Lifeboat Foundation

New AI tools CLIP+VQ-GAN can create impressive works of art based on just a few words of input.

Breaking — Branson Beats Bezos to Space! Some history of the Virgin Galactic propulsion development, flight analysis and more background with Tim Pickens.

Tim Pickens is an entrepreneur, inventor, innovator, engineer and educator. He specializes in commercial space, technical product development and solutions, and business consulting and strategy for space and technical companies. Pickens’ 25+ years of experience in the aerospace industry, specializing in the design, fabrication and testing of propulsion hardware systems, has earned him a reputation as one of the industry’s leaders in these areas. Early in his career, Pickens served as propulsion lead for Scaled Composites on SpaceShipOne, winner of the $10 million Ansari X Prize. He also worked for small hardware-rich aerospace companies in Huntsville, and later supported the Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo venture.

Continue reading “Branson Beats Bezos to Space History and Flight Analysis with Tim Pickens” »

Watch video from Virgin Galactic showing Richard Branson’s space plane’s engine ignite sending the billionaire into outer space.

As AI toys enter the market, they can be helpful, educational tools for kids but can also pose risks to data privacy.

Data collected can be used to provide new insights into the evolution of the Kuiper Belt, and the larger solar system.

Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), small objects that orbit the sun beyond Neptune, are fossils from the early days of the solar system which can tell us a lot about its formation and evolution.

A new study led by Mohamad Ali-Dib, a research scientist at the NYU Abu Dhabi Center for Astro, Particle, and Planetary Physics, reports the significant discovery that two groups of TNOs with different surface colors also have very different orbital patterns. This new information can be compared to models of the solar system to provide fresh insights into its early chemistry. Additionally, this discovery paves the way for further understanding of the formation of the Kuiper Belt itself, an area beyond Neptune comprised of icy objects, that is also the source of some comets.

WTF?! On Thursday the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) reported that they had shut down a cryptomining operation in the city of Vinnytsia, seizing over 500 GPUs and 50 processors — and a bunch of Playstation 4s. Consoles built on 2013-era technology might not be great at mining, but they don’t need to be when you have 3800 of them.

Although the market for GPUs is starting to improve, and dedicated ASICs might be on the way to relieve demand, it seems that one group of enterprising cryptocurrency miners have turned to last-gen console hardware to get things done.

Continue reading “3,800 PS4s found and seized from a cryptocurrency farm in Ukraine” »

A rare group of humans known as “superagers” can grow up without their minds growing old.

Even in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, a lucky few maintain incredibly youthful memories, recalling new experiences, events, and situations just as well as people decades younger.

New research now suggests that’s because their brains have somehow resisted the march of time.

Thawing permafrost threatens to undermine the supports holding up an elevated section of the pipeline, jeopardizing its structural integrity and raising the potential of an oil spill in a delicate and remote landscape.

The size of a tennis ball. The mass of the Earth.

But that could change soon.

Current gravitational wave observatories are sensitive to the mergers of stellar-mass black holes. We’ve observed a few mergers involving neutron stars, but most have been between black holes on the order of tens of solar masses.

Continue reading “‘Primordial black holes’ could confirm a theory about the origins of the universe” »