Lifeboat Foundation

Amazon’s plans to create a fleet of automated drones to deliver packages straight to customers’ doorsteps are widely known. But now the company is addressing concerns about noise pollution, collisions and even people who might try and shoot drones down.

In an interview with Yahoo News, Amazon Vice President of Global Affairs Paul Misener explained that the company is trying to implement a high-tech delivery system to get small packages to customers in 30 minutes or less – a far shorter period than a driver navigating a system of roads would require.

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I see this competition now between the US vs Russia/China in robotics as a good thing. For one it will make the silly campaigns against robots go away, as this will now become a matter of national security to advance robotics. And, secondly, it will force the government to put up a huge amount of money into robotics research even if they didnt really want to; the old guys think robots are silly. What that means for us in the general public is that we will get robot caregivers much sooner than we thought thanks to all this defense spending on robotics.

U.S. officials have ordered an investigation into whether China might be gaining an unfair competitive advantage in the robotics race.

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The excitement keeps growing on Quantum. Now, the “MAGIC” will happen.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. will work with Nvidia Corp. on cloud computing and artificial intelligence, and plans to enlist about 1,000 developers to work on its big-data platform during the next three years.

The arm of China’s biggest e-commerce operator, known as AliCloud, will boost investment in data analysis and machine learning, it said in a statement Wednesday. AliCloud is staking $1 billion on the belief that demand for processing and storage from governments and companies will boost growth during the next decade as its tries to compete with Amazon.com Inc. in computing services.

Continue reading “Alibaba Teams With Nvidia in $1 Billion Bet on Cloud Computing” »

Russia announces plans to construct a nuclear rocket engine as part of its ten-year Federal Space Program plans from 2016–2025.

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Planet would orbit the sun once every 15,000 years.

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Black holes may sport a luxurious head of “hair” made up of ghostly, zero-energy particles, says a new hypothesis proposed by Stephen Hawking and other physicists.

The new paper, which was published online Jan. 5 in the preprint journal arXiv, proposes that at least some of the information devoured by a black hole is stored in these electric hairs.

Still, the new proposal doesn’t prove that all the information that enters a black hole is preserved.

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“CES wrapped up last week and I can say it was the best one I’ve seen in a decade. Three big stories jumped out this year:

1. VR.
2. Self driving cars.
3. AR.”

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Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun.

The researchers, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, discovered the planet’s existence through mathematical modeling and computer simulations but have not yet observed the object directly.

“This would be a real ninth planet,” says Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy. “There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It’s a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that’s still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting.”

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Researchers have identified slow-moving brainwaves they say could be carried only by the brain’s gentle electrical field, a mechanism previously thought to be incapable of spreading neural signals on its own.

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