Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX is planning to send Dragons to Mars as early as 2018. Red Dragon missions will help inform the overall Mars architecture that will be unveiled later this year.

These missions will help demonstrate the technologies needed to land large payloads propulsively on Mars.

“Through Squad X, we want to vastly improve dismounted squad effectiveness in all domains by integrating new and existing technologies into systems that squads can bring with them,” said Maj. Christopher Orlowski, DARPA program manager. “The squad is the formation with the greatest potential for impact and innovation, while having the lowest barrier to entry for experimentation and system development. The lessons we learn and the technology we create could not only transform dismounted squads’ capabilities, but also eventually help all warfighters more intuitively understand and control their complex mission environments.”

Squad X intends to combine off-the-shelf technologies and new capabilities under development through DARPA’s Squad X Core Technologies (SXCT) program, which was launched specifically to develop novel technologies that Squad X could integrate into user-friendly systems. SXCT shares Squad X’s overarching goal of ensuring that Soldiers and Marines maintain uncontested tactical superiority over potential adversaries by exploring capabilities in four areas: precision engagement, non-kinetic engagement, squad sensing and squad autonomy. In an important step toward that goal, SXCT recently awarded Phase 1 contracts to nine organizations.

The U.S. Army, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps have expressed interest in future Squad X capabilities and plan to support the experimentation efforts with testing in simulated operational environments as the program progresses.

You need multiple clones of yourself as a humanoid robots created from your own 3D printer; we may be well on our way with this announcement.

An unusual egg-shaped booth in Tallinn’s Seaplane Harbour is where a small team of Estonian engineers is testing its new invention.

Continue reading “Estonian firm prints 3D customised model of you” »

What if a map of the brain could help us decode people’s inner thoughts?

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have taken a step in that direction by building a “semantic atlas” that shows in vivid colors and multiple dimensions how the human brain organizes language. The atlas identifies brain areas that respond to words that have similar meanings.

Continue reading “Brain’s ‘thesaurus’ mapped to help decode inner thoughts” »

Talk about changing everything that we thought about the brain and learning.

A new study from the University of Toulouse found that intelligence and learning aren’t limited to organisms with brains. By studying the mold Physarum polycephalum they found it can, over time, learn to navigate even irritating environments.

Supercomputer facing problems?

In the world of High Performance Computing (HPC), supercomputers represent the peak of capability, with performance measured in petaFLOPs (10¹⁵ operations per second). They play a key role in climate research, drug research, oil and gas exploration, cryptanalysis, and nuclear weapons development. But after decades of steady improvement, changes are coming as old technologies start to run into fundamental problems.

When you’re talking about supercomputers, a good place to start is the TOP500 list. Published twice a year, it ranks the world’s fastest machines based on their performance on the Linpack benchmark, which solves a dense system of linear equations using double precision (64 bit) arithmetic.

Looking down the list, you soon run into some numbers that boggle the mind. The Tianhe-2 (Milky Way-2), a system deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China, is the number one system as of November 2015, a position it’s held since 2013. Running Linpack, it clocks in at 33.86 × 10¹⁵ floating point operations per second (33.86 PFLOPS).

Wouldn’t be surprised.

The profession could be putting itself out of work.

The Army is working on a new interface that would improve UAS battlefield coordination.

Of course bio technology holds the key for better memory.

Newswise — A group of Boise State researchers, led by associate professor of materials science and engineering and associate dean of the College of Innovation and Design Will Hughes, is working toward a better way to store digital information using nucleic acid memory (NAM).

It’s no secret that as a society we generate vast amounts of data each year. So much so that the 30 billion watts of electricity used annually by server farms today is roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants.

Continue reading “Biology May Hold Key to Better Computer Memory” »