Lifeboat Foundation

Good news alien hunters! A Kickstarter to fund a year-long investigation into KIC 8462852—the star voted most likely to harbor an advanced alien civilization—just got funded. Alien megastructure or not, we may finally get to the bottom of this bewildering, flickering star.

This crowdfunding campaign was set up in May by Yale astronomer Tabby Boyajian, and it managed to meet its $100,000 goal in just 30 days. A $10,000 surge in the last 100 minutes of the campaign managed to put the project over the top. The next step is to figure out the logistics, but Boyajian, who’s been leading the research into KIC 8462852, says observations could start as early as later this summer.

The ultimate goal of the project will be to determine why this star’s light dims at such irregular intervals, and at times by as much as 20 percent. These huge dips in luminosity are way too large to be a passing planet, hence the suspicion the anomaly is being caused by swarms of comets, a distorted star, some unknown astronomical phenomenon—or an advanced alien civilization in the process of building a gigantic solar array around the star.

Continue reading “We Might Finally Solve the ‘Alien Megastructure’ Mystery” »

OpenAI’s mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI’s benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. We’re trying to build AI as part of a larger community, and we want to share our plans and capabilities along the way. We’re also working to solidify our organization’s governance structure and will share our thoughts on that later this year.

Our metric

Defining a metric for intelligence is tricky, but we need one to measure our progress and focus our research. We’re thus building a living metric which measures how well an agent can achieve its user’s intended goal in a wide range of environments.

These sunglasses let you listen to music while still hearing the rest of the world.

This electric car can go from 0–60 in two seconds.

These sheets and pillowcases are lined with real silver, so they fight bacteria all on their own.

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These autonomous robots are high-tech security guards.

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the Pohang University of Science and Technology in Korea has created organic nanowire synaptic transistors that emulate the working principles of biological synapses. As they describe in their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the artificial synapses they have created use much smaller amounts of power than other devices developed thus far and rival that of their biological counterparts.

Scientists are taking multiple paths towards building next generation computers—some are fixated on finding a material to replace silicon, others are working towards building a quantum machine, while still others are busy trying to build something much more like the human mind. A hybrid system of sorts that has organic artificial parts meant to mimic those found in the brain. In this new effort, the team in Korea has reached a new milestone in creating an artificial synapse—one that has very nearly the same power requirements as those inside our skulls.

Up till now, artificial synapses have consumed far more power than human synapses, which researchers have calculated is on the order of 10 femtojoules each time a single one fires. The new synapse created by the team requires just 1.23 femtojoules per event—far lower than anything achieved thus far, and on par with their natural rival. Though it might seem the artificial creations are using less power, they do not perform the same functions just yet, so natural biology is still ahead. Plus there is the issue of transferring information from one neuron to another. The “wires” used by the human body are still much thinner than the metal kind still being used by scientists—still, researchers are gaining.

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Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has always had the dream of sending the human race to Mars. Now, thanks to SpaceX’s advancements, that dream is not far off. In an interview with The Washington Post, Musk divulges some new details on his plan to get to Mars.

The first step in his plan is to send an uncrewed spacecraft to Mars as early as 2018. These missions will continue every two years when Earth and Mars are at closest approach supplying rovers and science experiments to the Red Planet, and testing pertinent systems of the spacecrafts.

“Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a cargo route to Mars,” Musk told The Post. “It’s a regular cargo route. You can count on it. It’s going happen every 26 months. Like a train leaving the station.”

Continue reading “SpaceX lays out a roadmap to getting humans to Mars in a decade” »