Lifeboat Foundation

To mark the second season of the television series Mars, Hollywood director Ron Howard talked to the BBC about creating a realistic depiction of the first human colonies on the Red Planet.

If humankind is to expand out into the Universe, then Mars is likely to be our first stepping stone. With an atmosphere largely consisting of carbon dioxide and temperatures that vary between 20C and −125C, the Red Planet isn’t exactly ideal for human occupation.

We’d have to adapt to living almost entirely within sealed habitats — so outdoors-y types need not apply.

In the spirit of Halloween, where ghouls, ghosts, and vampires walk among us, our perception of reality will soon transform as well, forever possessed by the specter of Transhumanism!

Last year, I wrote about how people could transform themselves into one of my favorite horror creatures—a real-life werewolf—using modern science and tech. This merely scratches the surface, however, in terms of how far an individual can go. In a Transhumanist future, you’ll be empowered to not only question the extent of your humanity but equally put those questions into action.

Continue reading “In a Transhumanist Future, Everyday Could Be Halloween” »

We’re in for quite the spectacle… 👀😲.

Just a normal Friday night at my house, then.

A “portrait” that is the first piece of artificial-intelligence art sold by a major auction house shattered estimates, selling for 45 times what was expected.

“Portrait of Edmond de Belamy” was sold Thursday at Christies in New York for $432,500. It had been expected to go for $7,000 to $10,000. The buyer was not revealed.

The painting is one of 11 portraits of a fictional family created so far by the Paris-based art collective Obvious.

Continue reading “Art ‘painted’” »

Backed by startup incubator Y Combinator, Acre Designs is poised to transform the house building industry with prefabricated, net zero energy homes that are affordable and sustainable.

New houses could soon deliver on a long-awaited promise and incorporate windows or roof tiles that harvest solar energy, research conducted at KAUST suggests.

Derya Baran, at the KAUST Solar Center, and her colleagues have developed a photovoltaic organic material that captures light efficiently and that potentially could be coated on building materials.

Traditional roof-mounted solar panels are made from slabs of silicon, but organic molecules can also capture energy from sunlight. These molecules could be formulated as inexpensive printable inks that are applied to regular building components such as windows. Turning sunlight into electricity is a multistep process, and the key to developing high-performance organic photovoltaic materials has been to find organic molecules that are good at every step, Baran explains.

Continue reading “Printable solar materials could soon turn many parts of a house into solar panels” »

The “slow motion” modes on modern smartphones crank up the speed of video recording so that when it’s played back at regular speed, the motion you see on the screen is slowed down. It’s a neat feature to mess around with, but slow motion capture has some very serious scientific applications as well. Capturing the microscopic world at high speeds can help researchers shed light on all kinds of interesting behaviors and phenomena that shape our reality.

Now, imaging specialists have built what is being called the fastest camera on the planet, allowing for the capture of movement at up to 10 trillion frames per second. Forget slowing down a video of a home run at your kid’s softball game, this incredible contraption can slow down light itself.

A new paper published in Light: Science & Applications explains how the camera works, and boy is it complicated. To put it in its most basic terms, the camera uses laser pulses so ultra-fast that they are measured in quadrillionths of a second and combines those frames with images captured from a second camera moving at the same speed, allowing for high-quality images generated 10 trillion times every second.

Continue reading “World’s fastest camera can shoot light in slow motion” »

Backed by startup incubator Y Combinator, Acre Designs is poised to transform the house building industry with prefabricated, net zero energy homes that are affordable and sustainable.

Aerial footage shows rows of damaged and destroyed homes lining the beach in Mexico Beach, Florida, after Hurricane Michael slammed into the town on October 10, 2018. It was the strongest hurricane on record to hit the Florida Panhandle.

Credit: WJAX