Lifeboat Foundation

Facebook turns 20 years old today, and if you don’t like it, I’m sure you have your reasons.

Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook on February 4, 2004, in his Harvard dorm room. Thomas Lake says there are valid reasons today to dislike Facebook, but for him and many others it’s a living journal of 21st-century life — a virtual museum that otherwise would not exist.

Continue reading “As Facebook turns 20, I have something to confess” »

Recent technological advances, such as increasingly sophisticated drones and cameras, have opened exciting new possibilities for cinematography. Most notably, film directors can now shoot scenes from a wide range of angles that were previously inaccessible and in far higher resolution.

Researchers at University of Zaragoza and Stanford University recently developed CineMPC, a new cinematographic system that relies on a fully autonomous drone that carries a cinematographic camera to film multiple targets autonomously, while following a director’s instructions. The platform modulates various drone and camera parameters to satisfy these instructions. The team’s innovative system, outlined in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, could bring a wave of innovation to the film industry and other sectors that can benefit from high-quality video footage.

Continue reading “A fully autonomous drone system for cinematography and wildlife monitoring” »

A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police.

The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday.

“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,” senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city’s public broadcaster RTHK.

Connecticut-based WaveAerospace recently unveiled a multi-role unmanned multi-copter in development for the last five years.

Huntress Turbojet’s flight tests will take place in the summer and it is expected to be delivery-ready by early 2025.

The all-weather hybrid-electric drone has a top speed of Mach 0.7 (467 knots) and flight endurance of two hours.

Liftoff is scheduled for 1:33 a.m. ET on Tuesday (Feb. 6).

Scientists have discovered a super-Earth, named TOI-715 b, located within the “conservative” habitable zone of a nearby red dwarf star.

This revelation has ignited the astronomical community with the potential of uncovering conditions that are suitable for life a mere 137 light-years from Earth.

The research, led by Georgina Dransfield at the University of Birmingham, represents a significant step forward in our quest to understand the conditions under which life might arise.

Newly developed memory cell combines high-speed performance with low power consumption.

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said successful tests would allow the drones to undertake research such as surveying marine ecosystems and studying glaciers, while reducing CO₂ emissions by approximately 90%.

The Windracers Ultra UAV (uncrewed aerial vehicle) is a twin-engine, 10-metre aircraft that can carry up to 100kg of cargo or sensors for distances of 1,000km and does not require a human pilot to take off, fly or land as it is equipped with a sophisticated autopilot system.

Unlike piloted Twin Otter aircraft, which are costly to operate and face logistical challenges in the extreme environment, the BAS said the “groundbreaking” unmanned drones are safer and “could enable dramatic increases in flight time”

An international team of astronomers have found a new and unknown object in the Milky Way that is heavier than the heaviest neutron stars known and yet simultaneously lighter than the lightest black holes known.

Using the MeerKAT Radio Telescope, astronomers from a number of institutions including The University of Manchester and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany found an object in orbit around a rapidly spinning millisecond pulsar located around 40,000 light years away in a dense group of stars known as a globular cluster.

Using the clock-like ticks from the millisecond pulsar they showed that the massive object lies in the so-called black hole mass gap.