Lifeboat Foundation

Forty per cent of Australia’s jobs will disappear in 10 years but the head of CSIRO’s data research unit has delivered an action plan for how they can be replaced.

“The fourth industrial revolution is under way and the winners will be so far ahead of the losers, Australia has no choice but to pivot to the new industries that will emerge,” Data61 chief executive Adrian Turner told The Australian Financial Review Business Summit on Wednesday.

Australia was already feeling the consequences of an economy whose greatest disruptors, such as Uber and Amazon, were mostly coming from elsewhere, Mr Turner said. He noted that GDP growth rates were below historic averages, government debt to GDP ratios were rising, wage growth was slowing and productivity plateauing.

Continue reading “Data61 CEO Adrian Turner has a plan for the next jobs” »

“At JPMorgan Chase & Co., a learning machine is parsing financial deals that once kept legal teams busy for thousands of hours.”

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“Using survey data from a sample of senior investment professionals from mainstream (i.e. not SRI funds) investment organizations we provide insights into why and how investors use reported environmental, social and governance (ESG) information.”

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“Tesla Inc. has completed a solar project in Hawaii that incorporates batteries to sell power in the evening, part of a push by the electric car maker to provide more green power to the grid.”

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Several companies will collectively be launching about 20,000 satellites over the next few years. SpaceX, OneWeb, Telesat, O3b Networks and Theia Holdings — all told the FCC they have plans to field constellations of V-band satellites in non-geosynchronous orbits to provide communications services in the United States and elsewhere. So far the V-band spectrum of interest, which sits directly above Ka-band from about 37 GHz to the low 50 GHz range, has not been heavily employed for commercial communications services.

* SpaceX, for example, proposes a “VLEO,” or V-band low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellation of 7,518 satellites to follow the operator’s initially proposed 4,425 satellites that would function in Ka- and Ku-band.

Continue reading “Massive commercial space push and a variety of new robotic capabilities could self supporting and rapidly growing space economy” »

Earlier this year, physicists had put together a blueprint for how to make and measure time crystals — a bizarre state of matter with an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, allowing them to maintain constant oscillation without energy.

Two separate research teams managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals back in January, and now both experiments have successfully passed peer-review for the first time, putting the ‘impossible’ phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality.

“We’ve taken these theoretical ideas that we’ve been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory,” says one of the researchers, Andrew Potter from Texas University at Austin.

Continue reading “It’s Official: Time Crystals Are a New State of Matter, and Now We Can Create Them” »

It’s easy to see which creatures inspired these robots.

If you think that the march of automation isn’t going to affect jobs in the medical profession, then, uh, you better sit down. A Belgian company called BeWell is showing off WellPoint, a self-service kiosk that’s designed for patients entering hospitals or clinics. The WellPoint is a touchscreen-enabled booth that operates as a first port of call for visitors, quickly checking your basic vitals before you see a medical professional.

Article by Richard Heidmann, Association Planète Mars vice president – English translation by Etienne Martinache.

After having analyzed the targets assigned by SpaceX to its project of an Earth-Mars transportation system which is supposed to set up and serve a Martian settlement (see “l’étude MCT” on the site www.planete-mars.com), we decided to address the issue of an essential aspect of the feasibility of the project, the design of the living areas (pressurized enclosures).

This aspect was subject to many proposals, even though most of previous documented studies applied to upstream phases of human presence, those of exploration from a temporary base or from a permanent base with few residents and limited self-sufficiency. The consequences of the specific constraints related to a mass production of these enclosures, essentially from local resources, have seldom been considered.