Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 7846

Ordinarily, planning a mid-afternoon launch from Florida during the summer would be inadvisable, especially if there’s no margin for error. The heat and humidity can make for “dynamic” weather conditions (to use a word that came up frequently in forecasts last week) that make it difficult to predict if a launch can proceed.

However, the schedule for the Demo-2 commercial crew mission was dictated not by Mother Nature but instead by Isaac Newton. The launch was tied to the orbit of the International Space Station so that the Crew Dragon spacecraft could reach the station after launch. That required an instantaneous launch window that, in late May, happened to be in the afternoon from the Kennedy Space Center.

Still, try explaining that to the boss. “I was told that the rocket you just witnessed had to be launched within one second, or it would be impossible for it to hit its target,” President Donald Trump said last Saturday, after a successful launch that he watched in person. He had been at the Kennedy Space Center three days earlier as well, when weather conditions didn’t quite clear in time to allow the launch.

Read more | >

If you are interested in artificial general intelligence (AGI), then I have a panel discussion to recommend. My friend, David Wood, has done a masterful job of selecting three panelists with deep insight into possible regulation of AGI. One of the panelists was my friend, Dan Faggella, who was eloquent and informative as usual. For this session of the London Futurists, David Wood selected two other panelists with significantly different opinions on how to properly restrain AGI.

As research around the world proceeds to improve the power, the scope, and the generality of AI systems, should developers adopt regulatory frameworks to help steer progress?

What are the main threats that such regulations should be guarding against? In the midst of an intense international race to obtain better AI, are such frameworks doomed to be ineffective? Might such frameworks do more harm than good, hindering valuable innovation? Are there good examples of precedents, from other fields of technology, of international agreements proving beneficial? Or is discussion of frameworks for the governance of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) a distraction from more pressing issues, given the potential long time scales ahead before AGI becomes a realistic prospect?

Continue reading “Regulating the rise of Artificial General Intelligence” | >

One of the biggest challenges for renewable energy research is energy storage. The goal is to find a material with high energy storage capacity and energy storage material with high storage capacity that can also quickly and efficiently discharge a large amount of energy. In an attempt to overcome this hurdle, researchers at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have proposed a brand-new carbon nanostructure designed to store energy in mechanical form.

Most portable energy storage devices currently rely on storing energy in chemical form such as batteries, however this proposed new structure, made from a bundle of diamond nanothread (DNT) does not suffer from the same limiting properties as batteries, such as temperature sensitivity, or the potential to leak or explode. I have previously written about carbon nanotubes, and their applications in everything from Batman-like artificial muscle, to an analogy of the fictional element Vibranium, but a lot of research around carbon nanotubes is already focused on energy harvesting and energy storage applications.

What makes this energy storage method different is the method by which energy is stored, and also the related increased robustness of the resultant material. Dr Haifei Zhan and his team at the QUT Centre for material science used computer modelling to propose the structure of these ultra-thin one-dimensional carbon threads. The theory is that these threads should be able to store energy when they are twisted or stretched, similar to the way we store energy in wind-up toys. By turning the key, we force the spring inside into a tight coil. Once the key is released, the coil wishes to release the extra tension held within it and begins to unfurl. In doing so it transfers that mechanical energy into the movement of the toy’s wheels.

Read more | >

In the periodic table of elements there is one golden rule for carbon, oxygen and other light elements: Under high pressures, they have similar structures to heavier elements in the same group of elements. But nitrogen always seemed unwilling to toe the line. However, high-pressure chemistry researchers of the University of Bayreuth have disproved this special status. Out of nitrogen, they created a crystalline structure which, under normal conditions, occurs in black phosphorus and arsenic. The structure contains two-dimensional atomic layers, and is therefore of great interest for high-tech electronics. The scientists have presented this “black nitrogen” in Physical Review Letters.

Nitrogen—an exception in the periodic system?

When you arrange the chemical elements in ascending order according to their number of protons and look at their properties, it soon becomes obvious that certain properties recur at large intervals (periods). The brings these repetitions into focus. Elements with similar properties are placed one below the other in the same column, and thus form a group of elements. At the top of a column is the element that has the fewest protons and the lowest weight compared to the other group members. Nitrogen heads element group 15, but was previously considered the “black sheep” of the group. The reason: In earlier experiments, showed no structures similar to those exhibited under normal conditions by the of this group—specifically, phosphorus, arsenic and antimony. Instead, such similarities are observed at high pressures in the neighboring groups headed by carbon and oxygen.

Read more | >

Autumn was closing in fast on northern Nevada when Martin Sander took one last look around the excavation site in the Augusta Mountains 150 miles (241 kilometers) east of Reno.

The longtime paleontologist from Germany had been working summers in Nevada for 20 years by that point and believed in the maxim that, “we find the spectacular things on the second to last day or last day.”

It was Oct. 3, 2011, and Sander and his team were nearing the end of a two-week expedition in an area that’s a hotspot for fossils.

Read more | >