Lifeboat Foundation

Dehgan hopes that the organization’s prizes and other initiatives will bring innovative solutions to conservation’s deepest problems. Hundreds of people have already been lured in through challenges and engineering programmes such as Make for the Planet — a multi-day, in-person event — and an online tech collaboration platform called Digital Makerspace, which matches conservationists with technical talent.

Standard efforts have failed to slow the pace of extinctions, so Conservation X Labs is trying a fresh approach.

Top artificial intelligence (AI) expert and founder and CEO of Fountech.ai Nikolas Kairinos said in a Daily Star interview that within 20 years we could have implants put into our heads that will allow us to learn everything. “You won’t need to memorize anything,” said the specialist to the Daily Star.

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It’s easy to miss the mirror forge at the University of Arizona. While sizable, the Richard F. Caris Mirror Laboratory sits in the shadow of the university’s much larger 56,000-seat football stadium. Even its most distinctive feature—an octagonal concrete prominence emblazoned with the school’s logo—looks like an architectural feature for the arena next door. But it’s that tower that houses some of the facility’s most critical equipment.

Inside the lab, a narrow, fluorescent-green staircase spirals up five floors to the tower’s entrance. I’m a few steps from the top when lab manager Stuart Weinberger asks, for the third time, whether I have removed everything from my pockets.

“Glasses, keys, pens. Anything that could fall and damage the mirror,” he says. Weinberger has agreed to escort me to the top of the tower and onto a catwalk some 80 feet above a mirror 27.5 feet in diameter. A mirror that has already taken nearly six years—and $20 million—to make. “Most people in the lab aren’t even allowed up here,” he says. That explains Weinberger’s nervousness about the contents of my pockets (which are really, truly empty), and why he has tethered my camera to my wrist with a short line of paracord.

Continue reading “The Astounding Engineering Behind the Giant Magellan Telescope” »

Brain cancer kills more Australian children than other cancers; University of Melbourne research finds genetically engineered killer T-cells could change that.

Quantum computing’s processing power could begin to improve artificial-intelligence systems within about five years, experts and business leaders said.

For example, a quantum computer could develop AI-based digital assistants with true contextual awareness and the ability to fully understand interactions with customers, said Peter Chapman, chief executive of quantum-computing startup IonQ Inc.

“Today, people are frustrated when a digital assistant says, ‘Sorry, I couldn’t understand that,’” said Mr. Chapman, who was named CEO of the venture-capital-backed startup this week after about five years as director of engineering for Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Prime. Quantum computers “could alleviate those problems,” he said.

Continue reading “When Quantum Computing Meets AI: Smarter Digital Assistants and More” »

The Create the Future Design Contest was launched in 2002 by the publishers of NASA Tech Briefs magazine to help stimulate and reward engineering innovation. The annual event has attracted more than 8,000 product design ideas from engineers, entrepreneurs, and students worldwide.

Arindam Banerjee, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics at Lehigh University, studies the dynamics of materials in extreme environments. He and his team have built several devices to effectively investigate the dynamics of fluids and other materials under the influence of high acceleration and centrifugal force.

One area of interest is Rayleigh-Taylor instability, which occurs between materials of different densities when the density and pressure gradients are in opposite directions creating an unstable stratification.

“In the presence of gravity—or any accelerating field—the two materials penetrate one another like ‘fingers,’” says Banerjee.

Continue reading “Behold the mayo: Experiments reveal ‘instability threshold’ of elastic-plastic material” »

A review of Rod Pyle’s new book, Space 2.0, a tour de force of the “new space” phenomena packed with photos and details of the amazing people behind it. The book goes beyond Musk, Branson and Bezos and explains the origins of the science and engineering required to build an economy beyond Earth.

The work should lead to control one to a few hundred atoms at microsecond timescales using AI control of electron beams. The computational/analytical framework developed in this work are general and can further help develop techniques for controlling single-atom dynamics in 3D materials, and ultimately, upscaling manipulations of multiple atoms to assemble 1 to 1000 atoms with high speed and efficacy.

Scientists at MIT, the University of Vienna, and several other institutions have taken a step toward developing a method that can reposition atoms with a highly focused electron beam and control their exact location and bonding orientation. The finding could ultimately lead to new ways of making quantum computing devices or sensors, and usher in a new age of “atomic engineering,” they say.

This could help make quantum sensors and computers.

Continue reading “Advance to Controlling one to a Few Hundred Atoms at Microsecond Timescales Using AI Control of Electron Beams” »