Lifeboat Foundation

As the global headcount nears 8 billion, our thirst for kilowatts is growing by the minute. How will we keep the lights on without overheating the planet in fossil fuel exhaust? Alternative energy is the obvious choice, but scaling up is hard. It would take an area the size of Nevada covered in solar panels to get enough energy to power the planet, says Justin Lewis-Weber, “and to me, that’s just not feasible.” This past March, Lewis-Weber, a then-high school senior in California, came up with a radical plan: self-replicating solar panels—on the moon.

Here’s the gist: When solar panels are orbiting Earth, they enjoy 24 hours of unfiltered sunshine every day, upping their productivity. Once out there, they could convert that solar radiation into electricity (just as existing solar panels do) and then into microwave beams (using the same principle as your kitchen appliance). Those microwaves then get beamed back to Earth, where receivers convert them back into electricity to power the grid. Simple! Except that Lewis-Weber estimates that building and launching thousands of pounds of solar panels and other equipment into space will be outrageously expensive, in the range of hundreds of trillions of dollars.

Instead, he suggested, why not make them on the moon? Land a single robot on the lunar surface, and then program it to mine raw materials, construct solar panels, and (here’s the fun part) make a copy of itself. The process would repeat until an army of self-replicating lunar robot slaves has churned out thousands of solar panels for its power- hungry masters.

Continue reading “A Robot Army To Build Solar Panels (On The Moon)” »

Sinais químicos do cérebro visto em tempo real.

Os investigadores injectaram estas células, conhecidas como CNiFERs (baseados em células repórteres fluorescentes modificadas neurotransmissor) no cérebro de ratos 13. Em seguida, eles cortaram uma janela para o cr nio de cada rato para expor seu cérebro e colocar uma tampa transparente em cima do buraco para que pudessem assistir as células acender em tempo real através de um microscópio.

A técnica é uma melhoria em métodos atuais, pois quantifica neurotransmissores diretamente em vez de calculá-los através de seus efeitos. “É um dos testes mais puros que você pode fazer”.

Continue reading “Brain’s chemical signals seen in real time” »

Scientists in Singapore have created a new type of concrete that bends, but is more durable and sustainable than the typical concrete.

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU)-JTC Industrial Infrastructure Innovation Center have created a new type of concrete that is flexible and more durable than regular concrete. They call it ConFlexPave.

According to its inventors, ConFlexPave can greatly reduce the weight and thickness of precast pavement slabs, making them lighter and easier to transport and install — thus, halving the time needed for road work and new pavement. Also, because it is more sustainable, it requires less maintenance compared to conventional concrete.

Continue reading “New Lighter, Tougher, and Bendable Concrete Aims to Revolutionize Roads” »

DARPA and MIT are leading an effort to take what are now bulky expensive Light Imaging, Detection, And Ranging (LIDAR) systems and make them small enough to fit on a microchip.

LIDAR is one of the key parts of Google’s self driving car.

MIT’s Photonic Microsystems Group is developing a lidar-on-a-chip system that is smaller than a dime, has no moving parts, and could be mass-produced at a very low cost for use in self-driving cars, drones, and robots.

Continue reading “LIDAR on a chip should be 1000 times cheaper and scan 1000 times faster to revolutionize self-driving cars, drones, and robots” »

The hard problem of consciousness must be approached through the ontological lens of 20th century physics, which tells us that reality is information theoretic and quantized at the level of Planck scale spacetime. Through careful deduction, it becomes clear that information cannot exist without consciousness – the awareness of things. And to be aware is to hold the meaning of relationships of objects within consciousness – perceiving abstract objects, while enjoying degrees of freedom within the structuring of those relationships. This defines consciousness as language – a set of objects and an ordering scheme with degrees of freedom used for expressing meaning. And since even information at the Planck scale cannot exist without consciousness, we propose an entity called a “primitive unit of consciousness”, which acts as a mathematical operator in a quantized spacetime language. Quasicrystal mathematics based on E8 geometry seems to be a candidate for the language of reality, possessing several qualities corresponding to recent physical discoveries and various physically realistic unification models.

The restaurant, which recently opened its doors in London, England, utilizes 3D printers to create dishes out of hummus, chocolate mousse, smashed peas, goat cheese or pizza dough.

(A fanciful illustration of small black holes passing through EarthPhoto by NASA/Illustration by Dave Mosher)

First, the good news: You have not been killed by a black hole.

The strange news is that it’s possible the universe is teeming with microscopic black holes that formed at the dawn of time, all of them hurtling through space like cosmic bullets.

Continue reading “Miniature black holes may be hitting Earth once every 1,000 years” »

A few weeks ago, up to 40 people from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia were hospitalized after a heatwave thawed permafrost, releasing a “zombie outbreak” of anthrax. Now, the Siberian Times reports that experts fear the thawing could spell the return of the eradicated smallpox virus.

During the 1800s, there were repeated outbreaks of smallpox in a small Siberian town, with hundreds of bodies buried near the banks of the Kolyma River. Some 120 years later, this summer’s heatwave has been melting the permafrost surrounding the town at a rate three times faster than usual. This has increased water levels in the river and is subsequently eroding away its banks where the bodies are buried.

While the risk at the moment is low, and with scientists aware of the issue for some time now, the current troubles of permafrost around the site and the Kolyma River are ringing alarms.

Continue reading “Melting Permafrost Could Thaw A Smallpox Graveyard In Siberia” »

Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded as the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and Tesla Motors offers Autopilot, essentially a souped-up cruise control that drives the car on the highway. Earlier this week, Ford announced plans for an autonomous ride-sharing service. But none of these companies has yet brought a self-driving car-sharing service to market.

Uber’s Pittsburgh fleet, which will be supervised by humans in the driver’s seat for the time being, consists of specially modified Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicles outfitted with dozens of sensors that use cameras, lasers, radar, and GPS receivers. Volvo Cars has so far delivered a handful of vehicles out of a total of 100 due by the end of the year. The two companies signed a pact earlier this year to spend $300 million to develop a fully autonomous car that will be ready for the road by 2021.

The Volvo deal isn’t exclusive; Uber plans to partner with other automakers as it races to recruit more engineers. In July the company reached an agreement to buy Otto, a 91-employee driverless truck startup that was founded earlier this year and includes engineers from a number of high-profile tech companies attempting to bring driverless cars to market, including Google, Apple, and Tesla. Uber declined to disclose the terms of the arrangement, but a person familiar with the deal says that if targets are met, it would be worth 1 percent of Uber’s most recent valuation. That would imply a price of about $680 million. Otto’s current employees will also collectively receive 20 percent of any profits Uber earns from building an autonomous trucking business.

Continue reading “Uber Debuts Its First Fleet of Driverless Cars in Pittsburgh” »