Lifeboat Foundation

There is no cheaper way to generate electricity today than with the sun. Power plants are currently under construction in sunny locations that will supply solar electricity for less than 2 cents per kilowatt hour. Solar cells available on the market based on crystalline silicon make this possible with efficiencies of up to 23 percent. Therefore they hold a global market share of around 95 percent. With even higher efficiencies of more than 26 percent, costs could fall further. An international working group led by photovoltaics researchers from Forschungszentrum Jülich now plan to reach this goal with a nanostructured, transparent material for the front of solar cells and a sophisticated design. The scientists report on their success of many years of research in the renowned scientific journal Nature Energy.

Silicon solar cells have been steadily improved over the past decades and have already reached a very high level of development. However, the disturbing effect of recombination still occurs after the absorption of sunlight and the photovoltaic generation of electrical charge carriers. In this process, negative and positive charge carriers that have already been generated combine and cancel each other out before they could be used for the flow of solar electricity. This effect can be countered by special materials that have a special property—passivation.

“Our nanostructured layers offer precisely this desired passivation,” says Malte Köhler, former Ph.D. student and first author from the Jülich Institute for Energy and Climate Research (IEK-5), who has since received his doctorate. In addition, the ultra-thin layers are transparent—so the incidence of light is hardly reduced—and exhibit high electrical conductivity.

NASA officially announced that it’s going to announce who it will choose to build a rocket capable of bringing the first astronauts to the Moon’s surface since the Apollo missions.

But news of the decision may have just leaked to The Washington Post a little early.

According to documents obtained by the newspaper, NASA has officially chosen Elon Musk’s SpaceX to to build a lunar lander variant of its Starship spacecraft as part of the agency’s Artemis program — an extraordinary coup for the spacetech startup.

Four veteran astronauts will launch to the International Space Station on Thursday (April 22) for SpaceX’s Crew-2 mission, the second operational commercial crew flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.

The mission is set to blast off on April 22 from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:11 a.m. EDT (1011 GMT). And, if all goes as planned, Crew Dragon will dock with the orbital outpost less than 24 hours later.

Some populations of neurons simultaneously process sensations and memories. New work shows how the brain rotates those representations to prevent interference.

The Syntellect Emergence seems to be a cosmic necessity, and in the long run, any voices calling to resist the cybernetic fusion of the mind will be no more influential than the voices calling, right now, to eradicate civilization and return to the jungle. Nature’s tendency to build up hierarchies of emergent patterns, the heuristic law of evolution, supersedes the human race itself. We see it time and again, Nature is constantly trying to combine seemingly opposing forces, to assemble existing parts into the new wholes through the universal process of radical emergence. We are bound to transcend our biology, our human condition, our limited dimensionality, we are bound to transcend ourselves.

#TranscendentalCybernetics #CyberneticSingularity #SyntellectEmergence

Syntellect Emergence is hypothesized to be the next meta-system transition, becoming one Global Mind — that constitutes the Cybernetic Singularity.

Continue reading “Transcendental Cybernetics: Imagining the Technological Singularity” »

NVIDIA has unveiled ‘Grace’ – its first data centre CPU, which will deliver a 10x performance leap for systems training AI models, using energy-efficient ARM cores. The company also revealed plans for a 20 exaflop supercomputer.

Opportunity to Publish AI Related Papers in a Peer-Reviewed Journal w/o cost. One in the BICA*AI 2021 Conference and the Philosophy and Computing Conference at IS4SI Summit in September.

One of the bigger problems I have run into in doing research out of a small lab is the cost of publishing papers and get them peer-reviewed. Many of the most specialized scientific conferences like BICA Society (Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures for AI) can not afford to subsidize costs. This means limits on how many papers can be released and spreading papers over many years sometimes. Recently I got invited to produce and help produce two scientific conferences at the IS4IS summit in September, and the best part is that IS4SI has gotten a grant to cover publishing costs. This means everyone for both conferences is able to publish (assuming your paper meets standards) and attend for free.

If for some reason, your paper does not meet the quality or topic bar’s, we can help you. So the two VIRTUAL conferences are:

Continue reading “Opportunity to Publish AI Related Papers in Peer-Reviewed Journal” »

Great new episode with Harvard University geologist Andrew Knoll who chats about the grand sweep of Earth’s history.

Harvard University geologist Andrew H. Knoll takes on the grand sweep of Earth’s formation and evolution in his new book A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters. He succinctly describes Earth from its cosmological beginnings in a molecular cloud on through to the present day. It’s a fine line between the vacuum of space and the planet on which we walk.

Continue reading “Episode 46 – Harvard Geologist Andy Knoll Sums Up The Grand Sweep Of Earth’s History” »

The human brain, just like whatever you’re reading this on, uses electricity to function. Neurons are constantly sending and receiving electrical signals. Everyone’s brain works a bit differently, and scientists are now getting closer to establishing how electrical activity is functioning in individual patients’ brains and how to stimulate it to treat neurological and psychiatric disorders. Some scientists are even using advanced AI predictive technology to enhance their brain stimulation therapy methods.