Lifeboat Foundation

Lockheed Martin has been awarded an Air Force Research Laboratory contract to develop and produce high-energy fiber laser weapons for tactical fighter aircraft.

Following a $200 million investment this summer — the largest agriculture-tech funding round in history — vertical farming startup Plenty is expanding beyond its Bay Area roots.

The company is opening a second farm in the greater Seattle area, Plenty CEO Matt Barnard told Business Insider. Located in Kent, Washington, the 100,000-square-foot warehouse facility will grow 4.5 million pounds of greens annually, which is enough to feed around 183,600 Americans, according to the USDA.

The new farm will officially start production in spring 2018. Instead of growing outdoors, Plenty grows its crops on glowing, LED-lit 20-foot-tall towers inside a former electronics distribution center in South San Francisco. The towers do not require soil, pesticides, or even natural sunlight.

Continue reading “A new Jeff Bezos-backed warehouse farm will grow enough produce to feed over 180,000 people per year” »

Tech folks are a little antsy about the whole death thing. They’re putting money behind DNA ‘hacking,’ organ printing and tiny robots that might kill what ails you.

Scientists suggest Enceladus’s porous core could keep its subsurface ocean liquid for billions of years.

Citizens’ Assembly hears how Denmark became one of most efficient countries in world.

A two-in-one solar bio-battery and solar panel has been created by researchers who printed living cyanobacteria and circuitry onto paper.

Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic micro-organisms that have been on Earth for billions of years. They are thought to be the primary reason why the Earth’s atmosphere is oxygen rich.

Now, a team has demonstrated that cyanobacteria could be used as an ink and printed from an inkjet printer in precise patterns onto electrically conductive carbon nanotubes, which were also inkjet-printed onto the piece of paper. The team showed that the cyanobacteria survived the printing process and were able to perform photosynthesis so that small amounts of electrical energy could be harvested over a period of 100 hours.

“The humanoid robot market will grow from $320.3 million this year to $3.9 billion in 2023,”

The consumer market is definitely there, but you have to deliver a robot that can do practical things. For people working on robots out there. Right Now, I would just sit and focus on a robot that can move around an average kitchen, and make the most basic of meals; show that it can be done, and be sold for a reasonable price, that would be Phase 1. Phase 2 would be rigging up the cooking robot to be able to at least clean an kitchen and a bathroom, eventually an entire house. Phase 3 would be rigging up the cooking/cleaning robot to be able to do basic landscaping tasks. At that point i believe every household in America would want one. Phase 4 would be rigging it with niche entertainment features, and rigging it with the human level AI that turns up around 2029.

Greater interest from manufacturing, medicine, and retail will drive robotics growth for the next five years.

Continue reading “Humanoid robot market to double by 2023, industrial robotics to hit $72B” »

Kai-Fu Lee, the former head of Google research in China and a top tech investor, sees a huge opportunity to automate routine office work.

It once took online grocer Ocado two hours to put together a box of 50 food items. Now machines can do it in five minutes.