Lifeboat Foundation

As 2018 draws to a close and we start anticipating the developments that will happen in 2019, here’s a look back at our ten most-read articles of the year.

This 3D Printed House Goes Up in a Day for Under $10,000 Vanessa Bates Ramirez | 3/18/18 “ICON and New Story’s vision is one of 3D printed houses acting as a safe, affordable housing alternative for people in need. New Story has already built over 800 homes in Haiti, El Salvador, Bolivia, and Mexico, partnering with the communities they serve to hire local labor and purchase local materials rather than shipping everything in from abroad.”

Machines Teaching Each Other Could Be the Biggest Exponential Trend in AI Aaron Frank | 1/21/18 “Data is the fuel of machine learning, but even for machines, some data is hard to get—it may be risky, slow, rare, or expensive. In those cases, machines can share experiences or create synthetic experiences for each other to augment or replace data. It turns out that this is not a minor effect, it actually is self-amplifying, and therefore exponential.”

In 2019, will Tesla become the world’s first automaker with a fully autonomous fleet on the road?

The Tesla CEO said the Hardware 3 upgrade has.

Get Astronomy tweets here http://twitter.com/DeepAstronomy

Probably my biggest regret when I made the Hubble Deep Field in 3D video is saying the phrase “these galaxies are racing away from us, in some cases faster than light”.

Continue reading “How Can Galaxies Travel Faster Than Light?” »

Scientists have uncovered the mechanisms between the world’s first known invertebrate endosymbiotic relationship between an algae and a type of salamander.

A newly discovered pink-colored object is the most-distant body ever observed in the solar system—and the first object ever found orbiting at more than 100 times the distance from Earth to the sun.

The pink-colored object is nearly four times more distant from the sun than Pluto, and hints at the possibility of an as-yet-undiscovered giant planet farther out.

• By Sarah Lewin, SPACE.com on December 18, 2018

Can machines make moral choices?

A massive new survey developed by MIT researchers reveals some distinct global preferences concerning the ethics of autonomous vehicles, as well as some regional variations in those preferences.

The survey has global reach and a unique scale, with over 2 million online participants from over 200 countries weighing in on versions of a classic ethical conundrum, the “Trolley Problem.” The problem involves scenarios in which an accident involving a vehicle is imminent, and the vehicle must opt for one of two potentially fatal options. In the case of driverless cars, that might mean swerving toward a couple of people, rather than a large group of bystanders.

Continue reading “A self-driving car can choose who dies in a fatal crash. These are the ethical considerations” »

On #NewYearsEve, our New Horizons spacecraft will fly within 2,220 miles of this object, providing the first close-up look at such a pristine building block of the solar system. Get the latest update: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

Power suits, robotaxis, Leonardo da Vinci mania—just a few of the things to look out for in 2019. But what else will make our top ten stories for the year ahead?

Click here to subscribe to The Economist on YouTube: https://econ.st/2xvTKdy

Continue reading “What will be the biggest stories of 2019? | Part One | The Economist” »

The Space Force would constitute the sixth branch of the US armed forces.

The news: During a meeting with the National Space Council today, President Donald Trump directed the Department of Defense and the Pentagon to begin work on the creation of the Space Force. He stated, “‘We are going to have the Air Force and we’re going to have the Space Force, separate but equal.”

Some background: This isn’t the first time Trump has brought up this idea. He has continued to express interest in the idea during visits to West Point and in speeches to military members.

Continue reading “Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to create the US Space Force” »