Lifeboat Foundation

Pepper update:

Italian researchers have programmed a humanoid robot named Pepper, made by SoftBank Robotics in Japan, to “thinks out loud” so that users can hear its thought process. Hearing a robot voice its decision-making process increases the transparency and trust between humans and machines.

Arianna Pipitone and Antonio Chella at the University of Palermo, Italy, built an ‘inner speech model’ based on a cognitive architecture that allowed the robot to speak aloud its inner decision-making process, just like humans when faced with a challenge or a dilemma. With the inner speech, users can hear its thought process and better understand the robot’s motivations and decisions.

Continue reading “Pepper the humanoid robot can now ‘think out loud’ to increase user trust” »

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter ‘went big’ with its second flight, reaching new milestones with a higher altitude, flying to the side and grabbing another black-and-white photo of its shadow on the ground below.

The US space agency said it climbed up to 16ft above the surface, hovered, tilted slightly and then moved sideways 7ft. When in position it hovered again to take a series of colour photos before landing.

Continue reading “NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter successfully completes second flight through the Martian atmosphere” »

While leaded gasoline was fully phased out in 1996 with the passage of the Clean Air Act, it still fuels a fleet of 170000 piston-engine airplanes and helicopters. Leaded aviation fuel, or avgas, now makes up “the largest remaining aggregate source of lead emissions to air in the U.S.,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Meanwhile residents continue to live with the air quality that comes with living near an airport where small planes burning leaded fuel fly in and out, said Alarcon, who is also a volunteer organizer with the nonprofit tenant advocacy group Vecinos Activos. It’s also unclear to air quality experts and residents what is arguably safe.

“There is no bright line that says ‘Above this concentration lead is safe and below this concentration’ that it is not. You’d have to make a policy decision,” said Jay Turner, an engineering education professor at Washington University in St. Louis and member of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board. “We’re really careful to come back to this point that just because public areas might meet the EPA standard [for lead] doesn’t mean zero risk or zero concern.”

Continue reading “Why small planes still use leaded fuel decades after phase-out in cars” »

DARPA announced it has increased Lockheed Martin’s contract for satellite integration work for the Blackjack program by $27.3 million.

WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency increased Lockheed Martin’s contract for satellite integration work for the Blackjack program by $27.3 million, the agency announced April 22.

DARPA a year ago selected Lockheed Martin as the satellite integrator for Blackjack, a project to demonstrate a network of small satellites in low Earth orbit for military communications, missile warning and navigation.

Continue reading “Lockheed Martin wins $27 million contract modification for integration of DARPA’s Blackjack satellites” »

A remote island could host Elon Musk’s new Space X project — but its residents are not impressed.

They require less maintenance, and less pollution. Imagine if you used them as a battery backup during an emergency.

School board seals deal to bring 300 electric school buses to Montgomery County. The buses will recharge at night and run during the day. During the hot summers, the buses and charging stations can help store needed energy for local businesses.

Users can input a specific address or more generalized region, such as a state or country, and then choose a date ranging from zero to 750 million years ago.

The interactive tool enables users to home in on a specific location and visualize how it has evolved between the Cryogenian Period and the present.

In pharmaceutical research, swapping out hydrogens for methyl groups is a frequent strategy to optimize small-molecule properties. Vasilopoulos et al. report a versatile, convenient, and comparatively safe method for methylation of carbon centers adjacent to nitrogen or aryl rings. Under carefully optimized conditions, di-tert-butyl peroxide plays a dual role as oxidant and methyl source. Cleaving the O–O bond through photosensitization produces butoxyl radicals, some of which cleave substrate C–H bonds, whereas others release methyl radicals that a nickel catalyst delivers to those activated substrates.

Science, this issue p. [398][1]

The “magic methyl” effect describes the change in potency, selectivity, and/or metabolic stability of a drug candidate associated with addition of a single methyl group.

OEC promoting STEM education in Africa.

Remember the project where Bill Gates wanted to cover the sun to cool the Earth? Well, this summer, the tests will begin. According to The Times, a large balloon will soon be launched in Sweden that will spew out of calcium carbonate, which is essentially “chalk dust.”

The Controlled Stratospheric Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) wants to prove that the release of this dust into the stratosphere could eventually divert some of the sun’s energy and lower the temperatures of our planet.

Continue reading “A Project Supported by Bill Gates Is Set to Temporarily Dim the Sun” »