Lifeboat Foundation

Electric Sky says it’s begun building its first transmitter for providing tightly focused wireless power to drones in flight, thanks to funding from DARPA.

A startup called Electric Sky says it’s begun building its first Whisper Beam transmitter for providing tightly focused wireless power to drones in flight, thanks to a $225,000 award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Electric Sky will use the six-month Phase I award, granted through DARPA’s Small Business Innovation Research program, to explore ways to adapt its wireless architecture to power a swarm of drones.

Continue reading “Electric Sky wins DARPA grant to work on focused power beaming system for drones” »

Most physicists and philosophers now agree that time is emergent while Digital Presentism denotes: Time emerges from complex qualia computing at the level of observer experiential reality. Time emerges from experiential data, it’s an epiphenomenon of consciousness. From moment to moment, you are co-writing your own story, co-producing your own “participatory reality” — your stream of consciousness is not subject to some kind of deterministic “script.” You are entitled to degrees of freedom. If we are to create high fidelity first-person simulated realities that also may be part of intersubjectivity-based Metaverse, then D-Theory of Time gives us a clear-cut guiding principle for doing just that.

Here’s Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind (2021) documentary, Part III: CONSCIOUSNESS & TIME #consciousness #evolution #mind #time #DTheoryofTime #DigitalPresentism #CyberneticTheoryofMind

Continue reading “Consciousness & Time | Part III of Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind (2021) Documentary” »

Spain is banning fruit and veg wrapped in plastic. But should your bag of salad be spared.

With a ban on plastic wrapped fruit and veg expected in 2023 in Spain, manufacturers and retailers have concerns around its effect on food waste and the nation’s health.

Can you imagine sound traveling in the same way as light does? A research team at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has discovered a new type of sound wave: The airborne sound wave vibrates transversely and carries both spin and orbital angular momentum like light does. The findings shattered scientists’ previous beliefs about the sound wave, opening an avenue to the development of novel applications in acoustic communications, acoustic sensing and imaging.

The research was initiated and co-led by Dr. Shubo Wang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at CityU, and conducted in collaboration with scientists from Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). It was published in Nature Communications, titled “Spin-orbit interactions of transverse sound.”

Human computing for labeling at scale

All this begs the question: How do you create labeled data at scale?

Manually labeling data for AI is an extremely labor-intensive process. It can take weeks or months to label a few hundred samples using this approach, and the accuracy rate is not very good, particularly when facing niche labeling tasks. Additionally, it will be necessary to update datasets and build bigger datasets than competitors in order to remain competitive.

Earth’s Crust Elements

The crust is a rigid surface containing both the oceans and landmasses. Most elements are found in only trace amounts within the Earth’s crust, but several are abundant.

The Earth’s crust comprises about 95% igneous and metamorphic rocks, 4% shale, 0.75% sandstone, and 0.25% limestone.

Summary: A new machine-learning algorithm could help practitioners identify autism in children more effectively.

Source: USC

For children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), receiving an early diagnosis can make a huge difference in improving behavior, skills and language development. But despite being one of the most common developmental disabilities, impacting 1 in 54 children in the U.S., it’s not that easy to diagnose.

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have shown that a jet of material propelled from the core of a giant galaxy is channeled by a corkscrew-shaped magnetic field out to nearly 3,300 light-years from the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. That is much farther than such a magnetic field previously had been detected in a galactic jet.

“By making high-quality VLA images at several different radio wavelengths of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87), we were able to reveal the 3-dimensional structure of the magnetic field in this jet for the first time,” said Alice Pasetto of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, leader of the team. “The material in this jet traces a double helix, similar to the structure of DNA,” she added.

M87 is a giant elliptical galaxy about 55 million light-years from Earth. A supermassive black hole some 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun lurks at the center of M87. That black hole is the first one ever to be imaged—an achievement done with the world-wide Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration and announced in 2019. Earlier this year, new EHT images traced the magnetic field in the vicinity of the black hole event horizon.

The James Webb Space Telescope was fuelled inside the payload preparation facility at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana ahead of its launch on Ariane 5.

Webb’s thrusters will use this propellant to make critical course-corrections after separation from Ariane 5, to maintain its prescribed orbit about one and a half million kilometers from Earth, and to repoint the observatory and manage its momentum during operations.

Fuelling any satellite is a particularly delicate operation requiring setup of the equipment and connections, fuelling, and then pressurization.