Lifeboat Foundation

The future could be here before we know it. On Monday, Fisker Inc.—the company behind the Tesla Model S-fighting EMotion picture above—announced that it had filed patents for a new type of battery technology that could put electric cars with 500-plus mile ranges and one-minute recharging times on the roads as soon as the year 2024.

While Fisker’s press release was, unsurprisingly, a tad cagey about the details of this potentially paradigm-shattering technology, the company did reveal a few bits about what its new inventions and discoveries could do. Fisker’s new power storage technology, according to the company, would allow it to build solid-state batteries packing far more surface area than existing flat thin-film solid-state electrodes can do, while also allowing for greater conductivity, allowing the batteries to work better in cold weather and charge faster overall. (Low levels of conductivity has been one of the key problems preventing the widespread adoption of solid-state batteries so far, so this could potentially be, as Michael Scott might say, a B.F.D.)

Due to the complexities of bringing the new technology to market, such as developing supply chains for some raw materials and setting up property quality control measures for them, Fisker says the technology isn’t likely to reach cars and trucks until sometime after 2023. Once it does, however, the company claims the batteries—2.5 times more power-dense than their lithium ion equivalents—could lead to electric vehicles capable of recharging in less time than it takes to fill a modern car’s gas tank, then driving more than 500 miles before needing to power up again. Oh, and the carmaker says the batteries would cost about one-third as much as li-ion ones, to boot. (That said, Fisker did mention that there are still plenty of “technical bottlenecks” between where the tech is now and where it needs to be for production use, so don’t get too excited just yet.)

The other gaming was that computers don’t really understand words… So you ask, “Who was the sixteenth president of the United States.”? The computer doesn’t know what “sixteenth” and “president of the United States” mean. But it can go and rummage through Wikipedia-like sources and find those words and match them to a president, Abraham Lincoln and come back with “‘Who’ was Abraham Lincoln.”

But then you put anything in that’s like a pun or a joke or a riddle or sarcasm, that you can’t look up in Wikipedia, and computers are helpless. For example, in the first round, one of the final Jeopardy clues was, “Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest for a World War II battle.” And the correct answer was “Chicago.” And Watson guessed “Toronto,” apparently because it was confused in the second part of that sentence, what “it” referred to. And that is a common problem with computers. (See: Why did Watson think Toronto was in the U.S.A.?)

Terry Winograd is a computer scientist at Stanford and he thought up this test of computer knowledge. The question is, “What does ‘it’ refer to in this sentence?”

French inventor becomes the first person to successfully cross the English Channel on a hoverboard 👏 👏.

Click on photo to start video.

Automated valet parking is coming sooner than you think.

What have we learned from fifty years of “software crisis”?

Actually probe expensive gear in real life? Pah. It’s 2019. We’re Boeing digital.

The US Army will field 50 kilowatt (kW)-class lasers on a platoon of four Stryker vehicles in 2022. They will support the Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (M-SHORAD) mission. The directed energy M-SHORAD capability is intended to protect maneuvering Brigade Combat Teams from unmanned aerial systems (UAS), rotary-wing aircraft, and rockets, artillery and mortar (RAM).

As well as Gait Recognition. (Go ahead and wear a disguise.)

The mass surveillance of innocent Americans continues as George Orwell’s 1984 becomes more of a reality with each passing day. “All told, we are barreling toward a future where every ritual of public life carries implicit consent to be surveilled,” writes Sidney Fussell for The Atlantic.

A new report from Georgetown Law‘s Center on Privacy & Technology (CPT) suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) may be using the rampant problem of illegal immigration as a type of cover to track and spy on Americans in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. Three years ago, the center revealed that nearly half of all U.S. adults are already in the FBI’s facial recognition database, which is largely sourced from DMV photos.

Continue reading “Mass Surveillance: 1 in 2 Americans Are Already In A Government Facial Recognition Database” »

It might not look like much, but this wobbly self-driving bicycle is a symbol of growing Chinese expertise in advanced chip design.

Look, no hands: The bike not only balances itself but steers itself around obstacles and even responds to simple voice commands. But it’s the brains behind the bike that matter. It uses a new kind of computer chip, called Tianjic, that was developed by Luping Shi and colleagues at Tsinghua University, a top academic institution in Beijing.

Two in one: The Tianjic chip features a hybrid design that seeks to bring together two different architectural approaches to computing: a conventional, von Neumann design and a neurologically inspired one. The two architectures are used in cooperation to run artificial neural networks for obstacle detection, motor and balance control, and voice recognition, as well as conventional software.

This could be used for real hoverboards and hovering spacecraft could float out of atmosphere just like aliens do :3.

The quantum vacuum has fascinated physicists ever since Hendrik Casimir and Dirk Polder suggested in 1948 that it would exert a force on a pair of narrowly separated conducting plates. Their idea was eventually confirmed when the force was measured in 1997. Just how to exploit this force is still not clear, however.

In recent years, a new way of thinking about the quantum vacuum has emerged which has vastly more potential. And today, one physicist describes how it could be used to create propulsion.

Continue reading “A Blueprint for a Quantum Propulsion Machine” »