Lifeboat Foundation

The need to find alternative sources for fertilizer have become urgent as chemical fertilizer shortages from the Ukrainian war threaten countries globally.

A Chinese military analyst suggested countermeasures for the Starlink satellite system developed by Musk’s SpaceX – including ways to hack or destroy the service.

Continue reading “As chemical fertilizer shortages persist, peecycling — the process of recycling human urine — could increase the yield of nutrient-rich crops” »

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A Chinese military analyst suggested that Beijing should develop countermeasures for the Starlink satellite system developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX — including ways to hack or even destroy the service during a time of conflict.

In a recent paper published in a China-based academic journal called Modern Defense Technology, analyst Ren Yuanzhen argued that China’s military needs to develop the capability of tracking each of the thousands of satellites set to comprise the Starlink constellations in the coming years.

Continue reading “China analyst urges possible attacks on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites” »

Flashes of what may become a transformative new technology are coursing through a network of optic fibers under Chicago.

Researchers have created one of the world’s largest networks for sharing quantum information —a field of science that depends on paradoxes so strange that Albert Einstein didn’t believe them.

The network, which connects the University of Chicago with Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, is a rudimentary version of what scientists hope someday to become the internet of the future. For now, it’s opened up to businesses and researchers to test fundamentals of quantum information sharing.

As our tech needs grow and the Internet of Things increasingly connects our devices and sensors together, figuring out how to provide power in remote locations has become an expanding field of research.

Professor Seokheun “Sean” Choi—a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science—has been working for years on biobatteries, which generate electricity through bacterial interaction.

One problem he encountered: The batteries had a lifespan limited to a few hours. That could be useful in some scenarios but not for any kind of long-term monitoring in remote locations.

The US Transportation Command, or USTRANSCOM, are a Pentagon office tasked with transporting cargo to American global military assets, announced that it was partnering with SpaceX to examine the feasibility of quickly blasting supplies into space and back to Earth rather than flying them through the air.

SpaceX is already functionally a defense contractor and has launched American military satellites and recently bolstered Ukrainian communication links with Starlink.

Practical uses

Continue reading “Pentagon considers using SpaceX for fleet of militarized Starships” »

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service has let the company capture high definition video of its rocket landing on a ship.

Developed in collaboration with colleagues from China, Germany and Singapore, the new technology uses nanoparticles, so small that about 12,000 of them can fit within a cross-section of a human hair. These tiny particles are arranged into unique patterns on the slides.

Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have developed tiny translucent slides capable of producing two very different images by manipulating the direction in which light travels through them.

As light passes through the slide, an image of Australia can be seen, but when you flip the slide and look again, an image of the Sydney Opera House is visible. The pair of images created is just one example of an untapped number of possibilities.

Continue reading “Nanoparticles that control flow of light like road signs direct traffic” »

In forthcoming years, everyone will get to observe how beautifully Metaverse will evolve towards immersive experiences in hyperreal virtual environments filled with avatars that look and sound exactly like us. Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash describes a vast world full of amusement parks, houses, entertainment complexes, and worlds within themselves all connected by a virtual street tens of thousands of miles long. For those who are still not familiar with the metaverse, it is a virtual world in which users can put on virtual reality goggles and navigate a stylized version of themselves, known as an avatar, via virtual workplaces, and entertainment venues, and other activities. The metaverse will be an immersive version of the internet with interactive features using different technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), 3D graphics, 5G, hologram, NFT, blockchain, haptic sensors, and artificial intelligence (AI). To scale personalized content experiences to billions of people, one potential answer is generative AI, the process of using AI algorithms on existing data to create new content.

In computing, procedural generation is a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually, typically through a combination of human-generated assets and algorithms coupled with computer-generated randomness and processing power. In computer graphics, it is commonly used to create textures and 3D models.

The algorithmic difficulty is typically seen in Diablo-style RPGs and some roguelikes which use instancing of in-game entities to create randomized items. Less frequently it can be used to determine the relative difficulty of hand-designed content to be subsequently placed procedurally, as can be seen with the monster design in Unangband. For example, the designer can rapidly create content, but leaves it up to the game to determine how challenging that content is to overcome, and consequently where in the procedurally generated environment this content will appear. Notably, the Touhou series of bullet hell shooters use algorithmic difficulty. Though the users are only allowed to choose certain difficulty values, several community mods enable ramping the difficulty beyond the offered values.