Lifeboat Foundation

A Facebook robot that wraps fiber-optic cable around existing power lines could help bridge the digital divide by bringing internet access to some of the billions of people who currently lack it.

Why it matters: The 60% of the world population with internet access has social, economic, financial, and educational advantages over the other 40%, most of whom live in developing nations or rural areas.

The cost of expanding internet networks is a major barrier to bringing internet access to those people — if the Facebook robot can cut that cost, it could help close this “digital divide” and make the world a more equitable place.

https://www.youtube.com/user/SingularityU

Peter Diamandis, Chairman and Co-Founder of Singularity University, discusses the best way to predict the future, and shares his personal philosophies on innovation and the commercial space industry. Flimed at Singularity University’s Executive Program, March 2010.

Subscribe: http://bit.ly/1Wq6gwm.

Continue reading “Peter Diamandis and The Best Way to Predict The Future” »

NEA Scout will visit an asteroid estimated to be smaller than a school bus – the smallest asteroid ever to be studied by a spacecraft.

Launching with the Artemis I uncrewed test flight, NASA

Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. It’s vision is “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.”

The more a technology or concept permeates and gets normalized in our day-to-day lives, the more we grow to expect from it. About two decades ago, a sub-56kpbs dial-up internet connection seemed miraculous. Today, with internet speeds as high as 2000Mbps becoming normal, the 56Kbps connection would be considered a failure of sorts—in the developed world, at least. This shift in expectation also applies to AI. Having seen numerous practical AI applications aid human convenience and progress, both the general population and the AI research community now expects every new breakthrough in the field to be more earth-shattering than the previous one. Similarly, what qualifies as AI failure has also seen a massive shift in recent years, especially from a problem owner’s perspective. failure, in most cases, is attributed to technology-centric factors like the quality of data or the capabilities of algorithms and hardware used, ignoring the most crucial aspect of AI success—the end user.

For the past decade, AI has been quietly seeping into daily life, from facial recognition to digital assistants like Siri or Alexa. These largely unregulated uses of AI are highly lucrative for those who control them but are already causing real-world harms to those who are subjected to them: false arrests; health care discrimination; and a rise in pervasive surveillance that, in the case of policing, can disproportionately affect Black people and disadvantaged socioeconomic groups.

Gebru is a leading figure in a constellation of scholars, activists, regulators, and technologists collaborating to reshape ideas about what AI is and what it should be. Some of her fellow travelers remain in Big Tech, mobilizing those insights to push companies toward AI that is more ethical. Others, making policy on both sides of the Atlantic, are preparing new rules to set clearer limits on the companies benefiting most from automated abuses of power. Gebru herself is seeking to push the AI world beyond the binary of asking whether systems are biased and to instead focus on power: who’s building AI, who benefits from it, and who gets to decide what its future looks like.

Full Story:

Continue reading “Why Timnit Gebru Isn’t Waiting for Big Tech to Fix AI’s Problems” »

Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a drone whose hinged arms can fold themselves from horizontal to vertical position in order to pass through tight spaces or carry light objects.

Previous limb-adjusting vehicles created by labs like Purdue University’s Engineering Technology school were outfitted with actuators that shifted the arms and rotors into different positions, making them more efficient in certain conditions like heavy winds. The HiPeRLab staff wanted to avoid inclusion of actuators, which draw off the drone’s batteries and thereby reduce its flight time. Their solution: use passive hinges whose up and down folding is powered by the rotors themselves.

The idea that our genes are our fate” is dead. Exciting new discoveries in the field of epigenetics have proven that our lifestyle and environment can turn off and on many of the genes that control our health and wellbeing. Simple things like where we live, what we eat, pollution, stress, and exercise all impact which genes are silenced and expressed throughout our lives.

Research has shown that that the current dramatic rise in obesity, heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s all have epigenetic mechanisms at play. Not only that but many epigenetic changes are actually passed to future generations: your grandmother’s dietary deficits may have caused your diabetes. Your father’s smoking may have turned on your marker for obesity or ADHD. Three generations later the descendants of holocaust survivors are still suffering stress disorders.

Continue reading “Why Are We Genetically Modifying Humans? | Epigenetics | Spark” »

Neuroscientist David J. Linden is dying.

But the impending end of his life doesn’t mean he’s done learning about the human mind just yet. Linden was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. In a piece in The Atlantic, he writes: “I may be dying, but I’m still a science nerd.”

During a routine echocardiogram, doctors noticed something sticking up next to Linden’s heart that they thought was a hiatal hernia or a benign growth called a teratoma, he says. After the tumor was removed, a biopsy found it was a form of malignant cancer called synovial sarcoma that had grown into the wall of his heart — making it impossible to remove.

A million years ago, the soundtrack of the “sky island” mountains of East Africa may have been very similar to what it is today. That’s because a group of tiny, colorful birds has been singing the exact same tunes for more than 500,000 years — and maybe as long as 1 million years, according to a new study.

Sunbirds in the family Nectariniidae are colorful, tiny, nectar-feeding birds that resemble hummingbirds and are common throughout Africa and Asia. They are the “little jewels that appear before you,” senior author Rauri Bowie, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a curator in the school’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, said in a statement.