Lifeboat Foundation

Hawking repeats Zoltan Istvan’s worries:

“Governments seem to be engaged in an AI arms race, designing planes and weapons with intelligent technologies,” Hawking told veteran interviewer Larry King. “The funding for projects directly beneficial to the human race, such as improved medical screening, seems a somewhat lower priority.”

British physicist Stephen Hawking sees signs that the applications for artificial intelligence are already going down the wrong track.

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Alphabet’s “improved city living” company, Sidewalk Labs – the group behind the futuristic digital city story a while back – is already getting its feet wet in real-life situations. The Guardian has obtained documents and emails that detail a proposal made by Sidewalk Labs to the city of Columbus, Ohio. It essentially allows Google to assume control of the city’s public transport and parking system.

The information was obtained through public records laws and details an offer made by Sidewalk Labs to provide the city of Columbus with its cloud-based program called Flow for free. Flow would put the city’s public transit, public parking and transit subsidy program under the control of Google.

Continue reading “This is how Google plans to take control of public transit and parking in the U.S” »

Definitely been seeing great research and success in Biocomputing; why I have been looking more and more in this area of the industry. Bio/ medical technology is our ultimate future state for singularity. It is the key that will help improve the enhancements we need to defeat cancer, aging, intelligence enhance, etc. as we have already seen the early hints already of what it can do for people, machines and data, the environment and resources. However, a word of caution, DNA ownership and security. We will need proper governance and oversight in this space.

© iStock/ Getty Images undefined How much storage do you have around the house? A few terabyte hard drives? What about USB sticks and old SATA drives? Humanity uses a staggering amount of storage, and our needs are only expanding as we build data centers, better cameras, and all sorts of other data-heavy gizmos. It’s a problem scientists from companies like IBM, Intel, and Microsoft are trying to solve, and the solution might be in our DNA.

A recent Spectrum article takes a look at the quest to unlock the storage potential of human DNA. DNA molecules are the building blocks of life, piecing our genetic information into living forms. The theory is that we can convert digital files into biological material by translating it from binary code into genetic code. That’s right: the future of storage could be test tubes.

Continue reading “The future of storage may be in DNA” »

A new paper in AIP Advances argues that the controversial EM Drive doesn’t break physics as we know it, as it emits light (photons) as exhaust. However, other experts assert that it’s likely just an artifact.

Want to get people excited about science? Simple. Just post about EM Drive.

For those of you who may be new to the topic, EM Drive is a method of space travel that, if realized, would utterly transform our way of life. We could get to Mars in just 10 weeks (as opposed to the current 6+ month journey), and we could save a massive amount of money on fuel. We could have a truly viable space industry.

Continue reading “New Paper Claims EM Drive Works, Produces Light As Exhaust” »

The Sun has hit a heretofore unforseen middle-aged evolutionary phase that is characterized by decreasing solar magnetic activity, including starspots and coronal mass ejections, say the authors of a new paper just submitted to APJ Letters. NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope enabled the team to make the determination. The good news is that we have another 5 billion years of relative quiescence before the Sun begins its expansion as a Red Giant.

The Sun has likely already entered into a new unpredicted long-term phase of its evolution as a hydrogen-burning main sequence star — one characterized by magnetic sputtering indicative of a more quiescent middle-age. Or so say the authors of a new paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Using observations of other sunlike stars made by NASA ’s Kepler Space Telescope, the team found that the Sun is currently in a special phase of its magnetic evolution.

Continue reading “Sun Has Likely Entered New Evolutionary Phase, Say Astronomers” »

“The legendary engineer’s building philosophy has never been more relevant. This summer, he’s getting his first major museum retrospective.”

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A “huge” stash of helium discovered in East Africa could ease a decades-long shortage of the rare and valuable gas.

Researchers in the United Kingdom and Norway say the newly discovered helium gas field, found in the East African Rift Valley region of Tanzania, has the potential to ease a critical global shortage of helium, a gas that is vital to many high-tech applications, such as the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners used in many hospitals.

The researchers say the discovery is the result of a new approach to searching for helium that combines prospecting methods from the oil industry with scientific research that reveals the role of volcanic heat in the production of pockets of helium gas. [Elementary, My Dear: 8 Elements You Never Heard Of].

Continue reading “Huge Cache of Ancient Helium Discovered in Africa’s Rift Valley” »

Windows 10 is a “recommended update,” meaning some computers attempt to install it by default.

Geez! Is no one safe anymore; Google’s CEO has been hacked. Oh boy; guess there is definitely a bigger message to Google and others of big tech around this one. Whose next Bezos, Schmidt, etc? BTW — how is that AI working out.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has become the latest tech executive to have a social media account hacked, and the group responsible says more targets will follow.

On Sunday, a group of hackers calling themselves OurMine briefly took over Pichai’s account on Quora, a question-and-answer site.

Continue reading “Google’s Sundar Pichai has been hacked — which CEO will be next?” »