Lifeboat Foundation

Concentrated Solar Power and the better-known photovoltaic panels — what’s the difference, and is one better than the other?

Move over Spot, there’s a new four-legged flipping robot in town. Boston Dynamic’s dog-like droid has some new, friendly competition in the form of a quadruped built by undergraduate students at Stanford University, who have made the designs open source with the aim of encouraging advances through low-cost robotics.

Is it me? Or am I the only one who wishes George Church was not so secretive? https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/05/rejuvenate-bio-using-g…dogs.html?

Harvard Genetics Giant Geroge Church and Noah Davidsohn, a former postdoc in his lab, have engaged in a secretive antiaging venture called Rejuvenate Bio. They are making old dogs new. They have conducted gene therapy on beagles and are currently advertising for Cavalier King Charles spaniels to use gene therapy to fix their hearts.

They have identified many other targets for gene-based interventions, studying a database of aging-related genes.

Continue reading “Rejuvenate Bio Using Gene Therapy Has Reversed Aging Effects in Mice and Dogs” »

Researchers from Washington State University and Ohio State University have developed a low-cost, easy way to make custom lenses that could help manufacturers avoid the expensive molds required for optical manufacturing.

Led by Lei Li, assistant professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, and graduate student, Mojtaba Falahati, the researchers developed a liquid mold from droplets that they can manipulate with magnets to create lenses in a variety of shapes and sizes. Their work is featured on the cover of the journal, Applied Physics Letters.

High-quality lenses are increasingly used in everything from cameras, to self-driving cars, and virtually all robotics, but the traditional molding and casting processes used in their manufacturing require sophisticated and expensive metal molds. So, manufacturers are mostly limited to mass producing one kind of lens.

Continue reading “Researchers develop new lens manufacturing technique” »

A U.S. venture-capital firm recently led a round of seed investment for Hermeus Corp., a new startup developing a hypersonic aircraft.

Watching the algorithm work is like perusing a stock photo catalog from hell.

The Amazon Rainforest is well known across the world for being the largest and most dense area of woodland in the world. Spanning across nine countries, the Amazon is home to millions of different animal and plant species, as well as harboring some for the world’s last remaining indigenous groups. The Waorani people of Pastaza are an indigenous tribe from the Ecuadorian Amazon and have lived in the Rainforest for many generations. However, there Home came under threat from a large oil company — they didn’t take it lightly.

After a long legal battle with a number of organizations, the Waorani people successfully protected half a million acres of their ancestral territory in the Amazon rainforest from being mined for oil drilling by huge oil corporations. The auctioning off of Waorani lands to the oil companies was suspended indefinitely by a three-judge panel of the Pastaza Provincial Court. The panel simply trashed the consultation process the Ecuadorian government had undertaken with the tribe in 2012, which rendered the attempt at land purchase null and void.

Continue reading “Amazon Tribe Wins Lawsuit Against Big Oil, Saving Millions Of Acres Of Rainforest” »

In less than two decades, you won’t just use your computers, you will have relationships with them.

Because of artificial intelligence, computers will be able to read at human levels by 2029 and will also begin to have different human characteristics, said Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google.

“My timeline is computers will be at human levels, such as you can have a human relationship with them, 15 years from now,” he said. Kurzweil’s comments came at the Exponential Finance conference in New York on Wednesday.

Continue reading “Computers will be like humans by 2029: Google’s Ray Kurzweil” »

As you saw in Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel not only sported a new haircut, she was also sporting a new suit. It wasn’t always like that, though. Since Endgame was shot before Captain Marvel, the suit she originally wore while shooting the film, was the same suit that she wore in the solo Captain Marvel movie.

After her scenes were shot, the creative team decided that they needed to give her suit a different look since so much time had passed since the 90s. Weta Digital’s Matt Aitken, who was a VFX supervisor on Endgame, explained when they changed up the suit design it was all done digitally, so the final suit design that was shown on screen was 100% CGI.

Aitken talked to CB about the new suit design, explaining:

Continue reading “Captain Marvel’s Suit Was Entirely CGI in AVENGERS: ENDGAME” »