Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 9405

Aeronautical engineer Edwin Van Ruymbeke has developed a remote-controlled insect ornithopter called MetaFly.

Capable of reaching a top speed of 18 km/h (11 mph) and a maximum range of 100 metres (328 ft), the wings are flapped using a mechanical coreless motor and an aluminum heat sink that is powered by a rechargeable lithium-polymer battery.

Weighing 10 grams (0.35 oz), MetaFly measures 19 cm long (7.5 in) with a 29-cm (11.4-in) wingspan. The patented wings are made from carbon fibre, liquid crystal polymer and oriented polypropylene.

Read more

It’s a fascinating competition that paints an incredibly detailed picture of what the future of Moon or even Mars exploration could look like one day — and we’ve never been closer to that future.

READ MORE: Top Three Teams Share $100,000 Prize in Complete Virtual Construction Level of 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge [NASA]

More on the Challenge: Here Are The Finalists For NASA’s Mars Habitat Design Competition.

Read more

The city of the future is a symbol of progress. The sci-fi vision of the future city with sleek skyscrapers and flying cars, however, has given way to a more plausible, human, practical, and green vision of tomorrow’s smart city. Whilst smart city visions differ, at their heart is the notion that in the coming decades, the planet’s most heavily concentrated populations will occupy city environments where a digital blanket of sensors, devices and cloud connected data is being weaved together to build and enhance the city living experience for all. In this context, smart architecture must encompass all the key elements of what enable city ecosystems to function effectively. This encompasses everything from the design of infrastructure, workspaces, leisure, retail, and domestic homes to traffic control, environmental protection, and the management of energy, sanitation, healthcare, security, and a building’s eco-footprint.

The

Continue reading “The Human, Smart and Sustainable Future of Cities” | >

Livingston is sitting comfortably in his office in Portland, Oregon, when he appears on the screens inside the car and announces he’ll be our teleoperator this afternoon. A moment later, the MKZ pulls into traffic, responding not to the man in the driver’s seat, but to Livingston, who’s sitting in front of a bank of screens displaying feeds from the four cameras on the car’s roof, working the kind of steering wheel and pedals serious players use for games like Forza Motorsport. Livingston is a software engineer for Designated Driver, a new company that’s getting into teleoperations, the official name for remotely controlling self- driving vehicles.

Designated Driver is just the latest competitor to enter the market for the teleoperation tech that will make robo-cars work.

Read more

Dr. Been Kim wants to rip open the black box of deep learning.

A senior researcher at Google Brain, Kim specializes in a sort of AI psychology. Like cognitive psychologists before her, she develops various ways to probe the alien minds of artificial neural networks (ANNs), digging into their gory details to better understand the models and their responses to inputs.

The more interpretable ANNs are, the reasoning goes, the easier it is to reveal potential flaws in their reasoning. And if we understand when or why our systems choke, we’ll know when not to use them—a foundation for building responsible AI.

Read more

Prof Jennifer Doudna, one the pioneers of Crispr-Cas9 gene editing, explains how this revolutionary discovery enables precise changes to our DNA, which can be used to correct mutations that cause genetic diseases and eradicate them from a germ line. Doudna raises the key issues of debate around gene editing and suggests what will have the most immediate impact.

Read more

Everything you see around you is made up of elementary particles called quarks and leptons, which can combine to form bigger particles such as protons or atoms.

But that doesn’t make them boring – these subatomic particles can also combine in exotic ways we’ve never spotted.

Now CERN’s LHCb collaboration has announced the discovery of a clutch of new particles dubbed “pentaquarks”. The results can help unveil many mysteries of the theory of quarks, a key part of the standard model of particle physics.

Read more