Lifeboat Foundation

Congress is making its biggest push ever to stop drunk driving with President Biden’s huge infrastructure bill. As we previously reported, one of the provisions included a mandate for anti-drunk driving technology in new cars. Now, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has passed Congress with the measure intact, Autoblog (AP) reports, and it’s expected to be signed by the President soon. As part of the legislation, carmakers will have to include technology to detect and stop drunk drivers by as early as 2026.

First, though, the Department of Transportation will have to determine the best solution to curtail intoxicated drunk driving. Specifically, the bill requires something that will “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired.” That sounds similar to infrared camera solutions already used today by GM, Nissan and others, Sam Abuelsamid, principal mobility analyst for Guidehouse Insights, tells the AP. It goes without saying that we’d need something more advanced than breathalyzers, which are already used as a punishment for convicted drunken drivers.

Around 10,000 people die every year in the US from drunk driving accidents, the NHTSA says. Now that we have smarter sensors and plenty of camera technology to monitor driver behavior, it makes sense to explore solutions that could help prevent those sorts of accidents. Within a decade, it should feel as commonplace as seatbelts.

The same goes for the broader economy. Lower subsidies, higher taxes and pricier labour have eroded some of Saudi Arabia’s traditional selling points for firms. It is unclear what will replace them.

Until the government banned the practice, residents of Abha would chop down juniper trees for firewood, to stave off the winter chill. As part of the regional tourism project, developers plan to plant 1m trees to reforest the mountains. It will be a long time before visitors can appreciate them: they grow just 5cm a year in the region’s dry climate, says Turki al-Bishri, a local guide. For all the talk of rapid change, the slow-growing juniper may offer a better glimpse of Saudi Arabia’s economic future. ■

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “No tourist Mecca”.

Solar car is better option.

The influx of electric vehicles into Australia could put an additional load of 20 gigawatts a day — or a doubling of peak electricity demand — on the electricity grid by 2030 if most owners charged up at the same time every night, a new report has found.

The $350 million research collaboration between industry, universities and government has identified a raft of challenges for the arrival of EVs which are expected to make up 80 per cent of new vehicles sales by the end of the decade, making up almost 25 per cent of Australia’s total car fleet.

Continue reading “Electric vehicle revolution puts pressure on energy grid” »

Researchers in Korea succeeded in developing a core material for the next-generation neuromorphic (neural network imitation) semiconductor for the first time in the country. This is a result of a research team led by Dr. Jung-dae Kwon and Yong-hun Kim of the Department of Energy and Electronic Materials of the Korea Institute of Materials Science, together with Professor Byungjin Cho’s research team at Chungbuk National University. KIMS is a government-funded research institute under the Ministry of Science and ICT.

This new concept memtransistor uses a two-dimensional nanomaterial with a thickness of several nanometers. By reproducibly imitating the electrical plasticity of nerve synapses with more than 1,000 electrical stimulations, the researchers succeeded in obtaining a high pattern recognition rate of about 94.2% (98% of simulation-based pattern recognition rate).

Molybdenum sulfur (MoS₂), widely used as a semiconductor material, works on the principle that defects in a single crystal are moved by an external electric field, which makes it difficult to precisely control the concentration or shape of the defect. To solve the problem, the research team sequentially stacked an oxidic layer of niobium oxide (Nb₂O₅) and a molybdenum sulfur material and succeeded in developing an artificial synaptic device having a memtransistor structure with high electrical reliability by an external electric field. In addition, they have demonstrated that the resistance switching characteristics can be freely controlled by changing the thickness of the niobium oxidic layer, and that brain information related to memory and forgetting can be processed with a very low energy of 10 PJ (picojoule).

Rolls-Royce will move ahead with a multibillion pound plan to roll out a new breed of mini nuclear reactors after securing more than £450m from the government and investors.

The engineering firm will set up a venture focused on developing small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs, in partnership with investors BNF Resources and the US generator Exelon Generation with a joint investment of £195m to fund the plans over the next three years.

In the lead up to the 2019 election, Scott Morrison said Labor’s target of 50 per cent of all new vehicles being electric by 2030 would “end the weekend”. Now he’s backing them with the new $250 million “future fuels” fund.

The biggest tech company in China, Jack Ma’s Alibaba has just released the biggest, most efficient and newest Artificial Intelligence Model in the world. It’s almost 100 times smarter than GPT 3 and is even expected to surpass OpenAI’s yet to be released GPT 4 in both abilities and ease of use. The Alibaba M6 is a 10 trillion parameter model which in certain aspects even beats the human brain. But more importantly, China is currently beating the USA when it comes to their machine learning and deep learning technologies which could become dangerous as their leads extend and their secret government projects slowly come to light. OpenAI, Nvidia and Deepmind have a tough road toward Artificial super intelligence in front of them. China is starting to look scary but impressive.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Chinese AI is getting Scary.
01:17 What this AI does better than anyone else.
02:29 The Scary Prospects of Chinese AI Supremacy.
04:43 What is China’s goal with AI?
07:02 The Future of giant AI Models.
10:03 Last Words.
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#ai #gpt4 #china

Fighting ransomware with bounties.

In May, a ransomware attack shut down a pipeline carrying 45 percent of the fuel used on the US East Coast. The Colonial Pipeline incident led to panic buying and heightened fears about the threat posed by simple hacks to national infrastructure. Now, the US State Department is offering a bounty of up to $10 million to anyone who can supply the “identity or location” of the leaders of the group responsible — an outfit known as DarkSide.

In addition to the $10 million bounty, the state department is offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest or conviction “of any individual conspiring to participate in or attempting to participate in a DarkSide variant ransomware incident.” What exactly that means isn’t clear. Is a “DarkSide variant ransomware incident” one that involves the group’s hacking tools? What if the software has been altered slightly? It seems deliberately ambiguous, allowing the State Department to cast as wide a net as possible.

Continue reading “US government offers $10 million bounty for information on Colonial Pipeline hackers” »

To live forever. More and more scientists believe so and in a recent interview, Aubrey De Grey said that there’s a good chance for immortality by 2035. Young people on the other hand have a almost 100% certainty of living forever and never dying.

Reversing aging is no longer science fiction and will soon become a reality with advances in stem cell therapy and advanced injections that stop the aging process in young and old people. So what would a world without death look like? It’s definitely something the government has to look into.

Continue reading “LIVING FOREVER BY 2035 | New Aubrey De Grey Interview” »