Lifeboat Foundation

To defend against military lasers, Adsys Controls of Irvine, California, has created Helios, which can be carried on drones. To do much damage, an offensive laser needs to remain focused on its target for several seconds. Helios stops a laser from doing this by disrupting the systems controlling the beam – the Achilles’ heel for all such weapons. “Beam control is a critical function of high-energy lasers,” says Adsys CEO Brian Goldberg.

Helios can detect an incoming laser beam and identify its key characteristics, such as power, wavelength, pulse frequency and its source. Helios then interferes with the beam control – possibly by firing back a low-power laser of its own – so the attacking laser cannot fix on the target. “It provides permanent protection,” says Goldberg. “It’s not just buying time.”

He will not say exactly how the interference is done, but it may involve fooling the control system into thinking it is hitting its target despite the laser actually pointing a few metres to the side. A direct hit would have produced a big burst of reflected light, so a pulse sent back by an anti-laser laser could make it look like the original laser was on target.

Continue reading “Drones armed with anti-laser lasers that trick controls of enemy lasers into missing the drone” »

“Apple started looking seriously into building an electric car about two years ago. It expanded the project quickly, poaching experts in battery technology and so-called machine vision, as well as veterans from the automobile industry.”

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“There’s something missing from the conversation about lifelong learning.”

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Google’s DeepMind unit, which is working to develop super-intelligent computers, has created a system for machine-generated speech that it says outperforms existing technology by 50 percent.

U.K.-based DeepMind, which Google acquired for about 400 million pounds ($533 million) in 2014, developed an artificial intelligence called WaveNet that can mimic human speech by learning how to form the individual sound waves a human voice creates, it said in a blog post Friday. In blind tests for U.S. English and Mandarin Chinese, human listeners found WaveNet-generated speech sounded more natural than that created with any of Google’s existing text-to-speech programs, which are based on different technologies. WaveNet still underperformed recordings of actual human speech.

Warp drive. It is a technology that humanity has dreamed about for years; however, in reality, it is more than just a dream—a number of scientists have long speculated about how such devices would actually work. Unfortunately, the ideas are largely just thought experiments, and most experts don’t think that this technology is likely to develop anytime soon (if at all).

But before I start raining on anyone’s parade, let’s break this technology down a bit.

The EmDrive is a new type of rocket engine first proposed by British scientist/electrical engineer Roger Shawyer in 1999. Unlike conventional space rocket engines, the EmDrive doesn’t require any kind of propellant (also known as a reaction mass) to make propulsion possible, and hence partially disobeying Newton’s Third Law: “To each action there’s an equal and opposite reaction”.

Despite the fact that this seems to violate the known laws of physics, a prototype device was submitted to NASA’s Eagleworks lab for testing which came back positive, reports Digital Trends.

Continue reading “Breaking Newton’s Third Law: Impossible Space Engine ‘The EMdrive’ Passes Peer Review” »

#Technology #WaveHarvester

www.AncientExplorers.com

The Aubrey de Grey and Matthew O’Connor SENS AMA on reddit Monday 12th 11am PST.

I am Dr. Aubrey De Grey, biologist, gerontologist PhD and author of the book Ending Aging and Chief Science Officer at the SENS Research Foundation. I am here with researcher Dr. Matthew O’Connor from the MitoSENS project who is an expert on “allotopic expression” of mitochondrial genes. His team has been working on engineering mitochondrial genes to be expressed from the nucleus and targeted to the mitochondia as part of the MitoSENS approach to one of the damages of aging.

Each cell in the body is dependent on the efficient generation of cellular energy by mitochondria to stay alive. Critical to this process are genes encoded within the mitochondrial genome. Over time however, mutations in these genes occur as a result of constant exposure to reactive oxygen species produced by oxidative phosphorylation, the mitochondrial energy generation process. Unlike genes within the nucleus, mitochondria lack an efficient system to repair damaged DNA. This leads to accumulated mutations, resulting in mitochondrial defects and an increase in oxidative stress throughout the body. Closely correlated with this is the observation that organisms which age more slowly also consistently display lower rates of mitochondrial free radical damage. Thus, reversing and/or preventing damage to mitochondrial DNA may be a key factor in slowing the aging process.

Continue reading “Aubrey de Grey & Matthew O’Connor AMA! • /r/Futurology” »

(Phys.org)—Are time crystals just a mathematical curiosity, or could they actually physically exist? Physicists have been debating this question since 2012, when Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek first proposed the idea of time crystals. He argued that these hypothetical objects can exhibit periodic motion, such as moving in a circular orbit, in their state of lowest energy, or their “ground state.” Theoretically, objects in their ground states don’t have enough energy to move at all.

In the years since, other physicists have proposed various arguments for why the physical existence of time crystals is impossible—and most physicists do seem to think that time crystals are physically impossible because of their odd properties. Even though time crystals couldn’t be used to generate useful energy (since disturbing them makes them stop moving), and don’t violate the second law of thermodynamics, they do violate a fundamental symmetry of the laws of physics.

However, now in a new paper published in Physical Review Letters, physicists from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Microsoft Station Q (a Microsoft research lab located on the UCSB campus) have demonstrated that it may be possible for time crystals to physically exist.