Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 7,661

The future of disaster management, using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and a bit of Waffle House and Starbucks 🙂

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador interviews Craig Fugate Chief Emergency Management Officer of One Concern and former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

The international context of this interview: In choosing our leaders it is becoming increasingly important to select people who can both anticipate and address and where possible avoid large scale disasters. Here, Craig Fugate discusses evaluating past disasters, planning for future events and reacting to the “unexpected” — “think big and move fast”.

Ira Pastor comments:

The U.S. has sustained 279 weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including CPI adjustment to 2020). The total cost of these 279 events exceeds $1.825 trillion.

Continue reading “Think Big, Move Fast, Build Capacity and Resilience: Disaster Management” | >

SpaceX is preparing to conduct a national security mission for the United States Space Force. The aerospace company is tasked to deploy the military’s fourth new-generation series Global Positioning System satellite, known as GPS-III Space Vehicle 04. On October 2nd, SpaceX attempted to launch the satellite to orbit but at around two seconds before the 9:43 p.m. EDT liftoff time, launch controllers aborted the launch at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 40.

During the Live broadcast of the launch attempt the Principal Integration Engineer at SpaceX John Insprucker said the next launch opportunity for this mission is on Saturday, October 3rd at 9:39 p.m. EDT. but the rocket did not attempt a second launch because SpaceX found issues on one of the Falcon 9 rocket’s nine Merlin 1D engines. According to SpaceX founder and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, the Falcon 9 rocket carrying the GPS-III satellite experienced an “unexpected pressure rise in the turbomachinery gas generator,” he wrote. “
 We’re doing a broad review of launch site, propulsion, structures, avionics, range & regulatory constraints this weekend. I will also be at the Cape next week to review hardware in person,” he said early October.

SpaceX’s Vice President of build and flight reliability, Hans Koenigsmann, said during a news conference on October 28th that SpaceX engineers worked alongside the U.S. Space Force and NASA to perform a deep investigation into the issue. They came to the conclusion that the Falcon 9 engine issue was due to a residue of a “masking lacquer” designed to protect sensitive parts during anti-corrosion anodizing treatment. Koenigsmann told reporters the SpaceX vendor that performed the lacquer coating treatment failed to remove all of the lacquer afterward, causing a blockage of small vent holes for Merlin engine valves. “It’s not necessarily bad,” he said, “In most cases, it rattles the engine, and it may cause a little bit of damage to the engine. In extreme cases, it may cause more damage to the engine.” SpaceX officials announced they would fix the issue by replacing the engine. Now, SpaceX targets to deploy GPS-III Space Vehicle 04 satellite atop the Falcon 9 no earlier than Thursday, November 5th at 6:24 p.m. EDT [date is subject to change]. This mission is important for the United States because the GPS-III satellite is designed to upgrade the satellite constellation that actively provides navigation services to over 4 billion users.

Read more | >

As progress in traditional computing slows, new forms of computing are coming to the forefront. At Penn State, a team of engineers is attempting to pioneer a type of computing that mimics the efficiency of the brain’s neural networks while exploiting the brain’s analog nature.

Modern computing is digital, made up of two states, on-off or one and zero. An analog computer, like the , has many possible states. It is the difference between flipping a light switch on or off and turning a dimmer switch to varying amounts of lighting.

Neuromorphic or brain-inspired computing has been studied for more than 40 years, according to Saptarshi Das, the team leader and Penn State assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics. What’s new is that as the limits of digital computing have been reached, the need for high-speed image processing, for instance for self-driving cars, has grown. The rise of big data, which requires types of pattern recognition for which the brain architecture is particularly well suited, is another driver in the pursuit of neuromorphic computing.

Read more | >

Virgin Hyperloop, the transportation company owned by business magnate Richard Branson, has ambitious plans to build a vacuum tube transportation system that travels over 600 miles per hour.

But before it does so, the company has made the reasonable decision to figure out what traveling that quickly might to do the brain. To wit, scientists at West Virginia’s Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute (RNI) will find out what to expect when launching passengers at 78 percent the speed of sound.

Hold on to your brains!

Read more | >

This is the episode for anyone who has wondered about the fundamental structure of the universe and its extremely distant future — a time which is so distant that for all practical purposes, it’s almost synonymous with eternity. Black Holes, Fundamental Physics, and the meaning behind the cosmological catchphrase — Turtles All the Way Down. Please listen.

What happens when all the stars in our cosmos’ galaxies burn out; with little or no hydrogen gas left to fuel star formation; and everything pretty much turns to toast? It will presage an age of black holes where extremely low temperatures and fundamental particle decay will alleviate life as we know it. This universal endgame in an almost infinite far future may actually be a Dark Age where little or nothing can happen. And if it does, only on the longest timescales. Yale University astrophysicist Gregory Laughlin and I discuss these and other issues in this cosmological “turtles all the way down” episode of the podcast.

Read more | >

Space — The final frontier, and for Soviet cosmonaut, Sergei Krikalev, it nearly was his final frontier! Check out today’s new video where a soviet astronaut was on a space mission, meanwhile the USSR crumbled,
 More making him the last citizen of the Soviet Union. How did Sergei finally get home, and what home would he be coming back to? Check out this epic new space story to find out!

Read more | >

New results from NASA’s Juno mission at Jupiter suggest that either “sprites” or “elves” could be dancing in the upper atmosphere of the solar system’s largest planet. It is the first time these bright, unpredictable and extremely brief flashes of light—formally known as transient luminous events, or TLE’s—have been observed on another world. The findings were published on Oct. 27, 2020, in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

Scientists predicted these bright, superfast flashes of light should also be present in Jupiter’s immense roiling atmosphere, but their existence remained theoretical. Then, in the summer of 2019, researchers working with data from Juno’s ultraviolet spectrograph instrument (UVS) discovered something unexpected: a bright, narrow streak of ultraviolet emission that disappeared in a flash.

“UVS was designed to characterize Jupiter’s beautiful northern and southern lights,” said Giles, a Juno scientist and the lead author of the paper. “But we discovered UVS images that not only showed Jovian aurora, but also a bright flash of UV light over in the corner where it wasn’t supposed to be. The more our team looked into it, the more we realized Juno may have detected a TLE on Jupiter.”

Read more | >

Microsoft has announced the launch of the public preview of a free app that allows users to train machine learning (ML) models without writing any code.

This app — Lobe — has been designed for Windows and Mac, only supports image classification; however, the tech giant is planning to expand the app to include other models and data types in the future.

According to Lobe website, the app needs to be shown examples of what the users want to learn, and the app automatically trains a custom machine learning model that can be shipped in the users’ app.

Read more | >