Lifeboat Foundation

My theory, alien life will either be nearly impossible to find and we will spend centuries just looking for microbes. Or aliens will turn out to be so common that they could care less who we are and where we came from, and we will just be a new backwards species that turns up at the alien bar.

The world was electrified last year when it was suggested that scientists had spotted an “alien megastructure” orbiting a distant star.

Now a space boffin has suggested huge extraterrestrial constructions could be relatively easy to spot, so long as we look in the right place using the correct tools.

Continue reading “Gigantic ‘alien megastructures’ built by an advanced civilisation could be orbiting dozens of nearby stars, boffin says” »

Global researchers, NGOs and meat industry leaders gather in Haifa to strategize mass production of cultured meat and learn about Israeli advances.

• Second Livestock is a unique application of virtual reality (VR) that could change animal husbandry and livestock farming.
• Developed by design professor Austin Stewart, this VR free-range farm world is a safe haven for chickens.

Free-range livestock is going to the next level, thanks to a unique, if seemingly silly idea that has recently gone viral. Second Livestock is a free range world for chickens in virtual reality (VR). And yes, just like most of VR’s current applications, it actually works like a game — a massively-multiplayer one full of chickens and with no AI bots.

University of Florida (UF) researchers have developed a method for 3D printing soft-silicone medical implants that are stronger, quicker, less expensive, more flexible, and more comfortable than the implants currently available. That should be good news for the millions of people every year who need medical devices implanted.

Continue reading “New 3D-printing method may allow for fast, low-cost, more-flexible medical implants for millions” »

Elon Musk co-founded artificial intelligence non-profit OpenAI just announced it has created an AI system that can learn to complete a task in reality after watching just one demonstration of that task in a simulated environment.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, OpenAI’s newest robot system should leave humanity blushing. Not only can it successfully replicate human behaviors, it can do so after just a single demonstration of the task.

Exoplanet Proxima B, which was recently discovered orbiting our closest neighbouring star, may have the potential to support life, new climate simulations have revealed.

Ever since it was identified in August 2016, Proxima B, which stands 4.2 light years away from Earth and close to the Proxima Centauri star, has intrigued scientists. The tantalising prospect that the planet could be habitable has led many to undertake in-depth investigations.

Trending: Who is David Nabarro, the UK candidate to lead the World Health Organisation?

Continue reading “Proxima B: Our closest neighbouring exoplanet could host ‘alien life’ climate models suggest” »

Biological systems don’t completely freeze up when they encounter a new situation, but computers often do.

Biological organisms are pretty good at navigating life’s unpredictability, but computers are embarrassingly bad at it.

That’s the crux of a new military research program that aims to model artificially intelligent systems after the brains of living creatures. When an organism encounters a new environment or situation, it relies on past experience to help it make a decision. Current artificial intelligence technology, on the other hand, relies on extensive training on various data sets, and if it hasn’t encountered a specific situation, it can’t select a next step.

Continue reading “DARPA Wants Artificial Intelligence That Doesn’t Forget Everything It Knows” »

I get beat up in The Guardian today a bit with a ham-fisted review. But make no mistake, the book Radicals by journalist and Immortality Bus rider Jamie Bartlett, which is coming out in a few days, is important and brilliant: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/16/radicals-outsi…ett-review #transhumanism

This thoughtful study of radical movements explores politics, sex and drugs.

Last month, we showed an earlier version of this robot where we’d trained its vision system using domain randomization, that is, by showing it simulated objects with a variety of color, backgrounds, and textures, without the use of any real images.

Now, we’ve developed and deployed a new algorithm, one-shot imitation learning, allowing a human to communicate how to do a new task by performing it in VR. Given a single demonstration, the robot is able to solve the same task from an arbitrary starting configuration.

Caption: Our system can learn a behavior from a single demonstration delivered within a simulator, then reproduce that behavior in different setups in reality.