two pilots to work flying a drone that has been designed specifically to plant trees at a rapid pace? You could potentially get up to 100,000 trees planted per day. That’s an astounding number compared to an average 11,000 trees that are currently being planted by professional tree planters on a weekly basis.

An asteroid that could be almost 600 feet wide is set to fly by Earth on Saturday, passing us at a speed of more than 29,000 miles per hour.

The asteroid, named 2020 TY1, was first discovered in October. It is expected to pass at a distance of around 3.5 million miles, which is about 14 times the distance between Earth and the moon, meaning it poses no risk to our planet.

It is one of the largest asteroids to pass Earth in recent weeks, with the last of a similar size passing by on October 22. The space rock is estimated to be between 260 and 590 feet wide, making it around the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza, which is 455 feet tall.

David Fischer, an MIT Energy Fellow at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, is observing ways irradiation damages thin high-temperature superconductor tapes in the design of ARC, a fusion pilot plant concept.

The U.S. drone delivery company Zipline is getting ready to begin commercial operations in Israel next year, TheMarker has learned. The company has begun the regulatory process and is in talks with potential customers.

Zipline hopes to begin its pilot program in Israel early next year, delivering blood and medicine to hospitals in the north and south of the country. While the company has drawn up detailed plans for entering the local market, there’s no guarantee that the pilot will develop into a commercial launch of the service.

Founded in 2014, Zipline has raised around 230 million to date and has a valuation of more than $1 billion. It’s considered the most prominent player in the field: The company has operated commercial drone delivery services since 2016 and has carried out more than 70,000 deliveries.

Some scientists believe that the ability of animals to store memory came from a virus that infected a common ancestor hundreds of millions of years ago. 😃

This study is radically changing how we view the process of evolution.

Continue reading “Our memory comes from an ancient virus, neuroscientists say” »

Restoration of lost motor function after stroke is typically accomplished after strenuous rehabilitation therapy lasting for over months. However, new research published by a group led by Yukio Nishimura, the project leader of the Neural Prosthesis Project, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science showed that an artificial neural connection (ANC)*1 successfully allowed a new cortical site, previously unassociated with hand movements, to regain control of a paralyzed hand in a matter of minutes.

In this research, experimental animals regained voluntary control of a paralyzed hand about ten minutes after establishment of an ANC. Animals engaged in learning with a functional ANC showed variable levels of input signals provided by the cerebral cortex*2 as hand movement improved. Specifically, the activated area of the cortex became more focused as control of hand movements improved.

Through this training of various areas of the cerebral cortex, the research team successfully imparted a new ability to control paralyzed hands via an ANC, even if those areas were not involved in hand control prior to the stroke. Examples of such regions include areas of the cortex that controls the movement of other body parts such as the face or shoulder, and even the somatosensory cortex, which is responsible for tactile and proprioception processing and is normally not associated with motor control. This finding suggests that an ANC can impart new motor control functions to any cortical region.