Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Deep learning algorithms, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have achieved remarkable results on a variety of tasks, including those that involve recognizing specific people or objects in images. A task that computer scientists have often tried to tackle using deep learning is vision-based human action recognition (HAR), which specifically entails recognizing the actions of humans who have been captured in images or videos.

Researchers at HITEC University and Foundation University Islamabad in Pakistan, Sejong University and Chung-Ang University in South Korea, University of Leicester in the UK, and Prince Sultan University in Saudi Arabia have recently developed a new CNN for recognizing human actions in videos. This CNN, presented in a paper published in Springer Link’s Multimedia Tools and Applications journal, was trained to differentiate between several different human actions, including boxing, clapping, waving, jogging, running and walking.

“We designed a new 26-layered convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for accurate complex action recognition,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “The features are extracted from the global average pooling layer and fully connected (FC) layer and fused by a proposed high entropy-based approach.”

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Elon Musk’s controversial ‘brain chip’ might be coming to us sooner than we first thought, with the technology entrepreneur promising a working demo by the end of this week.

The news comes a little over a month after Musk announced his latest start-up, Neuralink, was in the process of developing a brain-computer interface that allegedly has a life-changing range of benefits – including the ability to stream music straight into your brain.

Now, Neuralink, which has already received more than $158 million in funding, will be demonstrating a working device this coming Friday, August 28, at approximately 6.00pm ET (11.00pm BST).

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“This was a big milestone, as it was our first opportunity to turn on Ingenuity and give its electronics a ‘test drive’ since we launched on July 30,” said Tim Canham, the operations lead for Mars Helicopter at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in the statement. “Since everything went by the book, we’ll perform the same activity about every two weeks to maintain an acceptable state of charge.”

It’s one more step on the road to what NASA hopes will be humankind’s first flight on an alien world.

“This charge activity shows we have survived launch and that so far we can handle the harsh environment of interplanetary space,” MiMi Aung, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter project manager, added. “We have a lot more firsts to go before we can attempt the first experimental flight test on another planet, but right now we are all feeling very good about the future.”

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More advances on artificial photosynthesis.

Scientists at the UK’s University of Cambridge have developed a renewable energy device that mimics photosynthesis by making fuel from sunlight, carbon dioxide and water.

Taking inspiration from the way that plants create their own energy, the device is a slim sheet that produces oxygen and formic acid from water, carbon dioxide and sunlight.

Formic acid can be stored and used as fuel on its own, or turned into hydrogen fuel.

Continue reading “University of Cambridge develops synthetic leaf that turns sunlight into fuel” | >

In just two years a robotic device that prints a patient’s own skin cells directly onto a burn or wound could have its first-in-human clinical trials. The 3D bioprinting system for intraoperative skin regeneration developed by Australian biotech start-up Inventia Life Science has gained new momentum thanks to major investments from the Australian government and two powerful new partners, world-renowned burns expert Fiona Wood and leading bioprinting researcher Gordon Wallace.

Codenamed Ligō from the Latin “to bind”, the system is expected to revolutionize wound repairs by delivering multiple cell types and biomaterials rapidly and precisely, creating a new layer of skin where it has been damaged. The novel system is slated to replace current wound healing methods that simply attempt to repair the skin, and is being developed by Inventia Skin, a subsidiary of Inventia Life Science.

“When we started Inventia Life Science, our vision was to create a technology platform with the potential to bring enormous benefit to human health. We are pleased to see how fast that vision is progressing alongside our fantastic collaborators. This Federal Government support will definitely help us accelerate even faster,” said Dr. Julio Ribeiro, CEO, and co-founder of Inventia.

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Episode 13; please check out this candid interview with Lowell Observatory astronomer Gerard van Belle on why we need interferometry in space. Many thanks!

Lowell Observatory astronomer Gerard van Belle, Chief Scientist at the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer (NPOI) in Flagstaff. Arizona talks about the possibility of arrays of space telescopes that are 3D printed after launch. We also discuss the history of optical interferometry; why such interlinked telescopes are the key to America’s future in astronomy and why Arizona skies remain as vital today as they were a century ago.

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A team of researchers with Google’s AI Quantum team (working with unspecified collaborators) has conducted the largest chemical simulation on a quantum computer to date. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their work and why they believe it was a step forward in quantum computing. Xiao Yuan of Stanford University has written a Perspective piece outlining the potential benefits of quantum computer use to conduct chemical simulations and the work by the team at AI Quantum, published in the same journal issue.

Developing an ability to predict by simulating them on computers would be of great benefit to chemists—currently, they do most of it through trial and error. Prediction would open up the door to the development of a wide range of new materials with still unknown properties. Sadly, current computers lack the exponential scaling that would be required for such work. Because of that, chemists have been hoping quantum computers will one day step in to take on the role.

Current quantum computer technology is not yet ready to take on such a challenge, of course, but computer scientists are hoping to get them there sometime in the near future. In the meantime, big companies like Google are investing in research geared toward using quantum computers once they mature. In this new effort, the team at AI Quantum focused their efforts on simulating a simple chemical process—the Hartree-Fock approximation of a real system—in this particular case, a diazene molecule undergoing a reaction with hydrogen atoms, resulting in an altered configuration.

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The decades-old dream of zipping around in the sky as simply as driving on highways may be becoming less illusory.

Japan’s SkyDrive Inc., among the myriads of “flying car” projects around the world, has carried out a successful though modest test flight with one person aboard.

In a video shown to reporters on Friday, a contraption that looked like a slick motorcycle with propellers lifted several feet (1−2 meters) off the ground, and hovered in a netted area for four minutes.

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