Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have discovered that tantalum carbide and hafnium carbide materials can withstand scorching temperatures of nearly 4000 degrees Celsius.

Being able to withstand temperatures of nearly 4000°C could pave the way for both materials to be used in ever more extreme environments, such as in heat resistant shielding for the next generation of hypersonic space vehicles.

Tantalum carbide (TaC) and hafnium carbide (HfC) are refractory ceramics, meaning they are extraordinarily resistant to heat. Their ability to withstand extremely harsh environments means that refractory ceramics could be used in thermal protection systems on high-speed vehicles and as fuel cladding in the super-heated environments of nuclear reactors. However, there hasn’t been the technology available to test the melting point of TaC and HfC in the lab to determine how truly extreme an environment they could function in.

Continue reading “Imperial College of London makes world’s most heat resistant material at 4232 kelvin” »

The National Review via Wesley J. Smith commenting on my “AI Day replacing Christmas” story: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/443337/ai-day-supplent-christmas #transhumanism #robots #future #AI

Scrooge’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come never saw this coming.

The transhumanist popularizer and pseudo presidential candidate, Zoltan Istvan, claims that “AI Day” will soon replace Christmas as the world’s most beloved holiday. From his piece in the Huffington Post:

Continue reading “‘AI Day’ Will Never Replace Christmas” »

The idea of colonization of Saturn’s moons is attractive and presents many benefits, even if it is a challenging and distant prospect.

CTO Clive Brown announces new Oxford Nanopore sequencing and library prep devices during his keynote address to the company’s user group conference

Stop the presses! Not something we call on a regular bases at FLG towers because, well, our work is largely digital. But when the latest news from Oxford Nanopore landed on our desks this afternoon, this old print journalism adage felt rather apt.

This page corresponds with H+ magazine and values of transhumanism, emphasizing the contributions of women involved in our transition into posthumanity.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/hpluswomen/

In Brief The company that is tasked with running China’s power grid just proposed a $50 trillion global electricity network to help us tackle pollution and climate change.

It seems that China likes building big things. Take the Great Wall of China. The country has been constructing bigger (and sometimes better) things than the rest of the world for centuries.

Now, the Chinese are at it again, but this time it’s on a global scale. China wants to build a $50+ trillion power grid. For the entire world. And they want to have it in operation by 2050. Talk about ambitious.

Continue reading “China Wants to Build a $50 Trillion Global Wind & Solar Power Grid by 2050” »

This is how Ships are launched!

USS Detroit (LCS-7) is the fourth freedom-class combat ship deployed by United States Navy. This ceremony took place on Oct. 18, 2014, in Menominee River. LCS −7 owes itself to Lockheed Martin, an American global aerospace, defence and security company. You can watch the complete video of its launch here.

Just imagine how we will feel when we have access to more senses and our processing power enhanced a million times!

#MostViewed2016 The joy of discovering new colours.

Though Cheok acknowledges that sex robots could fulfill sexist male sexual fantasies, he believes robot-human marriages will have an overwhelmingly positive effect on society. “People assume that everyone can get married, have sex, fall in love. But actually many don’t,” he says. And even those who do might be in search of a different option. “A lot of human marriages are very unhappy,” Cheok says. “Compared to a bad marriage, a robot will be better than a human.”

Though various sex robots are on the market, there are none that come close to resembling a human sexual partner—and there’s certainly nothing like the type of humanoid robot capable of replicating a loving relationship. However, Cheok believes the greatest technological difficulty in creating love robots is not a mechanical challenge, but a matter of developing the software necessary to build a robot that understands human conversation skillfully enough for the job.

Once that problem has been addressed, Cheok sees no problem with romances between man and machine. “If a robot looks like it loves you, and you feel it loves you, then you’re essentially going to feel like it’s almost human love,” he says. Cheok points out that in Japan and South Korea, there are already cases of humans falling in love with computer characters. Cheok also compares robot love to human emotions for other species, such as pet cats. “We already have very high empathy for non-human creatures. That’s why I think once we have robots that act human, act emotional, or look human, it’s going to be a small jump for us to feel empathy towards robots,” he says.

Continue reading “Experts predict human-robot marriage will be legal by 2050” »