Lifeboat Foundation

As a philosophy student, I was bewitched by the power of reason – but my life is freer since I escaped from its spell.

The Futures Conference is coming to Sydney, Australia. Metaverse means Community. Technology is the pathway to the Future. The Arts meets Science meets Tech meets Business.

https://www.youtube.com/@ForesightInstitute/videos

Is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1987 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support.

From molecular nanotechnology, to brain-computer interfaces, space exploration, cryptocommerce, and AI, Foresight gathers leading minds to advance research and accelerate progress toward flourishing futures.

China has reached reportedly a secret deal with Cuba, under the deal China would be allowed to install an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island nation. This has surely become a matter for Washington.

But as the typical mutual fund disclaimer so famously states, past performance is no guarantee of future results. It’s time to rethink our love affair with depth. The pendulum between depth and breadth has swung too far in favor of depth.

There’s an oft-quoted saying that “to a man with a hammer, everything looks like nails.” But what if that man had a hammer, a screwdriver, and a wrench? Might he or she look to see if the flat top had a narrow slit, suggesting the use of a screwdriver? Or perhaps consider the shape of the flat top. Circle? Hexagon? Could a wrench be a more effective tool? And finally, the mere addition of these tools can encourage a better understanding of a problem.

This is not to suggest that deep expertise is useless. Au contraire. Carrying a hammer is not a problem. It’s just that our world is changing so rapidly that those with more tools in their possession will better navigate the uncertainty. To make it in today’s world, it’s important to be agile and flexible.

June 8 (Reuters) — Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google and Microsoft (MSFT.O) are inserting ads into AI experiments without providing an option to opt out of participation, an approach that has already rankled some brands and risks further pushback from the industry, ad buyers told Reuters.

The two tech giants are racing to revamp their search engines with artificial intelligence that can produce written responses to open-ended queries. That process will upend how advertisers reach consumers through ads on search results, a market that is estimated to grow 10% to $286 billion this year, according to research firm MAGNA.

Microsoft is testing ads in the Bing AI chatbot, which began rolling out to users in February, by relocating some traditional search ads and inserting them into the AI responses, the company said.

In May, 11,865 new passenger plug-in cars were registered in Norway (up 21% year-over-year), which is about 88.9% of the total volume.

Inspired by biological fractals, a team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in China has developed a new pore structure for a membrane used to separate uranium from seawater. In their paper published in the journal Nature Sustainability, the group describes their pore structure and how well it worked when tested. Alexander Wiechert and Sotira Yiacoumi with the Georgia Institute of Technology and Costas Tsouris with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have published a News & Views piece on the work done by the team in China and the work that is left to do before the membrane can be commercialized.

In the 1950s, scientists realized that the world’s oceans held the potential for supplying the uranium needed to produce atomic weapons and electrical power. But it took another 30 years before a viable means of extracting uranium was developed. A team of researchers in Japan developed an amidoxime-grafted adsorbent that appeared able to do the job, but only in a limited way. In this new effort, the researchers have expanded on the work by the Japanese team to create a membrane for use in filtering uranium from seawater.

The membrane created by the team in China is based on a hierarchical pore structure that was modeled on fractals found in nature. Seawater containing uranium enters the outer portion of the membrane through macropores. The molecules in the water then migrate into a branching matrix of smaller channels. From there, they are carried to a microporous inner portion of the membrane where the uranium is absorbed by an amidoxime-grafted adsorbent. Testing showed it capable of extracting 9 mg g⁻¹ from a sample of seawater over four weeks.

One of Meta’s top executives showed employees a preview of the company’s upcoming Twitter competitor during a companywide meeting today that was watched by The Verge. You can see some of the screenshots above.

Meta says people want a communications platform that’s “sanely run.”