Lifeboat Foundation

In this video, Elon Musk demonstrates a prototype brain–computer interface chip – implanted in a pig – that his company, Neuralink, has been working on. The device could one day be used by humans to augment their abilities.

Founded in 2016, the Neuralink Corporation remained highly secretive about its work until July 2019, when Musk presented his concept at the California Academy of Sciences. It emerged that he planned to create brain–machine interfaces (BMIs) not only for diseased or injured patients, but also healthy individuals who might wish to enhance themselves.

Yesterday, in a livestream event on YouTube, Musk unveiled a pig called Gertrude with a coin-sized chip in her brain. Simpler and smaller than the original revealed last year, the read/write link device can nevertheless pack 1,024 channels with megabit wireless data rate and all-day battery life. This latest prototype – version 0.9 – has now been approved as an FDA breakthrough device, allowing it to be used in limited human trials under the US federal guidelines for testing medical devices. The chip is removable, Musk explained, as he showed another pig called Dorothy, who no longer had the implant and was healthy, happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig.

This is a working proof of concept of the NeuralLace. It can detect limb motion and smell sensation via neural implants in the brain. So far it’s only been tested in pigs, but an early usecase might be a digital replacement for spinal cord injuries. But the real future goal about is getting to implant an internet enabled AI into your brain.

Elon Musk showed off Neuralink’s new implantable brain chip and demonstrated it working in real time on a pig.

Continue reading “Neuralink: Elon Musk’s entire brain chip presentation in 14 minutes (supercut)” »

DARPA announces a new type of cryptography to protect the Big Tech firm profits from the dawn of quantum computers and allow backdoor access into 3 trillion internet-connected devices.

by Raul Diego

Continue reading “DARPA Launches Project CHARIOT in Bid to Shield Big Tech Profits” »

Artificial intelligence applications are popping up everywhere these days, from our Internet browsing to smart homes and self-driving cars. Now a group of researchers is launching a new AI-led study that will collect data from recently released prisoners. The ultimate goal of the project is to identify – and, ostensibly, one day eliminate – the psychological and physiological triggers that cause recidivism among parolees.

According to project-leads Marcus Rogers and Umit Karabiyik, the resulting data will assist them in conducting a forensic psychological analysis. While the monitoring will be gauged in intervals – not real-time – they believe it will help build a profile of the risky behaviors and stressful triggers that recent parolees face when returning to the outside world.

Scientists at University College London have achieved a data transmission rate of 178 terabits per second (tbps) – a speed at which you could download the entire Netflix library in less than a second.

The breakthrough involved a collaboration between University College London (UCL) and two companies, Xtera and KDDI Research. The technology used a much wider range of colours of light, or wavelengths, than is typically found in optical fibre. Most of today’s infrastructure has a limited spectrum bandwidth of 4.5THz, with 9THz commercial systems entering the market. The researchers in this study, however, used a bandwidth of 16.8THz.

The hyperfast speed – around three million times faster than conventional broadband – was made possible by combining different “amplifier” technologies to boost signals over this wider bandwidth, and then maximised by developing new Geometric Shaping (GS) constellations. The latter are signal combinations that make best use of the phase, brightness and polarisation properties of light, manipulating the properties of each individual wavelength.

SpaceX just hit the FCC’s goal for low internet lag. Next step: 1 gigabit internet speeds.

The web app provides you with the precise location of my whereabouts in real-time, using real data. I’m learning space is a big place and I’m delighted to have you see how my team and I navigate it. http://go.nasa.gov/2YmfBz5

Researchers have fashioned ultrathin silicon nanoantennas that trap and redirect light, for applications in quantum computing, LIDAR and even the detection of viruses.

Light is notoriously fast. Its speed is crucial for rapid information exchange, but as light zips through materials, its chances of interacting and exciting atoms and molecules can become very small. If scientists can put the brakes on light particles, or photons, it would open the door to a host of new technology applications.

Now, in a paper published on August 17, 2020, in Nature Nanotechnology, Stanford scientists demonstrate a new approach to slow light significantly, much like an echo chamber holds onto sound, and to direct it at will. Researchers in the lab of Jennifer Dionne, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford, structured ultrathin silicon chips into nanoscale bars to resonantly trap light and then release or redirect it later. These “high-quality-factor” or “high-Q” resonators could lead to novel ways of manipulating and using light, including new applications for quantum computing, virtual reality and augmented reality; light-based WiFi; and even the detection of viruses like SARS-CoV-2.