Lifeboat Foundation

Could make awesome computers.

Materials scientists who work with nano-sized components have developed ways of working with their vanishingly small materials. But what if you could get your components to assemble themselves into different structures without actually handling them at all?

Verner Håkonsen works with cubes so tiny that nearly 5 billion of them could fit on a pinhead.

Continue reading “5 Billion of These Super-Strong Magnetic Supercrystals Can Fit on a Pinhead” »

Telescopes have captured the rare light flash from a dying star as it was ripped apart by a supermassive black hole.

Are we in a simulation?

In an influential 2003 paper, University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom laid out the possibility that our reality is a computer simulation dreamed up by a highly advanced civilization. In the paper, he argued that at least one of three propositions must be true:

1. Civilizations usually go extinct before developing the capability of creating reality simulations.
2. Advanced civilizations usually have no interest in creating reality simulations.
3. We’re almost certainly living inside a computer simulation.

I am for Ethical Robots what about you?

Every time we talk to Alexa, Siri, Google, or Cortana, we are building the brains of the robot. Human machine relationships increase and robot ethics are needed for the coming age of automation, they are simply not adequate for the nuanced capabilities and behaviors we are beginning to see in today’s devices.

Changing face of our military.

A company-sized evaluation is happening in October at Fort Pickett, Virginia.

The world’s small-scale farmers now can see a path to solving global hunger over the next decade, with solutions—such as adopting climate-resilient crops through improving extension services—all culled rapidly via artificial intelligence from more than 500,000 scientific research articles.

The results are synthesized in 10 new research papers—authored by 77 scientists, researchers and librarians in 23 countries—as part of Ceres2030: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger. The project is headquartered at Cornell University, with partners from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

The papers were published concurrently on Oct. 12 in four journals— Nature Plants, Nature Sustainability, Nature Machine Intelligence and Nature Food —and assembled in a comprehensive package online: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger.

Textron Systems has a new batch of Next Generation Squad Weapon prototypes, featuring improvements from soldier tests.

Mercedes-Benz used the LMP all-solid-state batteries on the eCitaro, but it is not like it used to be, according to BlueSolutions. Check their evolution.

Magnetic fields are far stronger and more important than gravity in forming stars and galaxies. Contrary to black hole propaganda, magnetic fields increase in strength the nearer to the center. There just is not a gravity center of mass to earth based reality in outer space.