Lifeboat Foundation

Dubbed 4660 Nereus, or 1982 DB, this vaguely egg-shaped asteroid has a size making it taller than the Eiffel Tower and nearly twice as tall as the Washington Monument. It is set to pass by the planet on December 11 at a distance of approximately 3.9 million kilometers and at a speed of 6.578 km/s.

For comparison, the distance between the Earth and the Moon is about a thousandth of that – around 385,000 km. As such, despite being classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) due to its size and close proximity to Earth, it seems unlikely to pose a threat to the planet.

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NASA is getting ready to launch a spacecraft to test an experimental method to deflect near-Earth objects, and you can participate in the mission by testing your own planetary defense know-how.

The space agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is designed to test a “kinetic impactor” technique for deflecting any asteroid or comet that might otherwise impact Earth.

“It doesn’t sound like a lot when you look at the numbers, but those are completely preventable deaths,” Zane Zents, the lead software engineer for the Grain Weevil robot, told NTV News. “It’s something that in the 21st century I don’t think we should still be dealing with.”

The Grain Weevil: Zents’ fellow student Ben Johnson was studying electrical engineering at UNO when he received a special request from a farmer friend, Zach Hunnicutt.

“(He) said, ‘Hey, look, you guys build robots. Why don’t you build me a robot so I and my children never have to go into a grain bin again?’” Johnson told AgWeb in May.

A new database aims to make it easier than ever to access and search through the world’s massive trove of research papers.

Each year, millions of scientific and academic papers get published across thousands of journals. The majority of those papers lie behind paywalls, costing $9 to $30 (or more) to read. Finding them can be difficult: Tools like Google Scholar allow you to search for paper titles and keywords, but more specialized queries are difficult.

The General Index was designed to reduce those obstacles without breaking the law. Developed by the technologist Carl Malamud and his nonprofit foundation Public Resource, the free-to-use index contains words and phrases from more than 107 million research papers, comprising 8.5 terabytes when compressed.

Biological immortality is not enough for an immerging community of Transhumanists. They’re hoping for a different take on Mind Uploading to offer them immortality. The Digital Immortality Definition depends on the person you ask, but one things is for certain the future is going to be weird when it comes to people longing for longevity and the goal of stopping aging completely. Living inside a computer by mind uploading to live forever may actually become a reality very soon in 2021.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 A new kind of Immortality.
02:05 Artificial Intelligence + Longevity =?
04:20 What are “Virtual Humans”?
06:40 The potential problem of consciousness.
08:53 Last Words.
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#ai #longevity #immortality

Fusion – combining atomic nuclei to release energy – is a clean and safe way to power our homes and industry. This ‘holy grail’ of energy has eluded physicists for decades, but there are signs that a bright future could be on the horizon.

One of the largest weaknesses of the U.S. military is its dependence on fuel. During the Global War on Terror, fuel convoys were easy targets for insurgent attacks. They will likely be targeted in future conflicts as well. This supply chain vulnerability is critical since, without access to fuel, military aircraft cannot maintain air superiority, a major requirement for winning wars.

Last week, the Air Force Operational Energy office awarded a contract to the energy company Twelve to develop the technology necessary to produce jet fuel from air. While this may sound unrealistic, the process is actually fairly straightforward. Indeed, Twelve has already shown that this process can be done at small levels. However, there are significant challenges involved in using this process at scale.

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Many job-seekers with valuable skills are disregarded by employers due to a fear of reduced intelligibility, removing the accent barrier could help.

In today’s multicultural societies, accents should not be a problem. But it turns out they still are due to a lack of coherence. Three Stanford students encountered this problem when one of their friends lost a customer support job due to his accent.

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A new machine-learning system helps robots understand and perform certain social interactions. Robots can deliver food on a college campus and hit a hole-in-one on the golf course, but even the most sophisticated robot can’t perform basic social interactions that are critical to everyday human life. MIT researchers have now incorporated certain social interactions into a framework for robotics, enabling machines to understand what it means to help or hinder one another, and to learn to perform these social behaviors on their own. In a simulated environment, a robot watches its companion, guesses what task it wants to accomplish, and then helps or hinders this other robot based on its own goals. The researchers also showed that their model creates realistic and predictable social interactions. When they showed videos of these simulated robots interacting with one another to humans, the human viewers mostly agreed with the model about what type of social behavior was occurring. Full Story: