Lifeboat Foundation

As Northrop Grumman’s NG-11 Cygnus spacecraft flew high above in low Earth orbit, NASA astronauts at the Johnson Space Center recently completed testing and evaluation of the company’s Earth-based full-scale cislunar habitat mockup.

Designed to test the ergonomics, feature layout and functional compatibility with basic “day-in-the-life” astronaut tasks for potential long-term use as a part of the future Lunar Gateway in cislunar space, the habitat mockup necessarily incorporated all core elements that would eventually be needed by a four-person Orion crew: sleep stations, a galley, crew exercise equipment and of course accommodations for science, a robotics workstations and life support systems.

Continue reading “NASA, Northrop Grumman finish testing cislunar habitat mockup” »

Very nice article at MIT Tech Review explaining Leon Bottou’s invited talk at ICLR on causality through invariance.

At a major AI research conference, one researcher laid out how existing AI techniques might be used to analyze causal relationships in data.

The consortium, called LifeTime, aims to use three emerging technologies—machine learning, the study of single cells, and lab-grown organlike tissues called organoids—to map how human cells change over time and develop diseases. It is one of six candidates in the latest round of ambitious proposals for European flagships, billion-euro research projects intended to run for 10 years. There is just one snag: The European Commission has decided that it won’t launch any of them.

Six candidate research proposals lost in limbo.

ALC’s new OptiFlex virtual integrator has been named the winner of the AHR Expo Innovation award in the building automation category.

5:30 pm.

Modders are taking advantage of AI tools to update old graphics.

The scenario military thinkers propose would double the number of jet fighters in a typical battle formation from four to eight. But instead of the additional aircraft being identical to an F-35 joint strike fighter, or F-15E Strike Eagle, they are low-cost, unmanned jets.

One might carry extra air-to-air missiles. Another may only have a sensor suite to boost situational awareness for the pilots in the traditional aircraft.

Whatever their payload, the enemy has to contend with double the number of targets on their radars. They have multiple “dilemmas” in front of them, giving U.S. forces an asymmetric advantage.

Continue reading “New Age of Autonomous Jet Fighters on Horizon” »

Planes, Drones, and AI Machines

But going from Mach 2 to Mach 5 is not an easy undertaking. Hermeus is hoping to pull from existing technologies to make its insanely fast passenger plane a reality, including titanium materials and cutting edge rocketry.

It’s impossible to tell what the future of air travel will look like. If supersonic airplanes aren’t it, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has pushed for the idea that we’ll go between Earthly destinations in rockets that can technically take us to Mars.

Continue reading “Blazing Supersonic Plane Could Zoom From NY to Paris in 90 Min” »

Robot enthusiasts were sending up cheers this month to the team advancing Atlas into an even more human-like walker through obstacles including a bunch of cinder blocks and a balance beam. They have turned Atlas into the very credible hulk, who wins the spotlight with its display of walking, which was recorded May 1.

The video is “IHMC Atlas Autonomous Path Planning Across Narrow Terrain.” Don’t miss the key word “narrow.” This is why the walk is being eyed as a big deal.

Continue reading “Atlas is rockstar cross-stepper over tricky terrain” »

Computer scientists the University of Melbourne in Australia and the University of Toronto in Canada have developed an algorithm that is capable of writing poetry following the rules of rhyme and metre.

With the use of poetries rules and taking the metre into account, this AI algorithm creates weaves of words and grouped them together to produce meaningful sentences.

This AI is trained extensively on the rules it needed to follow to craft an acceptable poem and the dataset researcher used to train the AI has over 2,600 real sonnets.

Continue reading “Scientists Trained AI To Write Poetry, It’s Ready To Replace Shakespeare” »