Lifeboat Foundation

If anything can sum up just how little we truly know about the Universe, it’s black holes.

We can’t see them because not even light can escape their gravitational pull, we have no idea what they’re made of, and where does everything inside go once a black hole dies?

Physicists can’t even agree on whether black holes are massive, three-dimensional behemoths, or just two-dimensional surfaces that are projected in 3D just like a hologram.

Continue reading “The case for black holes being nothing but holograms just got even stronger” »

“It’s been dubbed the Google tax, but it will likely hit every global internet company operating in India—and, in turn, the country’s fledgling startup and digital advertising ecosystems.”

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Tesla’s 2016 Shareholders Meeting yesterday was an unusual one. CEO Elon Musk and CTO JB Straubel were on stage for close to 4 hours and went through the bulk of Tesla’s history – recounting stories from the early days with longtime employees of the automaker.

We already reported on important nuggets of information the execs released about the Gigafactory and the Model 3 during the event, but what probably stands out the most from the event – from my perspective at least – is Musk’s rant about the importance of the “machine that makes the machine.”

The CEO said that he recently – in the last 2 or 3 months – came to the realization that the potential for improvement is at least a factor of 10 greater in manufacturing vehicles than in the actual vehicle engineering.

Continue reading “Elon Musk goes on a ‘machines building machines’ rant about the future of manufacturing” »

Official US defence and NATO documents confirm that autonomous weapon systems will kill targets, including civilians, based on tweets, blogs and Instagram by Nafeez Ahmed.

This exclusive is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowd-funded investigative journalism project for the global commons

Scientists have long used NAD+ as a powerful anti-aging tool. While trying to find a cure for aging, scientists increased the levels of NAD+ within the mitochondria. The mitochondria responded by increasing their performance and energy, which effectively neutralizes the effects of aging.

Lead researcher Johan Auwerx explained that “this work could have very important implications in the field of regenerative medicine,” adding that it may one day be possible to bypass surgery and repair the body with a dietary supplement.

Specifically, nicotinamide riboside “effectively delayed early- and late-stage disease progression, by robustly inducing mitochondrial biogenesis in skeletal muscle and brown adipose tissue, preventing mitochondrial ultrastructure abnormalities and [mitochondrial DNA] deletion formation.”

Storage in your laptop or smartphone is a compromise between volume, access speed and physical size. But, the industry’s competition to shrink them while boosting their specifications is fierce. A few months after shipping a 16TB solid-state drive, Samsung has announced a fast, efficient 512GB SSD that’s half the size of a postage stamp.

Samsung’s press release claims that the drive is the first mass-produced 512GB SSD with non-volatile memory express (NVMe), a host-controller interface with a streamlined register for speed, in a single package. Unlike other hard drives in multi-chip packages (MCP), Samsung’s new drive is organized in a ball grid array into a collected unit, making it simpler to fit in and connect to other parts in the device. This makes the drive ideal for the ultra-slim notebook PC market, where space and weight are at a premium.

A senior Samsung VP said in a press release that the tiny drive triples the performance of a typical SATA SSD. Its read/write speeds of up to 1,500MB/s and 900MB/s, respectively, mean you could transfer a 5GB HD video in 3 seconds. Samsung will start selling the drive in June in 512GB, 256GB and 128GB models.

Continue reading “Samsung’s new 512GB SSD is smaller than a postage stamp” »

No more shaky cam!

Meet the world’s first action camera with built-in stabilization.