Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: transportation – Page 10

The question is, can DEI proponents, who are already being marginalized, retool? Can they see themselves as champions who will guide humanity — regardless of peoples’ race, class, sexual orientation, gender, etc. — in this Fourth Industrial Revolution?

For, if political leaders are as unable as they seem to establish meaningful guardrails, AI will push those struggling to live their best lives (a right that should belong to all) to be thrown so far under the bus that roadkill will be more recognizable.

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Combustion engines, the engines in gas-powered cars, only use a quarter of the fuel’s potential energy while the rest is lost as heat through exhaust.

Now, a study published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces demonstrates how to convert exhaust heat into electricity. The researchers present a prototype thermoelectric generator system that could reduce fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions—an opportunity for improving sustainable energy initiatives in a rapidly changing world.

Fuel inefficiency contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and underscores the need for innovative waste-heat recovery systems. Heat-recovery systems, called thermoelectric systems, use semiconductor materials to convert heat into electricity based on a temperature difference.

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Researchers from three of Virginia’s premier universities, including the University of Virginia’s Homa Alemzadeh, aim to take the risk out of self-driving vehicles by overcoming inevitable computer failures with sound engineering.

Cutting-edge research from three top Virginia universities, led by the University of Virginia’s Homa Alemzadeh, is on a mission to revolutionize the safety of self-driving vehicles. With a substantial $926,737 grant from the National Science Foundation, this powerhouse team is dedicated to pinpointing and neutralizing potential computer failures in autonomous vehicle systems.

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By harnessing this insight, they aim to fortify the resilience of the entire system and proactively eliminate safety risks. Alemzadeh, a trailblazing associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UVA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, is joined by the esteemed William & Mary professor of computer science, Evgenia Smirni, and the visionary lead investigator and George Mason University assistant professor of computer science, Lishan Yang.

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When you look at your surrounding environment, it might seem like you’re living on a flat plane. After all, this is why you can navigate a new city using a map: a flat piece of paper that represents all the places around you.

This is likely why some people in the past believed the Earth to be flat. But most people now know that is far from the truth.

You live on the surface of a giant sphere, like a beach ball the size of the Earth with a few bumps added. The surface of the sphere and the plane are two possible 2D spaces, meaning you can walk in two directions: north and south or east and west.

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I wondered when this would start!

“This means that should everything go according to plan, the humanoid robot will eventually be put to work building itself.” 🤖 🤖

Apptronik, an Austin-based maker of humanoid robots, on Tuesday announced a new pilot partnership with American supply chain/manufacturing stalwart, Jabil. The deal arrives two weeks after Apptronik announced a $350 million Series A financing round aimed at scaling up production of its Apollo robot.

The Jabil deal is the second major pilot announced by Apptronik. It follows a March 2024 partnership that put Apollo to work on the Mercedes-Benz manufacturing floor. While the company tells TechCrunch that its partnership with the automaker is ongoing, it has yet to graduate beyond the pilot stage.

In addition to test running the humanoid robot on its factory floor, this new deal also finds Florida-based Jabil and Apptronik becoming manufacturing partners. Once Apollo is determined to be commercially viable, Jabil will begin producing the robot in its own factories. This means that should everything go according to plan, the humanoid robot will eventually be put to work building itself.

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Measurements and data collected from space can be used to better understand life on Earth.

An ambitious, multinational research project funded by NASA and co-led by UC Merced civil and environmental engineering Professor Erin Hestir demonstrated that Earth’s biodiversity can be monitored and measured from space, leading to a better understanding of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Hestir led the team alongside University of Buffalo geography Professor Adam Wilson and Professor Jasper Slingsby from the University of Cape Town on BioSCape, which collected data over six weeks in late 2024.

Two NASA aircraft and one South African aircraft flew over South Africa’s Greater Cape Floristic Region — one of the most biodiverse places on the planet — to collect ultraviolet, visual, thermal and other images. That data, combined with field work by the large team of scientists from the United States and South Africa, provides a comprehensive look at the region’s biodiversity, or life systems.

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Optical atomic clocks can increase the precision of time and geographic position a thousandfold in our mobile phones, computers, and GPS systems. However, they are currently too large and complex to be widely used in society.

Now, a research team from Purdue University, U.S., and Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has developed a technology that, with the help of on-chip microcombs, could make ultra-precise optical atomic clock systems significantly smaller and more accessible—with significant benefits for navigation, autonomous vehicles, and geo-data monitoring.

The research is published in the journal Nature Photonics.

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EMBL tech developers have made an important leap forward with a novel methodology that adds an important microscopy capability to life scientists’ toolbox. The advance represents a 1,000-fold improvement in speed and throughput in Brillouin microscopy and provides a way to view light-sensitive organisms more efficiently.

“We were on a quest to speed up ,” said Carlo Bevilacqua, optical engineer in EMBL’s Prevedel team and lead author on a paper published about this in Nature Photonics.

“Over the years, we have progressed from being able to see just a pixel at a time to a line of 100 pixels, to now a full plane that offers a view of approximately 10,000 pixels.”

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