This is the final part in a series of in-depth articles examining China’s efforts to build a stronger domestic semiconductor industry amid rising trade tensions.
Some in China see custom AI chips, which can offer superior performance to conventional integrated circuits even when manufactured using older processes, as helping the country loosen its dependence on the US in core technology.
In a new scientific paper, Google researchers claim for the first time to have demonstrated “quantum supremacy,” where a quantum computer outperforms a traditional one.
This developing branch of synthetic media technology has commercial applications—but also has the potential to disrupt elections and spread disinformation.
long Read
Saudi Arabia has called its giga-project Neom, a new city 33 times the size of New York City, “the world’s most ambitious project” — and it sounds it.
Combining new classes of nanomembrane electrodes with flexible electronics and a deep learning algorithm could help disabled people wirelessly control an electric wheelchair, interact with a computer or operate a small robotic vehicle without donning a bulky hair-electrode cap or contending with wires.
By providing a fully portable, wireless brain-machine interface (BMI), the wearable system could offer an improvement over conventional electroencephalography (EEG) for measuring signals from visually evoked potentials in the human brain. The system’s ability to measure EEG signals for BMI has been evaluated with six human subjects, but has not been studied with disabled individuals.
The project, conducted by researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Kent and Wichita State University, was reported on September 11 in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.
Scientists have demonstrated that life’s process on Earth could have actually started with molecules that formed by mixing RNA and DNA.
If you are a Lifeboat subscriber or have been reading these pages for awhile, you may know why it’s called “Lifeboat”. A fundamental goal of our founder, board, writers and supporters is to sustain the environment, life in all its diversity, and—if necessary—(i.e. if we destroy our environment beyond repair, or face a massive incoming asteroid), to prepare for relocating. That is, to build a lifeboat, figuratively and literally.
But most of us never believed that we would face an existential crisis, except perhaps a potential for a 3rd World War. Yet, here we are: Burning the forests, killing off unspeakable numbers of species (200 each day), cooking the planet, melting the ice caps, shooting a hole in the ozone, and losing more land to the sea each year.
Regading the urgent message of Greta Thunberg, below, I am at a loss for words. Seriously, there is not much I can add to the 1st video below.
Information about climate change is all around us. Everyone knows about it; Most people understand that it is real and it that poses an existential threat, quite possibly in our lifetimes. In our children’s lives, it will certainly lead to war, famine, cancer, and massive loss of land, structures and money. It is already raising sea level and killing off entire species at thousands of times the natural rate.
Yet, few people, organizations or governments treat the issue with the urgency of an existential crisis. Sure! A treaty was signed and this week, Jeff Bezos committed to reducing the carbon footprint of the world’s biggest retailer. But have we moved in the right direction since the Paris Accords were signed 4 years ago? On the contrary, we have accelerated the pace of self-destruction.
A new, non-invasive brain stimulation treatment shows promise in enhancing memories and cognitive function in those with Alzheimer’s disease. Transcranial electromagnetic treatment (TEMT) increases functional connectivity within the cingulate cortex. TEMT is also able to penetrate the brain to break up amyloid-beta and tau deposits, slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
