Lifeboat Foundation

Should we send messages into space in an effort to contact intelligent extra-terrestrial civilizations? Or should be fear them attacking us and transmit nothing? Two conflicting and oft-heard questions, but it turns out we may overlooking something rather important and completely obvious— it’s probably us that are the malicious aliens.

When I read that we’ve got more chance of being struck by a planet-killer asteroid than being invaded by aliens, I was intrigued.

So I got in touch with Alberto Caballero, the author of the though experiment-style paper published this week, to find out more. His paper is an attempt to determine how many malicious extraterrestrial civilizations there could be, and how likely it is that they would invade us.

A new training approach yields artificial intelligence that adapts to diverse play-styles in a cooperative game, in what could be a win for human-AI teaming.

As artificial intelligence gets better at performing tasks once solely in the hands of humans, like driving cars, many see teaming intelligence as a next frontier. In this future, humans and AI are true partners in high-stakes jobs, such as performing complex surgery or defending from missiles. But before teaming intelligence can take off, researchers must overcome a problem that corrodes cooperation: humans often do not like or trust their AI partners.

Now, new research points to diversity as being a key parameter for making AI a better team player.

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The experiment will investigate the Unruh effect, which is produced by a mixture of quantum mechanics and special relativity.

Scientists have long known that touching plants can set off a stress reaction in them – but until now it hasn’t been exactly clear how that worked at a molecular level, something that a new study hopes to shed light on.

The researchers behind the study have identified certain genetic keys inside plants that lead to two separate signaling pathways, explaining why plants react so strongly to being touched.

Understanding more about how this process works at a fundamental level could help researchers in a variety of different areas, from improving plant health to getting higher harvest yields from the same crop.

SpaceX informed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) it surpassed 400,000 Starlink Internet subscribers across 36 countries. The company had a private conference presentation with FCC representatives on May 19 about using the 12GHz band “for providing next-generation satellite services to Americans,” including to use Starlink broadband satellite service on moving vehicles.

An outline of the presentation was submitted as a public filing to the Commission where it states the new subscriber count and a list of how Starlink has been useful; a screenshot of the document is shown below. SpaceX doubled the amount of Starlink subscribers in just a couple months. SpaceX announced its Starlink division had 250,000 subscribers in February.

SpaceX’s FCC presentation says the Starlink service is active in 48 U.S. states. Besides the United States, Starlink is now available in portions of: Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Denmark, Chile, Portugal, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, Czech Republic, Sweden, Mexico, Croatia, Lithuania, Spain, Slovakia, Slovenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Luxembourg, Latvia, Tonga, Hungary, and Ukraine. SpaceX plans to expand service to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East in 2023. The company recently released an interactive Starlink Coverage Map which shows where the internet service is “available” and on a “waitlist” by simply typing an address.

Every lungful of air we suck down is mostly made up of nitrogen, with a generous helping of oxygen, and a dash of carbon dioxide.

But dusting this atmospheric soup is a whole encyclopedia of different compounds and elements, some of which we can only speculate about.

One of those mysteries just came into focus, however. Chemists have shown that a reactive class of compounds called organic hydrotrioxides exists in the atmosphere, and while these chemicals last only briefly, they could have effects we don’t know about.

Elon Musk will soon allow Dogecoin to purchase SpaceX merchandise.

The ancient farmsteaders may have “left in haste.”

Archaeologists in Israel have unearthed the 2,100-year-old remains of a farmstead whose owners likely abandoned it in a hurry, possibly to avoid an impending military invasion.

“We were very lucky to discover a time-capsule, frozen in time, in which the finds remained where they were left by the occupants of the site,” which is near Israel’s northern Sea of Galilee, archaeologist Amani Abu-Hamid, who is leading the excavation for the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), said in a statement.