Lifeboat Foundation

Finally the sisters left Percival alone to sleep, and though exhausted, he lay awake reflecting on his quest. He still had no definite sense of direction, so he prayed again for guidance, and finally trusting in the Lord to give him answer by whatever method He chose, he fell deeply asleep. He dreamt, an unusual dream in vivid color, in which he could hear water tricke and birds sing and feel the warmth of the sun on his face.

In his dream he saw an angel in a purple robe reclining against the rocks, a disturbing sight because the angel, with receding hairline and beard, wearing a white apron, held a angel figurine in a blue dress and its wings were plucked or flung out, drifting above his apron. Behind the angel was an unknown man’s shade, far to the angel’s right and above were some swords, point downwards, and to the angel’s right side, next to Percival, was a pile of jewels and crystal. The angel faced towards a cliff edge dropping off hundreds or thousands of feet, and just to the angel’s right was strung a narrow rope going past the rocks ahead, by which holding fast one might through bare toeholds and daring tenacity edge around the corner of the mountain to reach a safer ledge further on. From this line dangled a net with three fine scarves. The closest to the angel was orange, the next combined orange with green, and the third was green.

This scene flashed before his mind’s eye just long enough for him to absorb its details, and barely did he think to seek its meaning when a flash of movement caught his attention. From the suspended net, out flew a brilliantly colored bird, away from the angel and past the cliff in the direction the rope led. Like a bird of paradise, it had an orange body, green crest, and orange and green wings with a scissor-tail. A pure cascade of melodious trilling filled the morning air as it partook its free course, such that Percival felt its joy within his heart and being, and it warmed him with hope. He awoke with his heart still burning and understood through his spirit the dream, for its interpretation had also been given him and filled his mind with certainty and peace.

Evgeny became wider known to the Russian public in March, after becoming one of the first to implant a chip – between his thumb and forefinger – even though such surgical procedures are forbidden in Russia.

He sleeps two hours a night, plays guitar with a custom prosthesis, and has illegally implanted a microchip. When Evgeny Nekrasov was disfigured by an accident at 14, he decided to leverage future technology to build a new life.

Evgeny, now 21, has no recollection of “messing around” after school with his friends in hometown Vladivostok and picking up the gas canister that exploded in his hands and into his face.

Continue reading “The transhumanist: Russian student who lost sight after explosion developing bionic eyes for himself” »

How do galaxies such as our Milky Way come into existence? How do they grow and change over time? The science behind galaxy formation has remained a puzzle for decades, but a University of Arizona-led team of scientists is one step closer to finding answers thanks to supercomputer simulations.

Observing real galaxies in space can only provide snapshots in time, so researchers who want to study how galaxies evolve over billions of years have to revert to computer simulations. Traditionally, astronomers have used this approach to invent and test new theories of galaxy formation, one-by-one. Peter Behroozi, an assistant professor at the UA Steward Observatory, and his team overcame this hurdle by generating millions of different universes on a supercomputer, each of which obeyed different physical theories for how galaxies should form.

The findings, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, challenge fundamental ideas about the role dark matter plays in galaxy formation, how galaxies evolve over time and how they give birth to stars.

At human scale, controlling temperature is a straightforward concept. Turtles sun themselves to keep warm. To cool a pie fresh from the oven, place it on a room-temperature countertop.

At the nanoscale—at distances less than 1/100th the width of the thinnest human hair—controlling temperature is much more difficult. Nanoscale distances are so small that objects easily become thermally coupled: If one object heats up to a certain temperature, so does its neighbor.

When scientists use a beam of light as that heat source, there is an additional challenge: Thanks to heat diffusion, materials in the beam path heat up to approximately the same temperature, making it difficult to manipulate the thermal profiles of objects within the beam. Scientists have never been able to use light alone to actively shape and control thermal landscapes at the nanoscale.

Machine learning, introduced 70 years ago, is based on evidence of the dynamics of learning in the brain. Using the speed of modern computers and large datasets, deep learning algorithms have recently produced results comparable to those of human experts in various applicable fields, but with different characteristics that are distant from current knowledge of learning in neuroscience.

Using advanced experiments on neuronal cultures and large scale simulations, a group of scientists at Bar-Ilan University in Israel has demonstrated a new type of ultrafast artificial intelligence algorithms—based on the very slow brain dynamics—which outperform learning rates achieved to date by state-of-the-art learning algorithms.

In an article published today in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers rebuild the bridge between neuroscience and advanced artificial intelligence algorithms that has been left virtually useless for almost 70 years.

The last-resort option for getting rid of malware is reinstalling Windows. Also, the tricky thing about Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage. And how to get a certain antivirus program off your computer. Patrick Marshall answers your personal technology questions each week.

Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano could be gearing up for an eruption after a pond of water was discovered inside its summit crater for the first time in recorded history, according to the AP.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have recently developed a metric that can be used to capture the space of collider events based on the earth mover’s distance (EMD), a measure used to evaluate dissimilarity between two multi-dimensional probability distributions. The metric they proposed, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, could enable the development of new powerful tools to analyze and visualize collider data, which do not rely on a choice of observables.

“Our research is motivated by a remarkably simple question: When are two particle collisions similar?” Eric Metodiev, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), protons are smashed together at extremely high energies and each collision produces a complex mosaic of particles. Two collider events can look similar, even if they consist of different numbers and types of particles. This is analogous to how two mosaics can look similar, even if they are made up of different numbers and colors of tiles.”

In their study, Metodiev and his colleagues set out to capture the similarity between collider events in a way that is conceptually useful for particle physics. To do this, they employed a strategy that merges ideas related to optimal transport theory, which is often used to develop cutting-edge image recognition tools, with insights from quantum field theory, a construct that describes fundamental particle interactions.

Just five months ago at the RSA conference, the NSA released Ghidra, a piece of open source software for reverse-engineering malware. It was an unusual move for the spy agency, and it’s sticking to its plan for regular updates — including some based on requests from the public.

In the coming months, Ghidra will get support for Android binaries, according to Brian Knighton, a senior researcher for the NSA, and Chris Delikat, a cyber team lead in its Research Directorate, who previewed details of the upcoming release with CyberScoop. Knighton and Delikat are discussing their plans at a session of the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas Thursday.

Before the Android support arrives, a version 9.1 will include new features intended to save time for users and boost accuracy in reverse-engineering malware — enhancements that will come from features such as processor modules, new support for system calls and the ability to conduct additional editing, known as sleigh editing, in the Eclipse development environment.