Lifeboat Foundation

Could this sensor technology revolutionize how auto and other navigation technology looks in the future?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded HRL Laboratories $4.3 million to develop vibration- and shock-tolerant inertial sensor technology that enables future system accuracy needs without utilizing GPS.

While GPS provides sub-meter accuracy in optimal conditions, the signal is often lost or degraded due to natural interference or malicious jamming.

HRL Laboratories, based in Malibu, California, is a corporate research-and-development laboratory owned by The Boeing Company and General Motors specializing in research into sensors and materials, information and systems sciences, applied electromagnetics and microelectronics.

Continue reading “HRL to develop inertial sensor tech for DARPA” »

Lov’n Quantum Espresso

Researchers use specialized software such as Quantum ESPRESSO and a variety of HPC software in conducting quantum materials research. Quantum ESPRESSO is an integrated suite of computer codes for electronic-structure calculations and materials modeling, based on density-functional theory, plane waves and pseudo potentials. Quantum ESPRESSO is coordinated by the Quantum ESPRESSO Foundation and has a growing world-wide user community in academic and industrial research. Its intensive use of dense mathematical routines makes it an ideal candidate for many-core architectures, such as the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor.

The Intel Parallel Computing Centers at Cineca and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) along with the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) are at the forefront in using HPC software and modifying Quantum ESPRESSO (QE) code to take advantage of Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors used in quantum materials research. In addition to Quantum ESPRESSO, the teams use tools such as Intel compilers, libraries, Intel VTune and OpenMP in their work. The goal is to incorporate the changes they make to Quantum ESPRESSO into the public version of the code so that scientists can gain from the modification they have made to improve code optimization and parallelization without requiring researchers to manually modify legacy code.

Continue reading “Supercomputers Aid in Quantum Materials Research” »

For communications; teleporting is definitely key. When it comes to Quantum Internet, one only needs to consult with researchers at Los Alamos National Lab to see how they have evolved in this space since 2009.

Advances in quantum communication will come from investment in hybrid technologies, explain Stefano Pirandola and Samuel L. Braunstein.

“DNA base pairing has been used for many years to direct the arrangement of inorganic nanocrystals into small groupings and arrays with tailored optical and electrical properties. The control of DNA-mediated assembly depends crucially on a better understanding of three-dimensional structure of DNA-nanocrystal-hybridized building blocks. Existing techniques do not allow for structural determination of these flexible and heterogeneous samples.”

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Stephen Hawking will be making a big announcement today about space exploration. What will it be? Find out at noon, EST.

Hawking and Yuri Milner of the Breakthrough Prize have been building up to an announcement on Project Starshot. So far, the only thing known about the new project is that it has to do with space exploration.

But what’s Hawking’s big reveal about the project? No one knows yet—but it’ll be streaming live right here at noon, EST. Watch along with us.

Continue reading “Watch Stephen Hawking Deliver a Mysterious Announcement on Space Exploration” »

Yuri Milner is spending $100 million on a probe that could travel to Alpha Centauri within a generation—and he’s recruited Mark Zuckerberg and Stephen Hawking to help. In an interview with The Atlantic, Milner makes his case for star travel.

In the Southern Hemisphere’s sky, there is a constellation, a centaur holding a spear, its legs raised in mid-gallop. The creature’s front hoof is marked by a star that has long hypnotized humanity, with its brightness, and more recently, its proximity.

Since the dawn of written culture, at least, humans have dreamt of star travel. As the nearest star system to Earth, Alpha Centauri is the most natural subject of these dreams. To a certain cast of mind, the star seems destined to figure prominently in our future.

Continue reading “​Inside a Billionaire’s New Interstellar Mission” »

“Where is everybody?” So wondered the great physicist Enrico Fermi. The Universe is vast and ancient. Life, he reasoned, has had plenty of time to get started – and get smart. But we see no evidence of life or intelligence beyond Earth.

Hmm… That would explain Alzheimer disease — It’d be like some sort of unabashedly evil version of a smart phone data caps!

Or not.

Continue reading “Is the Universe a Simulation? Scientists Debate” »

Regardless of whether or not this particular project achieves it’s aims, hopefully it will encourage other obscenely wealthy philanthropists to funnel their donations into private (or governmental ) outer-space related endeavors!

Yuri Milner has backed a plan to research sending tiny, laser-powered spacecraft to the nearest star at 20 per cent of the speed of light.