Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, have offered a bold glimpse into what the robots of the future could look like. And it’s nothing like C3PO, or a T-800 Terminator.

In a paper just published in Nature Machine Intelligence, CSIRO’s Active Integrated Matter Future Science Platform (AIM FSP) says robots could soon be taking their engineering cues from evolution, creating truly startling and effective designs.

This concept, known as Multi-Level Evolution (MLE), argues that current robots struggle in unstructured, complex environments because they aren’t specialised enough, and should emulate the incredibly diverse adaptation animals have undergone to survive in their environment.

Humanity is under threat. At least according to Sir Martin Rees, one of Britain’s most esteemed astronomers.

These two kinds of technologies enable just a few people to have a hugely wide-ranging and maybe even global cascading effect. This leads to big problems of governance because you’d like to regulate the use of these things, but enforcing regulations worldwide is very, very difficult. Think how hopeless it is to enforce the drug laws globally or the tax laws globally. To actually ensure that no one misuses these new technologies is just as difficult. I worry that we are going to have to minimize this risk by actions which lead to a great tension between privacy, liberty and security.

Do you see ways that we can use and develop these technologies in a responsible way?

Continue reading “Will humanity survive this century? Sir Martin Rees predicts ‘a bumpy ride’ ahead” »

When Nancy Grace Roman was a child, her favorite object to draw was the moon.

Her mother used to take her on walks under the nighttime sky and show her constellations, or point out the colorful swirls of the aurora. Roman loved to look up at the stars and imagine.

Eventually, her passion for stargazing blossomed into a career as a renowned astronomer. Roman was one of the first female executives at NASA, where she served as the agency’s first chief of astronomy.

Continue reading “Nancy Grace Roman, ‘Mother Of Hubble’ Space Telescope, Has Died, At Age 93” »

https://youtu.be/WEqYIxtJ674

Is an American syndicated talk show airing daily on television in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australia, Ireland, Sweden and Finland. It debuted on September 8, 2008. The hour-long daytime program is produced by Phil McGraw and his son Jay McGraw and is distributed domestically and globally by CBS Television Distribution. The series is a spin-off of Dr. Phil and is the first talk show to be a third generation talk show spin-off, as Dr. Phil itself spun off The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Rejuvenation is a medical discipline focused on the practical reversal of the aging process.

Continue reading “The Doctors — A Way To Reverse Aging” »

While our choices and beliefs don’t often make sense or fit a pattern on a macro level, at a “quantum” level, they can be predicted with surprising accuracy.

The irrationality of how we think has long plagued psychology. When someone asks us how we are, we usually respond with “fine” or “good.” But if someone followed up about a specific event — “How did you feel about the big meeting with your boss today?” — suddenly, we refine our “good” or “fine” responses on a spectrum from awful to excellent.

In less than a few sentences, we can contradict ourselves: We’re “good” but feel awful about how the meeting went. How then could we be “good” overall? Bias, experience, knowledge, and context all consciously and unconsciously form a confluence that drives every decision we make and emotion we express. Human behavior is not easy to anticipate, and probability theory often fails in its predictions of it.

Continue reading “Your Brain Isn’t a Computer — It’s a Quantum Field” »

A team of neuroscientists and engineers has developed a tiny, implantable device that has potential to help people with bladder problems bypass the need for medication or electronic stimulators.

The team — from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago — created a soft, implantable device that can detect overactivity in the bladder and then use light from tiny, biointegrated LEDs to tamp down the urge to urinate.

The device works in laboratory rats and one day may help people who suffer incontinence or frequently feel the need to urinate.

Continue reading “Tiny, implantable device uses light to treat bladder problems” »

An array of cubesats will create brand-sponsored new constellations.

Should brands fill the night sky with corporate logos?

Zero Mass Water produces solar panels that pull water out of the air, filter it, and deliver it to your home faucet.

Rapid comprehension of world events is critical to informing national security efforts. These noteworthy changes in the natural world or human society can create significant impact on their own, or may form part of a causal chain that produces broader impact. Many events are not simple occurrences but complex phenomena composed of a web of numerous subsidiary elements – from actors to timelines. The growing volume of unstructured, multimedia information available, however, hampers uncovering and understanding these events and their underlying elements.

“The process of uncovering relevant connections across mountains of information and the static elements that they underlie requires temporal information and event patterns, which can be difficult to capture at scale with currently available tools and systems,” said Dr. Boyan Onyshkevych, a program manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O).

The use of schemas to help draw correlations across information isn’t a new concept. First defined by cognitive scientist Jean Piaget in 1923, schemas are units of knowledge that humans reference to make sense of events by organizing them into commonly occurring narrative structures. For example, a trip to the grocery store typically involves a purchase transaction schema, which is defined by a set of actions (payment), roles (buyer, seller), and temporal constraints (items are scanned and then payment is exchanged).