Lifeboat Foundation

Study could lead to a pill that confers the benefits of physical activity on cognition.

Mars’ poles contain millennia-old ice deposits. They also contain carbon dioxide, iron, aluminium, silicon and sulfur, which could be used to make glass, brick and plastic. Furthermore, the planet’s atmosphere contains enough hydrogen and methanol for fuel.

The tallest mountain on Mars and in the solar system is Olympus Mons, and it is two and a half times taller than Mt. Everest. A Martian canyon system, called Valles Marineris, is the length of the entire continental United States and three times deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Continue reading “This map shows that Mars and Earth aren’t that different” »

SHANGHAI/BEIJING — U.S. electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc is “very close” to achieving level 5 autonomous driving technology, Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Thursday, referring to the capability to navigate roads without any driver input.

Musk added that he was confident Tesla would attain basic functionality of the technology this year, in remarks made via a video message at the opening of Shanghai’s annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC).

The California-based automaker currently builds cars with an autopilot driver assistance system.

The Neobiological Revolution is here. Now’s the time to put lessons from the Digital Revolution to use.

The Earth’s magnetic field flips, every few hundred thousand years or so on average, which means magnetic north becomes magnetic south and vice versa (the planet doesn’t actually turn upside down). New research suggests this change of direction can happen up to 10 times faster than previously thought.

That’s big news for scientists studying how the magnetic field shifts affect life on Earth, how our planet has evolved over time, and how we might be better able to predict the next reversal in the coming years.

Past palaeomagnetic studies have shown that the magnetic field could change direction at up to 1 degree a year, but the latest study suggests that movements of up to 10 degrees annually are possible.

Say something Eric Klien.

Given the increasing proliferation of AI, I recently carried out a systematic review of AI-driven regulatory gaps. My review sampled the academic literature on AI in the hard and social sciences and found fifty existing or future regulatory gaps caused by this technology’s applications and methods in the United States. Drawing on an adapted version of Lyria Bennett-Moses’s framework, I then characterized each regulatory gap according to one of four categories: novelty, obsolescence, targeting, and uncertainty.

Significantly, of the regulatory gaps identified, only 12 percent represent novel challenges that compel government action through the creation or adaptation of regulation. By contrast, another 20 percent of the gaps are cases in which AI has made or will make regulations obsolete. A quarter of the gaps are problems of targeting, in which regulations are either inappropriately applied to AI or miss cases in which they should be applied. The largest group of regulatory gaps are ones of uncertainty in which a new technology is difficult to classify, causing a lack of clarity about the application of existing regulations.

Continue reading “Can existing laws cope with the AI revolution?” »

You’ve never seen anything like these before.

A German research institute announced Tuesday a new video standard that halves the bitrate required for streaming, allowing higher quality images on lower-power devices and opening the door wider to adoption of super high-definition 8K content.

The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute said the new codec, VVC—Versatile Video Coding, will not compromise video quality. With ever-increasing demands on bandwidth for social media streaming, Zoom conferencing, 4K content and 360-degree panoramic videos, and especially during heightened web use spurred by global quarantines, VVC comes at an opportune time.

The increased transmission efficiency the codec promises to achieve would help major streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video and Hulu reduce costs as they prepare for higher-resolution fare down the road.

Balloon shaping isn’t just for kids anymore. A team of researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has designed materials that can control and mold a balloon into pre-programmed shapes. The system uses kirigami sheets—thin sheets of material with periodic cuts—embedded into an inflatable device. As the balloon expands, the cuts in the kirigami sheet guide the growth, permitting expansion in some places and constricting it in others. The researchers were able to control the expansion not only globally to make large-scale shapes, but locally to generate small features.

The team also developed an inverse design strategy, an algorithm that finds the optimum design for the kirigami inflatable device that will mimic a target shape upon inflation.

Continue reading “Programmable balloons pave the way for new shape-morphing devices” »