Lifeboat Foundation

A new infrared instrument on a telescope in Hawaii will let astronomers find more exoplanets orbiting red dwarf stars. The discoveries may include rocky worlds that are potentially habitable.

Breakthrough could lead to new type of energy source.

In a breakthrough discovery, University of Wollongong (UOW) researchers have created a “heartbeat” effect in liquid metal, causing the metal to pulse rhythmically in a manner similar to a beating heart.

Their findings are published in the 11 July issue of Physical Review Letters, the world’s premier journal for fundamental physics research.

The researchers produced the heartbeat by electrochemically stimulating a drop of liquid gallium, causing it to oscillate in a regular and predictable manner. Gallium (Ga) is a soft silvery metal with a low melting point, becoming liquid at temperatures greater than 29.7C.

Should we be fearful of artificial intelligence and the pace at which it’s progressing? Or should we fear fear itself and the risk of it stifling innovation?

Wherever this may be heading, the march of progress shows fews signs of slowing down. Which companies and countries are leading the way?

Continue reading “AI on Track to Achieving Superintelligence?” »

IBM Research AI team demonstrated deep neural network (DNN) training with large arrays of analog memory devices at the same accuracy as a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU)-based system. This is a major step on the path to the kind of hardware accelerators necessary for the next AI breakthroughs. Why? Because delivering the Future of AI will require vastly expanding the scale of AI calculations.

Above – Crossbar arrays of non-volatile memories can accelerate the training of fully connected neural networks by performing computation at the location of the data.

This new approach allows deep neural networks to run hundreds of times faster than with GPUs, using hundreds of times less energy.

Continue reading “IBM overcomes von Neumann bottleneck for AI hundreds of time faster using hundreds of times less energy” »

Water-scarce cities could get a new source of the precious resource through a simple and cost-effective technology.

What did they find out?

NASA’s Curiosity rover has uncovered the best evidence yet that life may have once existed on Mars.

Continue reading “Breakthrough in search for Martian life as Curiosity finds organic matter and seasonal methane” »

A breakthrough stem cell treatment that promises the first effective cure for heart disease will be offered to British patients this year, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Hundreds of thousands stand to benefit after regulators approved a major trial of the regenerative drug capable of shrinking fatal scar tissue which follows a heart attack.

The “off-the-shelf” therapy, which can be harvested for thousands of recipients from one healthy donor, will begin being administered to patients at London’s Royal Brompton Hospital in November.

Continue reading “Heart disease stem cell therapy can shrink deadly scar tissue” »