Lifeboat Foundation

Stephen Marr had his suspicions when he photographed a mysterious piece of equipment atop SpaceX’s drone ship at Port Canaveral on Monday.

“I knew there was something different there,” Marr, 34, said.

So he did what any lover of space and social media would do: He posted it online. Reddit users quickly propelled Marr’s clear, high-resolution photo to the top of the website’s SpaceX community and so began discussion that the object was likely a highly anticipated robot that would interact with Falcon 9 first stages.

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This AI hates racism, retorts wittily when sexually harassed, dreams of being superintelligent, and finds Siri’s conversational skills to be decidedly below her own.

A designer named Kosho Tsuboi has conceived a beautiful gadget idea. His product, the Magic Calendar, is an e-paper calendar that syncs with a smartphone to display your schedule. The project is associated with Google’s Android Experiments, which appears to be a Japanese program in which creators can pitch ideas for Android-centered gadgets. In this case, the calendar relies on a custom Android app, and, judging off the below video, uses Google Calendar for syncing.

A new computer simulation helps explain the existence of puzzling supermassive black holes observed in the early universe. The simulation is based on a computer code used to understand the coupling of radiation and certain materials. “Supermassive black holes have a speed limit that governs how fast and how large they can grow,” said Joseph Smidt of the Theoretical Design Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, “The relatively recent discovery of supermassive black holes in the early development of the universe raised a fundamental question, how did they get so big so fast?”

Using computer codes developed at Los Alamos for modeling the interaction of matter and radiation related to the Lab’s stockpile stewardship mission, Smidt and colleagues created a simulation of collapsing stars that resulted in supermassive black holes forming in less time than expected, cosmologically speaking, in the first billion years of the universe. “It turns out that while supermassive black holes have a growth speed limit, certain types of massive stars do not,” said Smidt. “We asked, what if we could find a place where stars could grow much faster, perhaps to the size of many thousands of suns; could they form supermassive black holes in less time?” A video about the discovery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD4xECbHx_I&feature=youtu.be

Ten of the most promising new regional aerospace start-up companies descended on El Segundo on Tuesday to pitch their futuristic concepts for the next wave of industry advancement, from orbiting cell towers in space to drones that communicate with each other.

The event, organized by new-tech business support company Starburst Accelerator, was held at The Aerospace Corp., the research and development arm of the adjacent Los Angeles Air Force Base.

Such meetings between legacy aerospace companies and energetic up-and-comers are becoming commonplace, as the industry works to keep up with a flood of technological advancements propelling the commercialization of low-Earth orbit.

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This coating makes things nearly indestructible.

This is life.

BEC CREW

22 MAR 2017

Continue reading “This Mesmerising Time-Lapse of Cell Division Is Real, and It’s Spectacular” »

Electronic computers are extremely powerful at performing a high number of operations at very high speeds, sequentially. However, they struggle with combinatorial tasks that can be solved faster if many operations are performed in parallel.

The EU Horizon 2020 has launched Bio4Comp, a five-year €6.1M project to build more powerful and safer biocomputers that could outperform quantum computing.

The Bio4Comp project has the ambitious goal of building a computer with greater processing speed and lower energy consumption than any of the most advanced computers existing today. Ultimately, this could translate into enabling large, error-free security software to be fast enough for practical use, potentially wiping out all current security concerns.

Continue reading “Europe has a five year project to scale up molecular biocomputers which could outperform quantum computers” »

People who received regular lifestyle counseling online were able to lower their blood pressure as much as a medication would, researchers said Saturday.

Their study involved 264 people with high blood pressure and an average age of 58.

The subjects’ average blood pressure began at around 140/90 mmHg, meaning they had what is clinically known as stage 1 hypertension.

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