Lifeboat Foundation

China gave up on their SLS clone, deciding that building a giant rocket that blows up with every mission is a bad idea. Maybe Congress, who is forcing NASA to build the SLS, could learn from this.

When China started to get serious about sending its astronauts to the Moon in the middle of the last decade, the country’s senior rocket scientists began to plan a large booster to do the job.

In 2016 the country’s state-owned rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, began designing the “Long March 9” rocket. It looked more or less like the large heavy lifter NASA was designing at the time, the Space Launch System. Like NASA’s large rocket, the Long March 9 had a core stage and boosters and was intended to be fully expendable.

Continue reading “China is scrapping plans for an SLS-like rocket in favor of reusable booster” »

Meta, Twitter employees, and eagles all appear to be in the same boat.

Drone-hunting eagles have reportedly been laid-off by the Swiss government due to concerns about the welfare of the birds, which awkwardly follows the recent tech industry layoffs, including Meta’s announcement on November 9 to let go of more than 11,000 employees.

The anticipated 2022 tech layoffs have not just dug their claws into drone-grounding eagles that were employed to hunt down the technology, but the tech industry itself, according to an article by Gizmodo on Tuesday.

Solar power gathered far away in space, seen here being transmitted wirelessly down to Earth to wherever it is needed. ESA plans to investigate key technologies needed to make Space-Based Solar Power a working reality through its SOLARIS initative. One such technology – wireless power transmission – was recently demonstrated in Germany to an audience of decision makers from business and government.

The demonstration took place at Airbus’ X-Works Innovation Factory in Munich. Using microwave beaming, green energy was transmitted green energy between two points representing ‘Space’ and ‘Earth’ over a distance of 36 metres.

The received power was used to light up a model city, produce green hydrogen by splitting water and even to produce the world’s first wirelessly cooled 0% alcohol beer in a fridge before serving to the watching audience.

face_with_colon_three circa 2016.

Two basic types of encryption schemes are used on the internet today. One, known as symmetric-key cryptography, follows the same pattern that people have been using to send secret messages for thousands of years. If Alice wants to send Bob a secret message, they start by getting together somewhere they can’t be overheard and agree on a secret key; later, when they are separated, they can use this key to send messages that Eve the eavesdropper can’t understand even if she overhears them. This is the sort of encryption used when you set up an online account with your neighborhood bank; you and your bank already know private information about each other, and use that information to set up a secret password to protect your messages.

The second scheme is called public-key cryptography, and it was invented only in the 1970s. As the name suggests, these are systems where Alice and Bob agree on their key, or part of it, by exchanging only public information. This is incredibly useful in modern electronic commerce: if you want to send your credit card number safely over the internet to Amazon, for instance, you don’t want to have to drive to their headquarters to have a secret meeting first. Public-key systems rely on the fact that some mathematical processes seem to be easy to do, but difficult to undo. For example, for Alice to take two large whole numbers and multiply them is relatively easy; for Eve to take the result and recover the original numbers seems much harder.

Continue reading “Quantum Cryptography Is Unbreakable. So Is Human Ingenuity” »

Researchers detail a new malware campaign by Pakistani hackers targeting Indian government organizations, revealing their new tools and techniques.

Coca leaf and cocaine may soon join alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and cannabis as legally regulated drugs.

Colombia’s new government wants to legalize coca leaf and cocaine. So does Peru. And Bolivia has been on that path since 2012.

“China was leading the global recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic and accounted for half of worldwide robot installations in 2021,” said Marina Bill, President of the International Federation of Robotics. “Growth is strong across all industries with electrical and electronics being the dominant sector – up 30% to 81,600 installations. The automotive industry also showed a strong recovery. This was mainly driven by electric vehicle manufacturing in China. It rose by 89% in 2021 with 50,700 installations.”

Chinese government supports robotic automation

In China aging population’s demographics causes shortage of labor and drives the growth of robotic automation. The continued robotization of industries has been announced earlier this year by the government. The Five-Year plan for the robotics industry, released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) in Beijing, focuses on promoting innovation — making China a global leader of robot technology and industrial advancement.

On December 6–7, 2022, the Buck Institute for Research on Aging will be hosting the Longevity Summit 2022. Lifespan.io is pleased to announce that we are an official media partner for this upcoming conference.

The Summit will see many of the leading experts in the field coming together in the grounds of the architecturally distinct Buck Institute. It is being framed as a peer-to-peer learning experience aiming to unite longevity entrepreneurs, pharma and biotech companies, investors, researchers, and government organizations.

Here’s what the organizers had to say about the event:

The project, known as DAF-MIT AI Accelerator, selected a pilot out of over 1,400 applicants.

The United States Air Force (DAF) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) commissioned their lead AI pilot — a training program that uses artificial intelligence — in October 2022. The project utilizes the expertise at MIT and the Department of Air Force to research the potential of applying AI algorithms to advance the DAF and security.

The military department and the university created an artificial intelligence project called the Department of the Air Force-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Accelerator (DAF-MIT AI Accelerator).

Continue reading “US Air Force and MIT commission a lead AI pilot for their innovative project” »