Lifeboat Foundation

Lower Austria, the largest of the country’s nine states, announced this week that is has gone all in on clean energy, with 100 percent of its electricity generation for its 1.65-million-strong population now sourced from renewable energy.

In the weeks before world leaders meet for decisive UN climate talks in Paris later this month, the announcement of Lower Austria’s achievement is a beacon of hope amid other grim environmental news – and also a testament to how much the state has put into clean energy production.

“We have invested heavily to boost energy efficiency and to expand renewables,” said Erwin Proell, premier of Lower Austria, at a news conference, as reported by AFP. “Since 2002 we have invested 2.8 billion euros (US$3 billion) in eco-electricity, from solar parks to renewing (hydroelectric) stations on the Danube.”

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A a vertical village in Singapore has been name the World Building of the Year 2015 at the World Architecture Festival. The Interlace is a residential development designed by OMA / Buro Ole Scheeren. It comprises 31 six-story apartment blocks stacked in hexagonal shapes.

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“For those struggling to understand what Apple is up to, it might be best to imagine the Apple logo as a giant, rose gold-colored apple sculpture that’s being polished beyond perfection, to some sort of ideal, a level of quality that is so undeniable that no competitor dares forget it.”

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A new story out in Breitbart that’s about AI, transhumanism, and politics: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/08/trans-humanist-pres…overlords/

Zoltan Istvan is running for President in 2016, and hoping he might be one of the last humans to hold the job.

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SANTA CLARA, California — Robotic spacecraft may ride the solar wind toward interstellar space at unprecedented speeds a decade or so from now.

Researchers are developing an “electric sail” (e-sail) propulsion system that would harness the solar wind, the stream of protons, electrons and other charged particles that flows outward from the sun at more than 1 million mph (1.6 million kilometers per hour).

“It looks really, really promising for ultra-deep-space exploration,” Les Johnson, of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said of the e-sail concept here at the 100-Year Starship Symposium on Oct. 30. [Superfast Spacecraft Propulsion Concepts (Images)].

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Posted by Jeff Dean, Senior Google Fellow, and Rajat Monga, Technical Lead.

Deep Learning has had a huge impact on computer science, making it possible to explore new frontiers of research and to develop amazingly useful products that millions of people use every day. Our internal deep learning infrastructure DistBelief, developed in 2011, has allowed Googlers to build ever larger neural networks and scale training to thousands of cores in our datacenters. We’ve used it to demonstrate that concepts like “cat” can be learned from unlabeled YouTube images, to improve speech recognition in the Google app by 25%, and to build image search in Google Photos. DistBelief also trained the Inception model that won Imagenet’s Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge in 2014, and drove our experiments in automated image captioning as well as DeepDream.

Continue reading “TensorFlow — Google’s latest machine learning system, open sourced for everyone” »

Pluripotent cells are great, but they can be difficult to steer into growing the way you want. Now scientists have found a new way to create 3D-printed ‘building blocks’ of embryonic stem cells (ESCs), which could be used for growing micro-organs, performing tissue regeneration experiments, testing medication and other biology research purposes.

While bioprinting with ESCs is not entirely new, until recently researchers have only managed to produce two-dimensional sheets of cells. Now a team of scientists from Tsingua University in China and Drexel University in Philadelphia have published a study in Biofabrication, introducing a novel technique for printing a grid-like 3D structure laden with stem cells.

In normal biological conditions ESCs naturally tend to cluster together into spherical ‘embryoid bodies’ – clumps of pluripotent cells which can go on to develop into any type of cell or tissue in the human body.

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Serious Wonder speaks with Humai CEO Josh Bocanegra about his company’s desire to resurrect the dead using A.I. — B.J. Murphy for Serious Wonder.

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In a dramatic departure, Google is open sourcing software that sits at the heart of its online empire.

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