Lifeboat Foundation

It is a lesson the U.S. space program has had to learn many times over: don’t voluntarily give up a space capability without having a successor ready to go or already operational.

But for the ISS (International Space Station), a gap in LEO (low Earth orbit) scientific research capability will likely not occur when the iconic outpost ends its career, whenever that may be.

And that is in large part due to Axiom, a private space organization with private funding that will begin adding modules to the ISS in 2024 — with the goal that those added modules will then be easily disconnected from the ISS at the end of its life, thus ensuring no gap in low Earth orbit space station capability for the United States.

Artificial Intelligence Is the New Science of Human Consciousness.
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Can AI dream? Can it love? Can it “think” in the same way we do? The short answer is: no. AI doesn’t need to bog itself down with simple human tasks like love or dreams or fear. The AI brain posits itself in a much grander scale first and then works backwards to the more human way of thinking. Joscha Bach suggests that much rather than humanoid robots, we are more likely to see AI super-brains developed by countries and larger companies. Imagine a computer brain that is designed to keep the stock market balanced, or detect earthquakes an ocean away that could sound alarms on our shores… that sort of thing.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Is the New Science of Human Consciousness | Joscha Bach | Big Think” »

Speaking at the 6th International FQXi Conference, “Mind Matters: Intelligence and Agency in the Physical World.”

The Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.

Continue reading “Joscha Bach — Reconciling consciousness with physicalism” »

NASA has released this year’s photo of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

We’ve been seeing a wave of innovations in solar panel technology, like perovskite solar cells, solar tiles and roofs, and organic panels. But what if we could harvest solar energy from the windows and skylights of our homes and skyscrapers, or even from our car windows and cellphone screens? Let’s explore transparent solar panels and how they stack up against conventional panels. Could transparent solar cells be the future of solar energy? Or does it remain to be unseen?

Watch Exploring Why This Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough Matters: h https://youtu.be/-KEwkWjADEA?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7UWp64ZlOKUPNXePMTdU4d.

Continue reading “Exploring a New Transparent Solar Cell Breakthrough” »

The French Armament General Directorate’s (DGA) ‘Capacité de Renseignement Electromagnétique Spatiale/Space-based Signal Intelligence Capability’ satellites have been successfully launched.

An Arianespace Vega rocket lifted off with the satellites from the European spaceport in French Guiana.

Known by the French acronym CERES, the satellites were designed and built by Airbus Defence and Space, and Thales.

Working at the intersection of hardware and software engineering, researchers are developing new techniques for improving 3D displays for virtual and augmented reality technologies.

Virtual and augmented reality headsets are designed to place wearers directly into other environments, worlds and experiences.

While the technology is already popular among consumers for its immersive quality, there could be a future where the holographic displays look even more like real life. In their own pursuit of these better displays, the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab has combined their expertise in optics and artificial intelligence. Their most recent advances in this area are detailed in a paper published in Science Advances and work that will be presented at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2021 in December.

When Elon Musk has any news to share, you’re likely to hear about it first on Twitter. You’d think the guy who runs SpaceX, Neuralink, Tesla, The Boring Company wouldn’t have much time on his hands.

But as his companies grow, so do his number of tweets. They’ve been increasing steadily – as the Wall Street Journal notes in this graphic. His tweets are so frequent that when he announced he was taking a break from Twitter that one time, it made the news.

Continue reading “The Clever Reason Elon Musk Tweets So Much” »

Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering are using generative adversarial networks (GANs)—technology best known for creating deepfake videos and photorealistic human faces—to improve brain-computer interfaces for people with disabilities.

In a paper published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the team successfully taught an AI to generate synthetic brain activity data. The data, specifically neural signals called spike trains, can be fed into machine-learning algorithms to improve the usability of brain-computer interfaces (BCI).

BCI systems work by analyzing a person’s brain signals and translating that neural activity into commands, allowing the user to control digital devices like computer cursors using only their thoughts. These devices can improve quality of life for people with motor dysfunction or paralysis, even those struggling with locked-in syndrome—when a person is fully conscious but unable to move or communicate.