Lifeboat Foundation

Photo: General Atomics

General Atomics has been awarded a contract to develop electromagnetic railgun technology for the Army as the service pursues cutting-edge weapons to take on advanced adversaries.

The Army’s growing interest in this capability comes after years of research by the Navy, which has yet to field one of the weapons.

Continue reading “Armys Pursuit of Electromagnetic Railguns Heats Up” »

There are certain classes of technology that, by their nature, put those who possess their secrets in danger: Nuclear weapons. Ballistic missiles. Advanced encryption software.

Now, add unmanned aerial vehicles—drones—to that list.

A Palestinian electrical engineer who had published research on drones was assassinated in Malaysia, the Wall Street Journal reported (paywall). A helmeted person on a motorcycle fired 10 shots at 35 year-old Fadi al-Batsh, killing him as he walked to a mosque for morning prayers.

Continue reading “The Israel-linked killing of Fadi al-Batsh in Malaysia shows that drone technology is now dangerous enough to kill for” »

A spinning black hole could provide enough energy to power civilization for trillions of years — and create the biggest bomb known to the universe. Using the rotation of a black hole to supercharge electromagnetic waves could create massive amounts of energy or equally massive amounts of destruction. Kurzgesagt explains what it would take to harness a black hole and the potential risks of the process.

Accelerating rejuvenation therapies to repair the damage of aging. Berlin, March, 15 — 17.

1. blame the American public that lost serious interest in science in the 1990’s, And 2. the US government who’s only real interest now is war, and how to spend money on war.

If you want to crunch the world’s biggest problems, head east. According to a newly published ranking, not only is China home to the world’s two fastest supercomputers, it also has 202 of the world’s fastest 500 such devices—more than any other nation. Meanwhile, America’s fastest device limps into fifth place in the charts, and the nation occupies just 144 of the top 500 slots, making it second according to that metric.

The world’s fastest supercomputer is still TaihuLight, housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China, and pictured above. Capable of performing 93 quadrillion calculations per second, it’s almost three times faster than the second-place Tianhe-2. The Department of Energy’s fifth-placed Titan supercomputer, housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, performs 17.6 quadrillion calculations per second—making it less than a fifth as fast as TaihuLight.

Continue reading “America Just Can’t Match China’s Exploding Supercomputing Power” »

The program awards cloud computing resources to individuals and organizations working on data-intensive projects, specifically focused on leveraging AI technologies.

AI for Earth is a Microsoft program aimed at empowering people and organizations to solve global environmental challenges by increasing access to AI tools and educational opportunities, while accelerating innovation.

Apr. 22, 2018 — 14:27 — What would happen if America’s electrical grid goes down and what can be done to protect it? EMP task force director Peter Pry shares insight on ‘Life, Liberty & Levin.’

Yellowstone National Park sits squarely over a giant, active volcano. This requires attention.

Yellowstone has been a national park since 1872, but it was only in the 1960s that scientists realized the scale of the volcano – it’s 44 miles across – and not until the 1980s did they grasp that this thing is fully alive and still threatens to erupt catastrophically. Yellowstone is capable of eruptions thousands of times more violent than the Mount St. Helens eruption of 1980. The northern Rockies would be buried in multiple feet of ash. Ash would rain on almost everyone in the United States. It’d be a bad day. Thus geologists are eager to understand what, exactly, is happening below all those volcano-fueled hot springs and geysers.

The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. Incorporated as a not-for-profit foundation in 1971, and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the Forum is tied to no political, partisan or national interests.