Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 7317

Cerebras Systems and the federal Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory today announced that the company’s CS-1 system is more than 10,000 times faster than a graphics processing unit (GPU).

On a practical level, this means AI neural networks that previously took months to train can now train in minutes on the Cerebras system.

Cerebras makes the world’s largest computer chip, the WSE. Chipmakers normally slice a wafer from a 12-inch-diameter ingot of silicon to process in a chip factory. Once processed, the wafer is sliced into hundreds of separate chips that can be used in electronic hardware.

Read more | >

It seems these robots could be used to spy on you from home. 😃

A team of researchers demonstrated that popular robotic household vacuum cleaners can be remotely hacked to act as microphones.

The researchers—including Nirupam Roy, an assistant professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science—collected information from the laser-based in a popular vacuum robot and applied and deep learning techniques to recover speech and identify playing in the same room as the device.

The research demonstrates the potential for any device that uses light detection and ranging (Lidar) technology to be manipulated for collecting , despite not having a microphone. This work, which is a collaboration with assistant professor Jun Han at the University of Singapore was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2020) on November 18, 2020.

Continue reading “Researchers hacked a robotic vacuum cleaner to record speech and music remotely” | >

AI startup RealityEngines. AI changed its name to Abacus.AI in July. At the same time, it announced a $13 million Series A round. Today, only a few months later, it is not changing its name again, but it is announcing a $22 million Series B round, led by Coatue, with Decibel Ventures and Index Partners participating as well. With this, the company, which was co-founded by former AWS and Google exec Bindu Reddy, has now raised a total of $40.3 million.

Read more | >

Newfound Autonomy

There are ways that a robot companion could outperform humans, Jecker says, by providing sympathetic and patient support free of judgment and condescension around the clock.

“It relates to issues of dignity,” Jecker told the Times. “The ability to be sexual at any age relates to your ability to have a life. Not just to survive, but to have a life, and do things that have value. Relationships. Bodily integrity. These things are a matter of dignity.”

Read more | >

Fantastic news for a change!

The ageing process has been biologically reversed for the first time by giving humans oxygen therapy in a pressurised chamber.

Scientists in Israel showed they could turn back the clock in two key areas of the body believed to be responsible for the frailty and ill-health that comes with growing older.

As people age, the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes – called telomeres – shorten, causing DNA to become damaged and cells to stop replicating. At the same time, “zombie” senescent cells build up in the body, preventing regeneration.

Continue reading “Human ageing process biologically reversed in world first” | >

Viruses are tiny invaders that cause a wide range of diseases, from rabies to tomato spotted wilt virus and, most recently, COVID-19 in humans. But viruses can do more than elicit sickness — and not all viruses are tiny.

Large viruses, especially those in the nucleo-cytoplasmic large DNA virus family, can integrate their genome into that of their host — dramatically changing the genetic makeup of that organism. This family of DNA viruses, otherwise known as “giant” viruses, has been known within scientific circles for quite some time, but the extent to which they affect eukaryotic organisms has been shrouded in mystery — until now.

“Viruses play a central role in the evolution of life on Earth. One way that they shape the evolution of cellular life is through a process called endogenization, where they introduce new genomic material into their hosts. When a giant virus endogenizes into the genome of a host algae, it creates an enormous amount of raw material for evolution to work with,” said Frank Aylward, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the Virginia Tech College of Science and an affiliate of the Global Change Center housed in the Fralin Life Sciences Institute.

Read more | >

The first radio burst discovered in the Milky Way is now repeating as it travels from a magnetar – a neutron star with a strong magnetic field – 32,616 light-years away.

The initial flash of energy was first detected in April and scientist have identified two more, confirming fast radio bursts ‘are emitted by magnetars at cosmological distances.’

A team working with the Westerbrok Telescope in the Netherlands captured the signal, which came as two short bursts, each one millisecond long and 1.4 seconds apart.

Read more | >