Lifeboat Foundation

There’s a mysterious X-ray source and other unknowns in this Hubble telescope photo of the Needle’s Eye galaxy.

We have all had the experience of one of our electronic devices overheating. Needless, to say that when that happens, it becomes dangerous both for the device and its surroundings. But considering the speed at which devices work, is overheating avoidable?

A 740 percent increase in power per unit.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) have recently devised an invention that could cool down electronics more efficiently than other alternative solutions and enable a 740 percent increase in power per unit, according to a press release by the institutions published Thursday.

The sunrise SpaceX Starlink launch included dazzling views of the sun and moon.

A stunning SpaceX Starlink satellite fleet launch on May 18 included amazing views of the moon and sunrise.

A hand-held laser pointer produces no noticeable recoil forces when it is “fired” — even though it emits a directed stream of light particles. The reason for this is simply because of its relatively enormous mass compared to the very tiny recoil impulses that the light particles cause when they leave the laser pointer.

However, it has long been clear that optical recoil forces can indeed have a significant effect on correspondingly small particles. For example, the tails of comets point away from the Sun partly due to light pressure. The propulsion of light spacecraft via light sails has also been discussed repeatedly, most recently in connection with the “starshot” project, in which a fleet of miniature spacecraft is to be sent to Alpha Centauri.

This week, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a multibillion-dollar program to develop carbon dioxide removal technologies.

Does the breakthrough to general AI need more data and computing power above all else? Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Metaon the recent debate about scaling sparked by Deepmind’s Gato.

The recent successes of large AI models such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, Google’s PaLM and Deepmind’s Flamingo have sparked a debate about their significance for progress towards general AI. Deepmind’s Gato has recently given a particular boost to the debate, which has been conducted publicly, especially on Twitter.

Gato is a Transformer model trained with numerous data modalities, including images, text, proprioception or joint moments. All training data is processed by Gato in a token sequence similar to those of large language models. Thanks to the versatile training, Gato can text, describe images, play video games or control robotic arms. Deepmind tested the AI model with over 600 benchmarks.

Researchers have created autonomous particles covered with patches of protein “motors.” They hope these bots will tote lifesaving drugs through bodily fluids.

Should we send robots on space missions instead of humans?

The cost differences are huge. In fact, NASA could pursue dozens of robotic missions for the cost of a single human mission. Also worth considering–wealthy entrepreneurs have made great advances recently with private space efforts.

Given the large ambitions for private human space flight, isn’t it time to phase out NASA’s human missions? The private sector has gained ground, and so the government should yield.

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In over six decades since the first satellite, the mode of communication hasn’t changed. Now, this technology will herald a new era of secure, faster connections.