Lifeboat Foundation

A mixed-reality headset Apple is developing will be equipped with more than a dozen cameras for tracking hand movements and showing video of the real world to people wearing it, along with ultra-high-resolution 8K displays and advanced technology for eye tracking, according to a person with direct knowledge of the device.

Those are among a bevy of features Apple is planning for the headset, a device that could represent one of the company’s most ambitious efforts to build a new technology platform. The Information viewed internal Apple images of a late-stage prototype from last year, which show a sleek, curved visor attached to the face by a mesh material and swappable headbands. An artist’s rendering based on the images of the headset and created by The Information appears below.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=m0vWME0Mk1Q

By 2050, the number of adults over the age of 65 globally will double, reaching a staggering 1.6 billion, with the largest growth in the developing world. This growth will be one of the greatest social, economic, and political transformations of our time, that will impact existing healthcare, government and social systems, that today are largely not inclusive of the ageing population or built to the scale needed to support it.

But we can begin to make investments in our support systems (enabled and scaled by technology) that encompass a coordinated response from governments, society, academia, and the private sector.

Continue reading “Ageing: Looming crisis or booming opportunity?” »

TL;DR: Last week, we kicked off a three-part series on the future of human-computer interaction (HCI). In the first post, we shared our 10-year vision of a contextually-aware, AI-powered interface for augmented reality (AR) glasses that can use the information you choose to share, to infer what you want to do, when you want to […].

Wiesendanger points out that unlike SARS and MERS, no intermediate host between bats and humans has been found more than a year since the start of the pandemic. Thus far, there is no evidence for the zoonotic theory to explain the outbreak.

Indeed, during the joint China-WHO report issued on Feb. 9, Liang Wannian, head of the Chinese National Health Commission’s Expert Panel of COVID-19 Response, stated that 50000 samples of wild animals from 300 different species (including bats) as well as 11000 farm animals in 31 Chinese provinces — taken between November 2019 and March 2020 — had all tested negative for SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19.

Continue reading “German scientist says 99.9% chance coronavirus leaked from Wuhan lab” »

The breadth and abundance of exploits for unknown vulnerabilities sets group apart.

A new, simpler solution process for fabricating stable perovskite solar cells overcomes the key bottleneck to large-scale production and commercialization of this promising renewable-energy technology, which has remained tantalizingly out of reach for more than a decade.

“Our work paves the way for low-cost, high-throughput commercial-scale production of large-scale solar modules in the near future,” said Wanyi Nie, a research scientist fellow in the Center of Integrated Nanotechnologies at Los Alamos National Laboratory and corresponding author of the paper, which was published today in the journal Joule. “We were able to demonstrate the approach through two mini-modules that reached champion levels of converting sunlight to power with greatly extended operational lifetimes. Since this process is facile and low cost, we believe it can be easily adapted to scalable fabrication in industrial settings.”

The team invented a one-step spin coating method using sulfolane, a liquid solvent. The new process allowed the team, a collaboration among Los Alamos and researchers from National Taiwan University (NTU), to produce high-yield, large-area photovoltaic devices that are highly efficient in creating power from sunlight. These perovskite solar cells also have a long operational lifetime.

“We’re going to try to catch the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower arm, using the grid fins to take the load,” Musk said via Twitter on Dec. 30. SpaceX will try a different approach to landing its future reusable rocket boosters. There are some benefits with this landing method: first, by omitting landing legs from the rocket design altogether, SpaceX can save weight and cost, because unlike Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy first stages Super Heavy won’t need landing legs. In a second place, it could allow SpaceX to essentially recycle the Super Heavy booster immediately because the rocket would be “ready to refly in under an hour”.

~Video credits: @tijnm_02 Text credits: www.space.com www.techcrunch.com.

7 Feb 2021

ISEC has great hopes for this new year. We have two studies coming to their conclusions, a Baseline Architecture, our conference is scheduled (25÷6 May), and we intend to participate in several others. Our current plans include working with potential sponsors as we present an aggressive program to the space community saying we are here and ready to help your vision. So, I thought I would give you a quick philosophical look at where I think we are and where we need to go. (background body of knowledge at www.isec.org)

Pete’s View of the Space Elevator Adventure: I have been in three mega-projects in space…I was in at the beginning of each; as such, here are my thoughts on success in Mega-Projects.

Continue reading “Starting a Mega-Project, such as Space Elevator” »

Researchers at the University of Ottawa have debunked the decade-old myth of metals being useless in photonics—the science and technology of light—with their findings, recently published in Nature Communications, expected to lead to many applications in the field of nanophotonics.

“We broke the record for the resonance quality factor (Q-factor) of a periodic array of metal nanoparticles by one order of magnitude compared to previous reports,” said senior author Dr. Ksenia Dolgaleva, Canada Research Chair in Integrated Photonics (Tier 2) and Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the University of Ottawa.

“It is a well-known fact that metals are very lossy when they interact with light, which means they cause the dissipation of electrical energy. The high losses compromise their use in optics and photonics. We demonstrated ultra-high-Q resonances in a metasurface (an artificially structured surface) comprised of an array of metal nanoparticles embedded inside a flat glass substrate. These resonances can be used for efficient light manipulating and enhanced light-matter interaction, showing metals are useful in photonics.”