Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 7330

Elon Musk announced that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving beta test will indeed be rolled out tonight. The Full Self-Driving beta will feature improvements from Tesla’s Autopilot rewrite. Musk has described the upcoming FSD beta as “profound,” which has only fueled excitement for its release.

While Musk confirmed the rollout of FSD’s limited beta, he did set some realistic expectations to the electric car community. The CEO stated that this limited beta will be rolled out in an “extremely slow and cautious” manner, likely to maximize safety. This bodes well for Tesla’s public Full Self-Driving rollout, as it shows that the company is taking a very conservative approach with regards to the release of its autonomous driving features.

Earlier this month, the Tesla CEO gave the public some information about the FSD beta coming out tonight. He said that Tesla’s new FSD build will be “capable of zero-intervention drives.”

Read more | >

A simple way to improve efficiency…

Solar panels offer huge potential to move more people away from electricity generated from burning coal, and a new innovation devised by scientists stands to more than double the amount of light captured by conventional solar cells.

In a new study, a team of scientists from the UK, Portugal, and Brazil discovered that etching a shallow pattern of grating lines in a checkerboard design on solar cells can enhance the current generated by crystalline silicon (c-Si) by as much as 125 percent.

“We found a simple trick for boosting the absorption of slim solar cells,” explains photovoltaics researcher Christian Schuster from the University of York.

Continue reading “Etching a Simple Pattern on Solar Panels Boosts Light Absorption” | >

Dualism Reborn

McFadden’s hypothesis veers away from most neuroscientists, who generally see consciousness as a narrative that our brain constructs out of our senses, perceptions, and actions. Instead, McFadden returns to a more empirical version of dualism — the idea that consciousness stems from something other than our brain matter — in this case energy.

“How brain matter becomes aware and manages to think is a mystery that has been pondered by philosophers, theologians, mystics and ordinary people for millennia,” McFadden said in a press release. “I believe this mystery has now been solved, and that consciousness is the experience of nerves plugging into the brain’s self-generated electromagnetic field to drive what we call ‘free will’ and our voluntary actions.”

Read more | >

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has made a historic touchdown on the asteroid Bennu, dodging boulders the size of buildings to collect samples from the surface for several seconds before safely backing away Tuesday evening.

The meticulous descent took 4.5 hours and by 6.12pm the spacecraft made touchdown where its 11-foot robotic arm acted like a pogo stick and bounced on the asteroid’s surface to collect dirt and dust before the craft launched back into space.

The crucial minutes in the mission started around 5.38pm when the spacecraft extended its arm and cameras toward the asteroid’s surface. By 6pm OSIRIS-REx made matchpoint burn, the spacecraft’s key final maneuver performed by firing its thrusters to match Bennu’s spin to center itself exactly over the landing spot.

Read more | >

In a newly published policy paper, a pair of Canadian scientists warn that the United States is angling to establish itself as the de facto gatekeeper of the moon and other celestial bodies.

Earlier this year, NASA published a new set of rules for lunar mining and other space activities, dubbing the voluntary guidelines the “Artemis Accords.”

Aaron Boley and Michael Byers, authors of the new Science paper, argue that the Artemis Accords are part of a concerted effort by the U.S. and NASA to set a legal precedent for space-based resource extraction.

Read more | >