Lifeboat Foundation

The Neobiological Revolution is here. Now’s the time to put lessons from the Digital Revolution to use.

The Earth’s magnetic field flips, every few hundred thousand years or so on average, which means magnetic north becomes magnetic south and vice versa (the planet doesn’t actually turn upside down). New research suggests this change of direction can happen up to 10 times faster than previously thought.

That’s big news for scientists studying how the magnetic field shifts affect life on Earth, how our planet has evolved over time, and how we might be better able to predict the next reversal in the coming years.

Past palaeomagnetic studies have shown that the magnetic field could change direction at up to 1 degree a year, but the latest study suggests that movements of up to 10 degrees annually are possible.

Say something Eric Klien.

Given the increasing proliferation of AI, I recently carried out a systematic review of AI-driven regulatory gaps. My review sampled the academic literature on AI in the hard and social sciences and found fifty existing or future regulatory gaps caused by this technology’s applications and methods in the United States. Drawing on an adapted version of Lyria Bennett-Moses’s framework, I then characterized each regulatory gap according to one of four categories: novelty, obsolescence, targeting, and uncertainty.

Significantly, of the regulatory gaps identified, only 12 percent represent novel challenges that compel government action through the creation or adaptation of regulation. By contrast, another 20 percent of the gaps are cases in which AI has made or will make regulations obsolete. A quarter of the gaps are problems of targeting, in which regulations are either inappropriately applied to AI or miss cases in which they should be applied. The largest group of regulatory gaps are ones of uncertainty in which a new technology is difficult to classify, causing a lack of clarity about the application of existing regulations.

Continue reading “Can existing laws cope with the AI revolution?” »

You’ve never seen anything like these before.

A German research institute announced Tuesday a new video standard that halves the bitrate required for streaming, allowing higher quality images on lower-power devices and opening the door wider to adoption of super high-definition 8K content.

The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute said the new codec, VVC—Versatile Video Coding, will not compromise video quality. With ever-increasing demands on bandwidth for social media streaming, Zoom conferencing, 4K content and 360-degree panoramic videos, and especially during heightened web use spurred by global quarantines, VVC comes at an opportune time.

The increased transmission efficiency the codec promises to achieve would help major streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video and Hulu reduce costs as they prepare for higher-resolution fare down the road.

Balloon shaping isn’t just for kids anymore. A team of researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has designed materials that can control and mold a balloon into pre-programmed shapes. The system uses kirigami sheets—thin sheets of material with periodic cuts—embedded into an inflatable device. As the balloon expands, the cuts in the kirigami sheet guide the growth, permitting expansion in some places and constricting it in others. The researchers were able to control the expansion not only globally to make large-scale shapes, but locally to generate small features.

The team also developed an inverse design strategy, an algorithm that finds the optimum design for the kirigami inflatable device that will mimic a target shape upon inflation.

Continue reading “Programmable balloons pave the way for new shape-morphing devices” »

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) have determined how to pinpoint the location of a drone operator who may be operating maliciously or harmfully near airports or protected airspace by analyzing the flight path of the drone.

Drones (small commercial unmanned aerial systems) pose significant security risks due to their agility, accessibility and low cost. As a result, there is a growing need to develop methods for detection, localization and mitigation of malicious and other harmful aircraft operation.

The paper, which was led by senior lecturer and drone expert Dr. Gera Weiss from BGU’s Department of Computer Science, was presented at the Fourth International Symposium on Cyber Security, Cryptography and Machine Learning (CSCML 2020) on July 3rd.

There you are wrist deep into a quart of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, digging ever deeper. You can’t deny it. Your necklace is recording the ice-cream binge, which it will later dispatch to a coach or dietician.

The aim is not to induce guilt but rather answer the question: “How did you get here?”

Continue reading “Smart necklace will know you binged on Chunky Monkey” »

To assist humans in completing manual chores or tasks, robots must efficiently grasp and manipulate objects in their surroundings. While in recent years robotics researchers have developed a growing number of techniques that allow robots to pick up and handle objects, most of these only proved to be effective when tackling very basic tasks, such as picking up an object or moving it from one place to another.

High-resolution sensors could enable more advanced robot manipulation capabilities by gathering valuable tactile information that can be used to identify the best strategies for manipulating specific objects. Many existing tactile sensors are highly efficient but expensive to produce, which makes them difficult or impossible to implement on a large-scale; others are inexpensive but with a limited resolution and performance.

With this in mind, researchers at Facebook recently designed DIGIT, a tactile sensor that is compact, affordable, and can also collect high-resolution images. DIGIT, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could facilitate the development of robots capable of completing a greater variety of tasks involving in-hand manipulation.