Lifeboat Foundation

This is the world’s first fully reusable spaceplane that can take off and land from a runway. Aerospace firm Radian Aerospace claim its spaceplane will completely transform travel both in space and around the world. The aircraft, named Radian One, will be a fully reusable, single stage to orbit vehicle that can be turned around and reflown within 48 hours. The firm has raised $27.5 million in seed funding but experts predict it will cost well over $1 billion to develop. Once in orbit, missions could range from once around the Earth, in about 90 minutes, to a full five day cruise. When returning to the Earth, wings allow it to land smoothly on any 10,000ft runway. This would allow it to land at most of the major UK airports. The firm says it will be able to carry out a wide range of functions once in space including taking people and light cargo to low Earth orbit.

University of Central Florida researchers are building on their technology that could pave the way for hypersonic flight, such as travel from New York to Los Angeles in under 30 minutes.

In their latest research published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers discovered a way to stabilize the detonation needed for hypersonic propulsion by creating a special hypersonic reaction chamber for jet engines.

The UCF-developed propulsion system could allow for flight speeds of Mach 6 to 17 and would have applications in air and space travel.

Continue reading “Flying at Speeds up to Mach 17 Could Become Reality” »

Cyanobacteria are single-celled organisms that derive energy from light, using photosynthesis to convert atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) and liquid water (H₂O) into breathable oxygen and the carbon-based molecules like proteins that make up their cells. Cyanobacteria were the first organisms to perform photosynthesis in the history of Earth, and were responsible for flooding the early Earth with oxygen, thus significantly influencing how life evolved.

Geological measurements suggest that the atmosphere of the early Earth—over three billion years ago—was likely rich in CO₂, far higher than current levels caused by anthropogenic climate change, meaning that ancient cyanobacteria had plenty to “eat.”

But over Earth’s multi-billion-year history, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have decreased, and so to survive, these bacteria needed to evolve new strategies to extract CO₂. Modern cyanobacteria thus look quite different from their ancient ancestors, and possess a complex, fragile set of structures called a CO₂-concentrating mechanism (CCM) to compensate for lower concentrations of CO₂.

This is the BMW electric wingsuit 2021.

BMW Group will present the first electric drive system for a wingsuit with which the centuries-old dream of flying can be realised in a completely novel way. The innovative drive module and the likewise entirely newly designed wingsuit were developed in a cooperation between BMW i, Designworks and the professional wingsuit pilot Peter Salzmann from Austria. His maiden flight with the Electrified Wingsuit by BMW i was visually captured in an elaborately staged video documentation. The spectacular film, which will be seen for the first time in the run-up to the #NEXTGen 2020, shows impressively how BMW eDrive technology is able to make a lasting change to the individual mobility experience.

Continue reading “Meet BMW Electric Wingsuit — the future of individual flying is now” »

When U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss decided to deliver a speech on a bill that would create a U.S.-Israel artificial intelligence center, he opted to let the AI do the talking.

The brief two-paragraph speech read by the Massachusetts Democrat on the floor of the U.S. House on Wednesday was generated by the online AI chatbot ChatGPT. His staff said they believe it’s the first time an AI-written speech was read in Congress.

Auchincloss said he prompted the system in part to “write 100 words to deliver on the floor of the House of Representatives” about the legislation. Auchincloss said he had to refine the prompt several times to produce the text he ultimately read.

Neural decoding models attempt to identify the current mental state of an individual from recordings of their neural activity¹. In recent years, neural decoders have been developed to identify numerous different types of mental activity from many neuroimaging modalities. These decoders were first developed to decode visual^2,3 and semantic^4,5,6,7 information from the brain, while more recent examples of neural decoders have been developed to decode a diverse set of activities, including, but not limited to, affective states⁸, visual imagery during sleep⁹, and story meaning¹⁰.

Neural decoding models have been developed that make use of many different types of neuroimaging techniques including, but not limited to, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electrocortiography (ECoG), electroencephalogram (EEG), and functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Depending on the type of neuroimaging technique the neural decoder uses different types of mental processes may be decoded. For example, fMRI provides a recording of activity throughout the entire brain with a very high spatial resolution, allowing a neural decoder the ability to decode mental states involving sub-cortical brain regions¹¹. However, this comes at the cost of poor time resolution, which prevents decoding of mental activity over very short time scales.

Few of us give much thought to Earth’s swirling, spinning contents until some sudden movement, an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, jolts us to our senses.

Geoscientists, though, are a little more clued into the dynamics of Earth’s guts, and have just discovered that Earth’s solid inner iron core – which usually spins within a near-frictionless molten outer envelope – appears to have slowed to a grinding halt.

Before anybody panics and searches for a copy of a terrible 20-year-old science fiction movie predicting such an event in hopes of inspiring a solution, it’s not the first time record of such an event. It’s not even the first in recent history.

Stay ahead of the game with top-notch cybersecurity measures. The attacks may be becoming more severe, but so are our defenses.

How can we ensure that the technologies currently being developed are used for the common good, rather than for the benefit of a select few?

When ChatGPT was asked what advances in artificial intelligence mean for the human condition, it responded to our inquiry that AI will “change the way people view their own abilities and skills and alter their sense of self.” It could “impact people’s sense of identity and purpose.” It could “change the way people form and maintain relationships and impact their sense of community and belonging.” The progress made in 2022 by generative AI, which includes large language models such as ChatGPT and image generators such as Dall-E, is awe-inspiring. When it eloquently warns us about its own potential impact on the human sense of self, purpose, and belonging—we are naturally impressed. But large language models can only give back to us what we have fed to them.