Lifeboat Foundation

Berlin 26th April 2018 – The first full scale model of the European Medium-Altitude Long-Endurance Remotely Piloted Aircraft (MALE RPAS) was unveiled today during a ceremony held at the 2018 ILA Berlin Air Show, which opened its gates at Schönefeld airport.

The reveal ceremony, led by Dirk Hoke, Airbus Defence and Space Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Eric Trappier, Dassault Aviation Chairman and CEO and Lucio Valerio Cioffi, Leonardo’s Aircraft Division Managing Director, confirms the commitment of the four European States and Industrial partners to jointly develop a sovereign solution for European Defence and Security.

The unveiling of the full scale model and the reaffirmed commitment comes after a nearly two-year definition study launched in September 2016 by the four participating nations Germany, France, Italy and Spain and follows the Declaration of Intent to work together on a European MALE unmanned aerial system signed by the countries in May 2015.

Continue reading “Airbus, Dassault Aviation and Leonardo reaffirm their total commitment in the first fully European MALE programme” »

The people-moving potential of a Hyperloop rightly generates a lot of the buzz, after all we are talking about fizzing passengers through low-vacuum tubes at close to the speed of sound. But what about its capacity to moves goods with new levels of efficiency? Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop One has just introduced a new service called Cargospeed that, if it gets up and running, is promised to deliver cargo with airline-like speeds at trucking-like costs.

As i said the other day on here. No money for science. Plenty of money for war war war. And, the knucklehead public is out zonked out to whatever mindless BS they screwing off with this minute.

In a move that shocked lunar scientists, NASA has cancelled the only robotic vehicle under development to explore the surface of the Moon, despite President Donald Trump’s vow to return people there.

Scientists working on the Resource Prospector (RP) mission, a robotic rover that had been in development for about a decade to explore a polar region of the Moon, expressed astonishment at the decision.

Continue reading “Scientists shocked as NASA cuts only moon rover” »

An investigational drug in clinical trials for rheumatoid arthritis also prevents a common, life-threatening side effect of stem cell transplants, new research shows.

Studying mice, the researchers found the drug prevented what’s known as graft-versus-host disease, a debilitating, sometimes lethal condition that develops when transplanted stem cells attack the body’s own organs or tissues.

About half of patients receiving donor stem cells develop graft-versus-host disease, which can linger for months or years after their transplants. In some cases, patients die not from their cancer but from the complication itself. Current treatments are not effective.

Last year Kollmeier was named director of the fifth version of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project that aims to map the universe. The survey, which launches in 2020, will employ telescopes in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres to scan the entire sky. The telescopes will obtain spectra of bright objects in the sky, breaking up that light into component parts. “That’s where the astrophysics is,” says Kollmeier. “That tells you all the chemical abundances. That tells you all the transitions in the objects.” And that’s where she’ll begin to find answers to her questions: How do supermassive black holes grow? Can stars be used as clocks that tell us when and how a galaxy was formed?

Kollmeier didn’t get into astronomy by looking up at the stars. She meant to be a lawyer until she went to what she calls “nerd camp” and learned how to write code to classify stars. “The idea that you could interrogate the universe in this way … I felt like an explorer.” Now she’s going further than she once thought possible.

If there is a phenomenon out there that is actually more bizarre than black holes, it has to be white holes. Black holes can’t say that they might be the answer to where so much of the dark matter—and even most of the matter—in the universe is lurking.

The gravitational pull of a black hole is so insanely strong that not even light (so much for being the fastest entity in the cosmos), can defy it. Nothing can save you once you pass the grim point of no return otherwise known as the event horizon. However, Space.com observed that when Einstein predicted the existence of black holes in his theory of relativity, he also predicted the theoretical reverse of these galactic monsters. A white hole would be no threat to objects in space passing dangerously close, nothing can even enter its event horizon.

When black holes devour massive amounts of matter and energy, it is thought that everything which appears to vanish forever actually emerges from a white hole. Exactly where the victims of a black hole come out could be anywhere from another place in this universe to another universe entirely. Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli theorized something even stranger linking the two. Black holes result from collapsed stars, but when these astral corpses die, they may actually turn into white holes.

Continue reading “Bye, black holes: white holes are even weirder” »

Germany and Denmark are setting the standard.

Europe already has the technology to create a 100% renewable energy system, but communities will need to join forces to achieve this ambitious goal.

This is a talk by Marc Raibert for course 6.S099: Artificial General Intelligence. He is the CEO of Boston Dynamics. This class is free and open to everyone. Our goal is to take an engineering approach to exploring possible paths toward building human-level intelligence for a better world.

Note: Due to technical difficulties, we don’t have a screencast of the slides, and the video of the slides is low resolution. Despite this, I chose to include several parts of the talk that show slides, especially with videos. It’s not optimal, but I hope you learn and enjoy anyway. Thanks for understanding. We’re always learning and improving.

Continue reading “Boston Dynamics (Marc Raibert, CEO)” »

Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California (USC) have demonstrated the successful implementation of a prosthetic system that uses a person’s own memory patterns to facilitate the brain’s ability to encode and recall memory.

In the pilot study, published in today’s Journal of Neural Engineering, participants’ short-term memory performance showed a 35 to 37 percent improvement over baseline measurements. The research was funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).