Lifeboat Foundation

Like all countries, China is facing severe economic losses from the pandemic, and that will certainly have a negative impact on scientific research, because funding will be reduced and projects will be delayed, says physicist Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing. Some universities have already announced a cut in funding. The research budget given by the education ministry to Jiangnan University in Wuxi, for example, will drop by more than 25% for 2020, and other universities are facing similar reductions. “An overall budget cutting of government spending on higher education is highly possible, though the level and scope may vary by regions, universities and fields,” says Tang Li, a science-policy scientist at Fudan University in Shanghai.

The country is rapidly gaining on the United States in research, but problems could slow its rise: part 5 in a series on science after the pandemic.

Singapore has only 1% of its land available for agriculture, so it imports 90% of its food requirements. The government is looking to curb this dependence on outside food sources under a programme titled ‘30 by 30,’ which aims to allow Singapore to grow 30% of its produce by the year 2030. Local vertical farms like Sustenir are at the forefront of bringing about this change. VICE visits the sustainable start-up to understand the future of food.

About VICE:
The Definitive Guide To Enlightening Information. From every corner of the planet, our immersive, caustic, ground-breaking and often bizarre stories have changed the way people think about culture, crime, art, parties, fashion, protest, the internet and other subjects that don’t even have names yet. Browse the growing library and discover corners of the world you never knew existed. Welcome to VICE.

Continue reading “Can Vertical Farms Fix the Future of Food?” »

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador, interviews Dr. Eric Van Gieson, Program Manager in the Biological Technologies Office (BTO) at DARPA. https://www.darpa.mil/staff/dr-eric-van-gieson

Ira Pastor Comments

Continue reading “Optimising Performance of the Human Body and Mind with Defense Advanced Research Projects” »

The endeavor escalates global competition for much-sought-after semiconductor technology and is intended to build on the island’s technology industry, led by major players such as key Apple Inc. suppliers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Taiwan has been caught in the middle of a clash between the U.S. and China over the development of chip technology that powers everything from smartphones to 5G base stations.

Taiwan is dangling incentives to attract more than NT$40 billion ($1.3 billion) of annual investments in research and technology, creating a seven-year blueprint to safeguard the island’s lead in semiconductors and other cutting-edge fields.

As part of the initiative, the cabinet plans to allocate more than NT$10 billion to entice foreign chipmakers to set up R&D facilities locally, confirming an earlier Bloomberg News report. The government said Thursday it aims to subsidize as much as half of all research and development costs incurred by global chip companies that build centers on the island.

Continue reading “Taiwan Draws Up Plan to Woo $1.3 Billion of Annual Tech Research” »

Famous basketball player Kevin Durant co-funded $200 million-valued Skydio, which has quietly been getting millions in federal government surveillance money, whilst spending thousands on lobbying senators and the president’s office.

Government agencies and universities around the world—not to mention tech giants like IBM and Google—are vying to be the first to answer a trillion-dollar quantum question : How can quantum computers reach their vast potential when they are still unable to consistently produce results that are reliable and free of errors?

Every aspect of these exotic machines—including their fragility and engineering complexity; their preposterously sterile, low-temperature operating environment; complicated mathematics; and their notoriously shy quantum bits (qubits) that flip if an operator so much as winks at them—are all potential sources of errors. It says much for the ingenuity of scientists and engineers that they have found ways to detect and correct these errors and have quantum computers working to the extent that they do: at least long enough to produce limited results before errors accumulate and quantum decoherence of the qubits kicks in.

As the pandemic continues to destroy the economy, the government guarantees no one will earn less than about $500 a month.

[Photo: Jack Gisel/Unsplash]

Advances in artificial intelligence could soon make creating convincing fake audio and video – known as “deepfakes” – relatively easy. Making a person appear to say or do something they did not has the potential to take the war of disinformation to a whole new level. Scroll down for more on deepfakes and what the US government is doing to combat them.

The prestigious news outlet mapped the performance of 30 leading economies by plotting their public health and economic outcomes and grouping them based on whether they have instituted light, moderate or severe restrictions on commerce and social interactions.

The matrix included countries and territories’ economic outcomes, including the benchmarks of GDP, unemployment and fiscal stimulus packages and health outcomes based on testing, infection and death statistics provided by health ministries and government authorities and graphed by Worldometer and Johns Hopkins University.

As seen in the ranking chart, Vietnam stands at the furthest end with “better public health outcome,” with Taiwan coming close, followed by New Zealand, South Korea, Iceland, Argentina and Australia.