Lifeboat Foundation

This Blue Origin rocket went higher than any previous rocket launched by Jeff Bezos’s company.

Our Fast Lightweight Autonomy program recently completed Phase 2 flight tests, demonstrating advanced algorithms designed to turn small air and ground systems into team members that can autonomously perform tasks dangerous for humans — such as pre-mission reconnaissance in a hostile urban setting or searching damaged structures for survivors following an earthquake.

Friends, I’m super excited to announce I’m launching a new #transhumanism column at The Maven, a new site out that features leaders in their field writing about their lives and activities. My column (or channel as The Maven editors call them) is titled: Transhumanist Wager. And I’ll be posting every day on it, often with original stories. Here’s my first one, just out! Give it a read!

Transhumanism—the social movement of merging people with machines & synthetic parts—is turning dangerously hard left.

“Will machines replace humans?” This question is on the mind of anyone with a job to lose. Daniel Susskind confronts this question and three misconceptions we have about our automated future, suggesting we ask something else: How will we distribute wealth in a world when there will be less — or even no — work?

So what would your dream body look like and do?

Entrepreneur Juan Enriquez has outlined a future in which we’ll be able to survive extreme environments and even hack our own memories, thanks to DNA manipulation.

New research measuring the importance of religion in 109 countries spanning the entire 20th century has reignited an age-old debate around the link between secularisation and economic growth. The study, published in Science Advances, has shown that a decline in religion influences a country’s future…

This is a new picture of Neptune taken from the Earth. It’s nothing short of amazing.

You’ve probably seen better pictures of Neptune from when Voyager 2 flew by in 1989. But there isn’t currently a spacecraft orbiting Neptune, so if scientists want pictures, they need to take them from 2.9 billion miles away. An upgrade on the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile has now allowed the ground-based telescope to take images as crisp as those taken by Hubble, a telescope that orbits Earth.

The Very Large Telescope consists of four telescopes with 8.2-meter (27-foot) mirrors in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. Today, scientists at the observatory have released the first observations taken with laser tomography, the new adaptive optics mode on its GALACSI unit, which works alongside a spectrograph instrument called MUSE on one of the telescopes.

Continue reading “New Super-Crisp Images of Neptune Show How Far Our Telescopes Have Come” »

The Robots are Coming!

Agricultural scientists are turning to emerging technologies, such as robotics and AI, to help deal with the challenges associated with modern-day farming. Here are some of the tech being harvested today.

It wasn’t that long ago that solar power and wind power were labeled as marginal, ‘green’ electricity, but in the last five years or so they have become much more affordable and economically more feasible than conventional sources like coal and nuclear.

What supported solar along the way partly was the emergence of energy storage in the form of battery systems. Electricity can now be made by solar power systems and the excess can be stored for usage at night or on less sunny days. At least, solar power has been paired successfully with energy storage, and it is catching up with solar power. The cost of this newish technology is dropping, “The overall estimated cost fell 32% in 2015 and 2016, according to the 2017 GTM Reseach utility-scale storage report. That will slow over the next five years, GTM reported. But battery storage is — in certain places and applications — on its way to cost-competitiveness.”

According to Lazard, it could drop another 36% between 2018 and 2022. The UC-Berkeley research study, “Energy Storage Deployment and Innovation for the Clean Energy Transition,” predicted lithium-ion batteries could hit the $100 per kilowatt-hour mark in 2018.

Continue reading “More Energy Storage Looming For Wind Power” »