Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Like weather forecasting, disease forecasting needs to be statistical.

While we cannot predict in advance exactly how many hurricanes will occur this year or how bad they will be, we know with great confidence that climate change is a risk factor increasing the frequency and severity of hurricanes. Our knowledge of this and all the other risk factors for hurricanes allows us to make a statistical prediction for the coming season.

Similarly, we have known for decades that ther… See more.

I’ve written before about the need for infectious disease intelligence and whether or not we can insure against damages from future outbreaks. Both ideas assume that epidemics can, to some extent, be predicted. But can they?

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In conversation with my teenage daughter last week, I pointed out a news report which flagged concerns over the use of facial recognition technologies in several school canteens in North Ayrshire, Scotland. Nine schools in the area recently launched this practice as a means to take payment for lunches more quickly and minimize COVID risk, though they’ve since paused rolling out the technology.

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Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have produced a variety of life-forms, each intelligent in its own fashion. Each species has evolved to develop innate skills, learning capacities, and a physical form that ensures survival in its environment.

But despite being inspired by nature and evolution, the field of artificial intelligence has largely focused on creating the elements of intelligence separately and fusing them together after the development process. While this approach has yielded great results, it has also limited the flexibility of AI agents in some of the basic skills found in even the simplest life-forms.

In a new paper published in the scientific journal Nature, AI researchers at Stanford University present a new technique that can help take steps toward overcoming some of these limits. Called “deep evolutionary reinforcement learning,” or DERL, the new technique uses a complex virtual environment and reinforcement learning to create virtual agents that can evolve both in their physical structure and learning capacities. The findings can have important implications for the future of AI and robotics research.

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Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday announced the parent company’s name is being changed to “Meta” to represent a future beyond just its troubled social network.

The new handle comes as the social media giant tries to fend off one its worst crises yet and pivot to its ambitions for the “metaverse” virtual reality version of the internet that the tech giant sees as the future.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp will keep their names under the rebranding.

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So would the private station be a viable replacement for the ISS? The ageing station, which is a partnership between the US, Russia and other nations, is only funded until 2,024 with a 2028 extension looking probable, but it cannot last forever.

Blue Origin says its space station will be fully operational in the late 2020s, but deadline slippage is common when it comes to huge space-related projects like this one. “They can dream of being fully operational in the late 2020s, but in the space sector they often aim for aspirational targets and if they miss it by a year or two or three then they at least have something they’re aiming for until then,” says space analyst Laura Forczyk. “It’s almost inevitable that things take longer and are more expensive than planned.”

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Blue Origin, the space-flight firm owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is planning to build a space station – with the hopes that it could replace the International Space Station (ISS), which is reaching the end of its life.

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Dubbed GEH2, the hydrogen system has a size of 1,150×2,200x3350mm and weighs in at 3.5 tons. It features IP43 ingress protection and is able to operate at temperatures between-5 and 45 degrees Celsius. Its output voltage is between 230 and 400 V.

The generator has a power of 110 kVA and its lifetime is guaranteed for two years or 15,000 hours. Its autonomy at 50% of prime running power is around eight hours. It can be started instantaneously and also features a double adduction system that allows continuous operation.

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