Lifeboat Foundation

Architecture studio KKAA YTAA has completed a home with a central courtyard named House in Front of a School in Nara, Japan.

Located in the densely populated capital of Japan’s Nara Prefecture, the house was split into two parts that are connected by a bridge across a central courtyard.

The unusual arrangement was created as the client wanted a space that supported their work-from-home lifestyle and gave them access to the outdoors.

If you haven’t had the experience yourself, you’ve likely heard the horror stories: Someone shows up to their Airbnb and finds the pool is overgrown with algae. The heat doesn’t work. Or a booking gets canceled at the last minute leaving travelers without a place to stay. Consistency and reliability have become an enormous Achilles heel for Airbnb, an issue that Chesky has long described as a managerial crisis that requires wrapping his arms around millions of hosts in hundreds of thousands of locations—and not stripping them of their individuality.

“Our system,” says Chesky—referring to the disruptive tech platform where “adventurous travelers” could buy and sell products (in this case, rooms or homes), process secure payments and leave reviews—“was designed for a much smaller company which grew like crazy.”

“To use a precise metaphor, it’s kind of like we never fully built the foundation. Like, we had a house and it had four pillars when we needed to have 10.”

The recent ratification of the IEEE 802.11bb standard represents a seismic shift in wireless communication, offering a new frontier that goes beyond Wi-Fi: LiFi (Light Fidelity). Utilizing infrared light instead of radio waves, this standard brings LiFi technology closer to mainstream adoption. This article delves into what this innovative standard means for various applications, including smart homes, healthcare, retail, and more.

The Core of IEEE 802.11bb

The IEEE 802.11bb standard serves as a robust framework for secure, reliable, and high-speed wireless communication. Unlike traditional LiFi that used visible light, this new standard utilizes infrared (IR) lightwaves, invisible to the human eye but highly effective for transmitting data at lightning speeds.

Wi-Fi signals can do much more than deliver streaming movies and music around the home, it turns out: they can also be used to identify shapes through solid walls, as demonstrated in recent experiments.

The ability for Wi-Fi to spot movement through walls has been shown off before, but the technology struggles with seeing anything that isn’t in motion.

Continue reading “Wi-Fi Can Decode Hidden Words Concealed Behind Walls” »

Beguš is a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. He got the chance, last summer, to observe sperm whales in their wild Caribbean habitat off the coast of the island nation of Dominica. With him were marine biologists and roboticists. There were also cryptographers and experts in other fields. All have been working together to listen to sperm whales and figure out what they might be saying.

They call this Project CETI. That’s short for Cetacean Translation Initiative (because sperm whales are a type of cetacean).

Continue reading “How artificial intelligence could help us talk to animals” »

HARNHAM, United Kingdom — The mysteries of Stonehenge may be the tip of the archaeological iceberg in this region of the United Kingdom. Researchers have made another remarkable discovery just miles from the world-famous site.

While preparing for a new housing development in Harnham, just eight miles south of Stonehenge, workers unearthed items that may date all the way back to 10,000 BC. The findings include ancient pottery, knives, and even red deer antler, which was often used for making tools and weapons in prehistoric times, according to archaeologists.

Continue reading “Amazing archaeological finds dating back to 10,000 BC unearthed just 8 miles from Stonehenge” »

The Sentinel system facilitates extended stays underwater, allowing scientists to reside at depths of up to 200 meters for as long as 28 days.

In a bold initiative, DEEP, a leading research organization, has announced plans to construct an underwater habitat open to the public by 2027. Named Sentinel, this modular subsea abode aims to revolutionize underwater living, research, and observation by providing scientists unprecedented access to the depths of the ocean.

The Sentinel system is designed to facilitate extended stays underwater, allowing scientists to reside at depths of up to 200 meters for as long as 28 days. This innovative habitat offers a unique opportunity for researchers to study… More.

Continue reading “Underwater abode for deep-sea living open to public by 2027” »

Rubio surpassed the U.S. space endurance record of 355 days on Monday at the International Space Station. He arrived at the outpost last September with two Russians for a routine six months. But their stay was doubled after their Soyuz capsule developed a coolant leak while parked at the space station.

The trio will return to Earth on Sept. 27 in a replacement capsule that was sent up empty for the ride home. By then, Rubio will have spent 371 days in space, more than two weeks longer than Mark Vande Hei, the previous U.S. record holder for a single spaceflight. Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov holds the world record of 437 days, set in the mid-1990s.

This talk is about how you can use wireless signals and fuse them with vision and other sensing modalities through AI algorithms to give humans and robots X-ray vision to see objects hidden inside boxes or behind other object.

Tara Boroushaki is a Ph.D student at MIT. Her research focuses on fusing radio frequency (RF) sensing with vision through artificial intelligence. She designs algorithms and builds systems that leverage such fusion to enable capabilities that were not feasible before in applications spanning augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics, smart homes, and smart manufacturing. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.