Lifeboat Foundation

Check out the trailer for The Shaman, a new short film debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival. As with a lot of short films we’ve seen lately, this has top-notch visual effects — but more than that, it looks like a thing of pure beauty. And it has an original story, with a concept I haven’t come across before.

Basically, in The Shaman, it’s 2204, and the world has been at war for 73 years. And the main character isn’t a soldier — he’s a Shaman, one of a group of people who used to be healers. But now, instead, he uses his supernatural powers to “heal” the souls of the enemy, basically helping them cross over into the afterlife. That’s what I get from the trailer, in any case. This is the work of writer/director Marco Kalantari (Ainoa).

Continue reading “This Short Movie About An Endless Future War Looks Unspeakably Great” »

We were really impressed with the trailer for The Shaman when it came out in March. And now, after a successful run at film festivals, you can finally see it for yourself.

At seventeen minutes, The Shaman is a bit longer than many other shorts, but that’s not to its detriment. It just contributes to the overall sense that what you’re actually seeing is a full cinematic feature film—which makes sense, since it was originally conceived as one. Marco Kalantari (Ainoa) uses every second he has to full effect. We have would-building, effective exposition, action scenes, and a confrontation that’s all about willpower.

Continue reading “You Can Finally Watch One of This Year’s Best Shorts Online” »

The University of Cambridge is launching a new research centre, thanks to a £10 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust, to explore the opportunities and challenges to humanity from the development of artificial intelligence.

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Cryogenics are an old science fiction dream, but today we still struggle to store large tissues without harming them. Now a breakthrough could lead to a safer, more reliable approach.

” This could be an important step toward the preservation of more complex tissues and structures”

Overcoming past challenges

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Scientists from the University of Queensland have used photons (single particles of light) to simulate quantum particles travelling through time. The research is cutting edge and the results could be dramatic!

Their research, entitled “Experimental simulation of closed timelike curves “, is published in the latest issue of Nature Communications. The grandfather paradox states that if a time traveler were to go back in time, he could accidentally prevent his grandparents from meeting, and thus prevent his own birth.

However, if he had never been born, he could never have traveled back in time, in the first place. The paradoxes are largely caused by Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the solution to it, the Gödel metric.

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“[O]nly a carbon tax—not innovation, conservation, or renewable energy—will accelerate the transition from carbon-producing fossil fuels to sustainable energy.”

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The risks associated with space debris are rising. An efficient way to clear the skies of junk is desperately needed, and a team of Chinese engineers think they have the answer.

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What will happen when machines become smarter than us?

It used to be a question purely for science fiction writers, but with experts predicting human-level AI could become a reality within this century, it’s become a pressing issue for scientists and philosophers, as they try to predict how our world will change.

Keen not to be left behind, Cambridge University has been at the forefront of the issue, and today announced the launch of a brand new centre, dedicated to answering the very real questions once seen solely as the preserve of Doctor Who or Stanley Kubrick’s HAL.

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Google says it wants to power 100% of its operations from renewable energy.

Google has announced a slew of renewable energy projects, as it moves to meet its commitment to power 100 percent of its business from green energy sources.

In what it calls the “largest, and most diverse, purchase of renewable energy ever made by a non-utility company,” Google said it has added 842 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy to its data centers, which nearly doubles the amount of clean energy it has already bought. Most of the renewable energy has been purchased for locations in the U.S., but Google said it has added more than 150 megawatts from a solar plant in Chile and a wind farm in Sweden.

Continue reading “Google makes ‘largest purchase’ of renewable energy to power data centers: 842 MW across 3 countries” »