Lifeboat Foundation

Bioo uses microorganisms in the soil to power lights—and maybe one day, your whole house.

This is probably the only time, that I’ll be sharing a netflix trailer in this group. The documentary is worth watching, especially the outlook at the end.

In this unique feature documentary, titled David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet, the celebrated naturalist reflects upon both the defining moments of his lifetime and the devastating changes he has seen. Coming to Netflix October 4 2020, the film addresses some of the biggest challenges facing life on our planet, providing a snapshot of global nature loss in a single lifetime. With it comes a powerful message of hope for future generations as Attenborough reveals the solutions to help save our planet from disaster.

Continue reading “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet | Official Trailer | Netflix” »

SpaceX is expanding the beta test of its Starlink satellite internet service, reaching out via email on Monday to people who expressed interest in signing up for the service.

Called the “Better Than Nothing Beta” test, according to multiple screenshots of the email seen by CNBC, initial Starlink service is priced at $99 a month – plus a $499 upfront cost to order the Starlink Kit. That kit includes a user terminal to connect to the satellites, a mounting tripod and a wifi router. There is also now a Starlink app listed by SpaceX on the Google Play and Apple iOS app stores.

“As you can tell from the title, we are trying to lower your initial expectations,” the emails said, signed Starlink Team. “Expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s and latency from 20ms to 40ms over the next several months as we enhance the Starlink system. There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all.”

Deci, a Tel Aviv-based startup that is building a new platform that uses AI to optimized AI models and get them ready for production, today announced that it has raised a $9.1 million seed round led by Emerge and Square Peg.

The general idea here is to make it easier and faster for businesses to take AI workloads into production — and to optimize those production models for improved accuracy and performance. To enable this, the company built an end-to-end solution that allows engineers to bring in their pre-trained models and then have Deci manage, benchmark and optimize them before they package them up for deployment. Using its runtime container or Edge SDK, Deci users can also then serve those models on virtually any modern platform and cloud.

Australian radio host Annabelle Brett, who works at Mix 1–6.3 Canberra, cleverly used her Tesla mobile app to mess with the two would-be thieves who attempted to steal her Model 3.

The theft attempt started when the radio host received notifications on her phone early one morning stating that her Model 3’s alarm was triggered. After receiving the notifications, Brett went to her locked garage where she had parked her Model 3 and discovered it was missing.

Unfortunately for the would-be thieves, Brett’s Model 3 is equipped with safety features like Sentry Mode, which continuously monitors a Tesla’s surroundings when it is left unattended. Through these features, footage from the car’s suite of cameras could be retrieved.

Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, is not a poker player—or much of a poker fan, in fact—but he is fascinated by the game for much the same reason as the great game theorist John von Neumann before him. Von Neumann, who died in 1957, viewed poker as the perfect model for human decision making, for finding the balance between skill and chance that accompanies our every choice. He saw poker as the ultimate strategic challenge, combining as it does not just the mathematical elements of a game like chess but the uniquely human, psychological angles that are more difficult to model precisely—a view shared years later by Sandholm in his research with artificial intelligence.

“Poker is the main benchmark and challenge program for games of imperfect information,” Sandholm told me on a warm spring afternoon in 2018, when we met in his offices in Pittsburgh. The game, it turns out, has become the gold standard for developing artificial intelligence.

Tall and thin, with wire-frame glasses and neat brow hair framing a friendly face, Sandholm is behind the creation of three computer programs designed to test their mettle against human poker players: Claudico, Libratus, and most recently, Pluribus. (When we met, Libratus was still a toddler and Pluribus didn’t yet exist.) The goal isn’t to solve poker, as such, but to create algorithms whose decision making prowess in poker’s world of imperfect information and stochastic situations—situations that are randomly determined and unable to be predicted—can then be applied to other stochastic realms, like the military, business, government, cybersecurity, even health care.

This is it. Harley-Davidson has been teasing us with the prospect of their own in-house electric bicycles for over two years. And today the bar-and-shield motorcycle manufacturer has finally announced its new dedicated electric bicycle brand known as Serial 1 Cycle Company.

The brand’s name is an homage to the very first motorcycle ever built by Harley-Davidson in 1903, named “Serial Number One.”

Back then, motorcycles were essentially just bicycles with a small engine placed in front of the pedals.

I am both amazed and wierded out. 😃

A very creative and cool idea! I think it could help a lot of people.

This is an evacuation strap that lets you drag bedridden patients down the stairs.

Continue reading “S-CAPEPOD evacuation blanket” »

The future Russian soldier is going to be able to control drone swarms, have landmine proof boots and an exoskeleton/suit to enhance their physical abilities and situational awareness.

Russia will integrate the ability to control small size attack drone swarms, robots, and exoskeletons into its next-generation soldier gear, in a development that feels more like a videogame update than reality.