Lifeboat Foundation

“Sound Screws” might one day be an easy way to tune out noisy neighbors.

Circa 2014

India looks like the future. Even as China and other Asian nations contract, economically or otherwise, India continues to expand, with…

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over. In fact, when it comes to the rise of new variants, the worst may still be yet to come.

That’s according to World Health Organization (WHO), who spelled out a strong warning this week to countries hoping to loosen their social distancing measures amidst rising COVID-19 cases and deaths.

“The Committee has expressed concern that the pandemic is being mischaracterized as coming to an end when it is nowhere near finished,” Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, said at a media briefing on July 15.

Lambda, an AI infrastructure company, this week announced it raised $15 million in a venture funding round from 1517, Gradient Ventures, Razer, Bloomberg Beta, Georges Harik, and others, plus a $9.5 million debt facility. The $24.5 million investment brings the company’s total raised to $28.5 million, following an earlier $4 million seed tranche.

In 2013, San Francisco, California-based Lambda controversially launched a facial recognition API for developers working on apps for Google Glass, Google’s ill-fated heads-up augmented reality display. The API — which soon expanded to other platforms — enabled apps to do things like “remember this face” and “find your friends in a crowd,” Lambda CEO Stephen Balaban told TechCrunch at the time. The API has been used by thousands of developers and was, at least at one point, seeing over 5 million API calls per month.

Since then, however, Lambda has pivoted to selling hardware systems designed for AI, machine learning, and deep learning applications. Among these are the TensorBook, a laptop with a dedicated GPU, and a workstation product with up to four desktop-class GPUs for AI training. Lambda also offers servers, including one designed to be shared between teams and a server cluster, called Echelon, that Balaban describes as “datacenter-scale.”

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is moving quickly to expand its chip-making capabilities, investing billions of dollars in plants and weighing a deal to buy GlobalFoundries that would value the company at about $30 billion.

A new $7.9 million seed round boosts Butlr Technologies’ ability to apply its real-time people-sensing technology beyond commercial real estate and retail uses to monitor falls and other movements for active seniors who are aging in place.

Hyperplane led the round, with Founder Collective, Union Labs, 500 Startups, SOSV, E14 Fund, Tectonic Ventures, Scott Belsky, Chad Laurans and Sunny Vu participating.

The new funding comes one year after the Burlingame, California-based proptech company raised $1.2 million in convertible notes, which is included in the $7.9 million. It is developing a platform and Heatic sensors that detect someone’s body heat anonymously to determine occupancy, headcount and activity.

Newfound genetic material may rev up methane cycling by soil microbes.

Bad news for coffee lovers. Global warming will limit our coffee consumption.

Global coffee prices are climbing and threatening to drive up costs at the breakfast table as the world’s biggest coffee producer, Brazil, faces one of its worst droughts in almost a century.

Prices for arabica coffee beans—the main variety produced in Brazil—hit their highest level since 2016 last month. New York-traded arabica futures have risen over 18% in the past three months to $1.51 a pound. London-traded robusta—a stronger-tasting variety favored in instant coffee—has risen over 30% in the past three months, to $1749 a metric ton, a two-year high.

Continue reading “Coffee Prices Soar After Bad Harvests and Insatiable Demand” »

A team of astronomers has released new observations of nearby galaxies that resemble colorful cosmic fireworks. The images, obtained with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), show different components of the galaxies in distinct colors, allowing astronomers to pinpoint the locations of young stars and the gas they warm up around them. By combining these new observations with data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner, the team is helping shed new light on what triggers gas to form stars.

Astronomers know that stars are born in clouds of gas, but what sets off star formation, and how galaxies as a whole play into it, remains a mystery. To understand this process, a team of researchers has observed various nearby galaxies with powerful telescopes on the ground and in space, scanning the different galactic regions involved in stellar births.