Lifeboat Foundation

The skies were clear as the VISTA X-62A — a one-of-a-kind training aircraft built by Lockheed Martin on an F-16 platform — soared over the Mojave Desert. The cockpit of the high-tech jet is littered with expensive and highly sensitive avionics that enable pilots to perform their missions. But the designers could have crammed in even more technology if it were not for the two pilot seats. Their wish might come true in the not-so-distant future. That’s because this was not your regular sortie.

The training jet was recently reported to have flown 17 hours entirely operated by an artificial intelligence (AI) system, which could open the floodgates for completely autonomous jet fighters and drones. This is the first time that an AI has flown a tactical aircraft for this long.

The VISTA X-62 is perhaps the most powerful and versatile training jet in the world. It’s essentially an upgraded F-16D with Block 40 avionics installed, but with a lot of room for installing and trying out different hardware quickly and easily, that mimics the flight controls of other aircraft, enabling the aircraft itself to act as its own ground simulator. Those who’ve flown the X-62 describe it as a Swiss army knife that they can use to attach lots of different things to the airplane.

Oddly enough nearly 50 percent of the trees near the abomb blast in japan survived 😀

In the city of Nagasaki, there are dozens of hibaku trees, or “A-bomb trees” that show scars from the heat and blast of the atomic bombing 74 years ago. People in the city see the trees as eyewitnesses of the attack and take extra care of them.

The two oak trees in Sachiko Yamashita’s garden have long gashes all the way down their trunks. These are the physical scars of the 1945 bombing.

Continue reading “A-bomb trees keep history alive” »

The Philippine Coast Guard has accused a China Coast Guard ship of pointing a “military grade” laser at some of its crew, temporarily blinding them, aboard a vessel in contested waters of the South China last week.

The Chinese ship also “made dangerous maneuvers” in approaching within 150 yards (137 meters) of the Philippine vessel, the Philippine Coast Guard alleged in a statement posted on its official Facebook page, with photos purporting to show the laser’s green beam.

The incident allegedly occurred on February 6 near Ayungin Shoal, also known as Second Thomas Shoal, in the Spratly Islands chain, known in China as the Nansha Islands. China calls the shoal Renai Reef.

Over the past decade, I’ve kept a close eye on the emergence of artificial intelligence in healthcare. Throughout, one truth remained constant: Despite all the hype, AI-focused startups and established tech companies alike have failed to move the needle on the nation’s overall health and medical costs.

Finally, after a decade of underperformance in AI-driven medicine, success is approaching faster than physicians and patients currently recognize.

The next version, ChatGPT4, is scheduled for release later this year, as is Google’s rival AI product. And, last week, Microsoft unveiled an AI-powered search engine and web browser in partnership with OpenAI, with other tech-industry competitors slated to join the fray.

Continue reading “5 Ways ChatGPT Will Change Healthcare Forever, For Better” »

One day after the US shot down a ‘cylindrical, silverish gray’ object in the northeast arctic region of Alaska, another unidentified airborne object was shot down by the US military over northern Canada on Saturday — making it the third time in just over a week that jets were deployed to neutralize foreign craft.

Wikipedia: “With Folded Hands…” is a 1947 science fiction novelette by American writer Jack Williamson. Willamson’s influence for this story was the aftermath of World War II and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and his concern that “some of the technological creations we had developed with the best intentions might have disastrous consequences in the long run.”

The novelette, which first appeared in the July 1947 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two (1973) after being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965. It was the first of several Astounding stories adapted for NBC’s radio series Dimension X.

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New “exascale” supercomputers will bring breakthroughs in science. But the technology also exists to study nuclear weapons.

If your image of nuclear power is giant, cylindrical concrete cooling towers pouring out steam on a site that takes up hundreds of acres of land, soon there will be an alternative: tiny nuclear reactors that produce only one-hundredth the electricity and can even be delivered on a truck.

Small but meaningful amounts of electricity — nearly enough to run a small campus, a hospital or a military complex, for example — will pulse from a new generation of micronuclear reactors. Now, some universities are taking interest.

“What we see is these advanced reactor technologies having a real future in decarbonizing the energy landscape in the U.S. and around the world,” said Caleb Brooks, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“This is just the first step on the AI front…as [the] AI arms race takes place among Big Tech.”

Right on the heels of Google announcing Artificial Intelligence chatbot Bard, Microsoft has beefed up its search engine Bing with the latest AI sensation, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“Search has remained the same since the last major inflection,” Microsoft corporate VP Yusuf Mehdi said at the event on Tuesday announcing the update, adding that “the user experience is the same as 20 years ago.”

Continue reading “Google just unveiled its Microsoft-backed ChatGPT rival, Bard AI” »