Lifeboat Foundation

Government-backed incentives and funding are still the main engines driving Chinese manufacturers to replace humans with robots in industries including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, new infrastructure projects and food processing.

Trade war with US saw many companies relocate outside China, but orders came back last year as Chinese production rapidly rebounded from the coronavirus, and a robotics boom is expected in 2021.

Fair to say that we all assume that aging is inevitable. In reality however, there is no biological law that says we must age. Over the years we’ve seen a variety of theories proposed to explain why we age including the accumulation of damage to our DNA, the damaging effects of chemicals called “free radicals, changes in the function of our mitochondria, and so many others.

Our guest today, Dr. David Sinclair, believes that aging is related to a breakdown of information. Specifically, he describes how, with time, our epigenome accumulates changes that have powerful downstream effects on the way our DNA functions. Reducing these changes to the epigenome is achievable and in fact, even taking it further, his research now reveals that the epigenome can be reprogrammed back to a youthful state.

Continue reading “The Empowering Neurologist — David Perlmutter M.D., and Dr. David Sinclair” »

Physicists imagine a day when they will be able to design a clock that’s so precise, it can detect dark matter.

Like periods in women, after a while our brains waves synchronise with the people we share our communications (family, friends, co-workers, church members, social media, etc.) so, it is good to know what are those and how they affect others and you.

Thanks to CuriosityStream for sponsoring this video! Go to https://curiositystream.com/thoughty or use code THOUGHTY at sign up to receive year-long access for just $14.99!

Continue reading “Our Brains Broadcast a Message We Don’t Understand” »

Here’s how it worked: red buoys placed along the river walk indicated the locations of the digital artworks. Visitors had to install an app on their phones called Acute Art. Pointing their phones at the area around the buoys, they’d see the digital sculptures appear.

The artwork didn’t follow any particular theme, but rather consisted of everything from a giant, furry spider to a wriggling octopus to a levitating spiritual leader. Artists included Norwegian Bjarne Melgaard, Chinese Cao Fei, Argentine Tomas Saraceno, German Alicja Kwade, American KAWS, and several others.

Continue reading “Watch London’s Cool, Quirky Augmented Reality Art Exhibit at Home” »

Their metal coins had virtually the same electrical conduction and light reflectance properties as standard ones, but their optical properties were dramatically changed. Why? Learn inside.

The concept: When we look at a chair, regardless of its shape and color, we know that we can sit on it. When a fish is in water, regardless of its location, it knows that it can swim. This is known as the theory of affordance, a term coined by psychologist James J. Gibson. It states that when intelligent beings look at the world they perceive not simply objects and their relationships but also their possibilities. In other words, the chair “affords” the possibility of sitting. The water “affords” the possibility of swimming. The theory could explain in part why animal intelligence is so generalizable—we often immediately know how to engage with new objects because we recognize their affordances.

The idea: Researchers at DeepMind are now using this concept to develop a new approach to reinforcement learning. In typical reinforcement learning, an agent learns through trial and error, beginning with the assumption that any action is possible. A robot learning to move from point A to point B, for example, will assume that it can move through walls or furniture until repeated failures tell it otherwise. The idea is if the robot were instead first taught its environment’s affordances, it would immediately eliminate a significant fraction of the failed trials it would have to perform. This would make its learning process more efficient and help it generalize across different environments.

The experiments: The researchers set up a simple virtual scenario. They placed a virtual agent in a 2D environment with a wall down the middle and had the agent explore its range of motion until it had learned what the environment would allow it to do—its affordances. The researchers then gave the agent a set of simple objectives to achieve through reinforcement learning, such as moving a certain amount to the right or to the left. They found that, compared with an agent that hadn’t learned the affordances, it avoided any moves that would cause it to get blocked by the wall partway through its motion, setting it up to achieve its goal more efficiently.

Metallurgists have all kinds of ways to make a chunk of metal harder. They can bend it, twist it, run it between two rollers or pound it with a hammer. These methods work by breaking up the metal’s grain structure—the microscopic crystalline domains that form a bulk piece of metal. Smaller grains make for harder metals.

Now, a group of Brown University researchers has found a way to customize metallic grain structures from the bottom up. In a paper published in the journal Chem, the researchers show a method for smashing individual metal nanoclusters together to form solid macro-scale hunks of solid metal. Mechanical testing of the metals manufactured using the technique showed that they were up to four times harder than naturally occurring metal structures.

“Hammering and other hardening methods are all top-down ways of altering grain structure, and it’s very hard to control the grain size you end up with,” said Ou Chen, an assistant professor of chemistry at Brown and corresponding author of the new research. “What we’ve done is create nanoparticle building blocks that fuse together when you squeeze them. This way we can have uniform grain sizes that can be precisely tuned for enhanced properties.”

DARPA is starting a program to develop a new multispectral Enhanced Night Vision (ENVision) system for the military that replaces today’s heavy night-vision goggles with ones that are as light and compact as a pair of eyeglasses.

Night-vision devices were first developed before the Second World War, but only became practical in the 1960s. Since then, they have revolutionized warfare by effectively eliminating the cover of darkness as protection for a hostile force. Where once aircraft and ground troops were effectively nullified by the fall of night, pilots and soldiers can now operate as if it was high noon.

However, the technology is far from mature even after four or five development generations. The devices have become more sophisticated and sensitive, with the capability to see across more of the infrared spectrum as well as seeing heat signatures, but night-vision goggles remain bulky and heavy, with a field of vision that’s a third that of the naked eye.