Lifeboat Foundation

Scientific investigations on the ISS’s latest resupply mission include advancements in 3D metal printing, semiconductor manufacturing, reentry thermal protection, robotic surgery, and cartilage tissue regeneration. These studies aim to enhance space mission sustainability and have significant implications for Earth-based technologies and health care.

Tests of a 3D metal printer, semiconductor manufacturing, and thermal protection systems for reentry to Earth’s atmosphere are among the scientific investigations that NASA and international partners are launching to the International Space Station on Northrop Grumman’s 20th commercial resupply services mission. The company’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida by late January.

Continue reading “NASA Sending Surgical Robot and 3D Metal Printer to Space Station” »

The Glaze/Nightshade team, for its part, denies it is seeking destructive ends, writing: Nightshade’s goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.

In other words, the creators are seeking to make it so that AI model developers must pay artists to train on data from them that is uncorrupted.

How did we get here? It all comes down to how AI image generators have been trained: by scraping data from across the web, including scraping original artworks posted by artists who had no prior express knowledge nor decision-making power about this practice, and say the resulting AI models trained on their works threatens their livelihood by competing with them.

Radar altimeters are the sole indicators of altitude above a terrain. Spectrally adjacent 5G cellular bands pose significant risks of jamming altimeters and impacting flight landing and takeoff. As wireless technology expands in frequency coverage and utilizes spatial multiplexing, similar detrimental radio-frequency (RF) interference becomes a pressing issue.

To address this interference, RF front ends with exceptionally low latency are crucial for industries like transportation, health care, and the military, where the timeliness of transmitted messages is critical. Future generations of wireless technologies will impose even more stringent latency requirements on RF front-ends due to increased data rate, carrier frequency, and user count.

Additionally, challenges arise from the physical movement of transceivers, resulting in time-variant mixing ratios between interference and signal-of-interest (SOI). This necessitates real-time adaptability in mobile wireless receivers to handle fluctuating interference, particularly when it carries safety-to-life critical information for navigation and autonomous driving, such as aircraft and ground vehicles.

A new study by Dr Constantine Evans of Maynooth University and researchers at the University of Chicago and California Institute of Technology, published in Nature, shows how the molecules that build structures can do both the thinking and the doing.

We tend to separate the brain and muscle – the brain does the thinking; the muscle does the doing. The brain takes in complex information about the world, makes decisions, while muscle merely executes.

This brain-muscle separation has also shaped how we think about the working within a single cell; some molecules within cells are seen as ‘thinkers’ that take in information about the chemical environment and decide what the cell needs to do for survival; separately, other molecules are seen as the ‘muscle’, building structures needed for survival.

Natasha and Max also appear in a recent video titled “Transhumanism. What it is not” in conversation with David Wood and two representatives of the anti-transhumanist camp, Alexander Thomas and Émile Torres. I’m not familiar with the work of Thomas. I’m more familiar with the work of Torres. I very strongly disagree with most of what Torres says, but I must concede that Torres seems an intelligent and perceptive person, not without a certain endearing grace. However, BS is BS.

I’ve watched and listened again to the awesome conversation between Lex Fridman and Guillaume Verdon aka Beff Jezos, the founder of the movement called effective accelerationism (e/acc) and the company Extropic AI. This long conversation (almost 3 hours) touches a lot of things including physics, quantum, thermodynamics, Artificial Intelligence, LLMs, space, e/acc philosophy & metaphysics, and of course the meaning of life & all that. This is the most complete talk on e/acc so far and is likely to remain so for some time. Watch it all, and let’s accelerate the fuck away from mediocrity toward unlimited extropian and cosmist greatness.

Continue reading “Old and new futurisms in Silicon Valley” »

The Knightscope K5 is our flagship fully autonomous security robot for both outdoor and indoor use. The K5 provides physical deterrence and perimeter protection in parking lots, parking structures, campus paths and large indoor spaces like malls and resorts.

According to the report, Sam Altman recently had talks with several large potential investors for the chip fabs venture, however, the talks are still early.

BMW wants humanoid robots to build its cars, evidenced by a partnership with a robotics startup that it signed today.

BMW has partnered with Figure in its first partnership since the company was founded two years ago. The German automaker plans to launch a small, controlled launch of humanoid robots in its production facilities, potentially expanding to more units if performance targets are met.

The humanoid robots will initially be launched out of the BMW facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina, which employs 11,000 people.

Robust hydrogels offer a promising solution for the development of artificial skin for bionic robots, yet few hydrogels have a comprehensive performance comparable to real human skin. Here, the authors present a general method to convert traditional elastomers into tough hydrogels via a unique radiation-induced penetrating polymerization method.