Lifeboat Foundation

New research suggests that the Big Bang that birthed the cosmos occurred 12.5 billion years ago.

The Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, is nearly 200,000 light-years from Earth. ESA / Hubble / Josh Lake / via AFP — Getty Images.

Is the future finally here? The arrival of 5G (fifth generation mobile networks) has been keenly anticipated and long discussed. And if you attended the latest Mobile World Congress, held in Barcelona in February, you would have seen plenty to suggest that 5G will take off in 2019. Smartphone manufacturers are busy preparing their 5G models, the wireless networks on which they will run are being planned, and there is no shortage of visionary use cases highlighting how virtual reality and other technologies will harness 5G’s amazing power and connectivity. In short, our lives are about to change.

The wars of the future will be fought in megacities around the world by soldiers connected — and possibly even augmented — by neural implants and AIn this episode, we examine how military leaders are preparing for a radical shift in combat.

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Continue reading “The Next Battlefield: Connected, Augmented and Urban” »

A team of scientists from the University of Maryland recently came up with a take on the hyperdimensional computing theory that could give robots memories and reflexes. This could break the stalemate we seem to be at with autonomous vehicles and other real-world robots, and lead to more human-like AI models.

The solution

The Maryland team came up with a theoretical method by which hyperdimensional computing – a hypervector-based alternative to computations based on Booleans and numbers – could replace current deep learning methods for processing sensory information.

Continue reading “Hyperdimensional computing theory could lead to AI with memories and reflexes” »

Do viral videos spread in the same way as infectious diseases?

Car Culture

Other automotive name choices include “Ford,” “Bentley,” and “Audi,” as Mashable reports, accounting for thousands of innocent newborns.

Whether the decision will help the car company overcome hurdles like hitting the lowest stock valuation since 2017 or dealing with multiple reports of Teslas randomly catching fire is unknown.

Continue reading “Hundreds of Americans Are Naming Babies ‘Elon’ and ‘Tesla’” »

Clusters of human brain cells can integrate into rat brains, and that’s raising concerns about giving animals some form of human consciousness.

Researchers can grow stem cells into tiny clumps of cells, called organoids, that display similar activity and structure to human brains. To find out more about how exactly that works, read our primer from when we made the technique one of our Ten Breakthrough Technologies of 2015.

Now, though, reports Stat, several labs have inserted those organoids into rat brains and connected them to blood vessels; some of the organoids have even grown physical links with the rat brains. From Stat’s report:

Continue reading “Tiny Human Brains Inside Rats Are Sparking Ethical Concern” »

Researchers have built a tiny insect-like robot that can fly with realistic poise.

It took humanity centuries to decide that Earth orbits the sun. Now a neural network has come to the same conclusion, using the same data, in just a few hours.