Lifeboat Foundation

Tesla’s 2016 Shareholders Meeting yesterday was an unusual one. CEO Elon Musk and CTO JB Straubel were on stage for close to 4 hours and went through the bulk of Tesla’s history – recounting stories from the early days with longtime employees of the automaker.

We already reported on important nuggets of information the execs released about the Gigafactory and the Model 3 during the event, but what probably stands out the most from the event – from my perspective at least – is Musk’s rant about the importance of the “machine that makes the machine.”

The CEO said that he recently – in the last 2 or 3 months – came to the realization that the potential for improvement is at least a factor of 10 greater in manufacturing vehicles than in the actual vehicle engineering.

Continue reading “Elon Musk goes on a ‘machines building machines’ rant about the future of manufacturing” »

Official US defence and NATO documents confirm that autonomous weapon systems will kill targets, including civilians, based on tweets, blogs and Instagram by Nafeez Ahmed.

This exclusive is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowd-funded investigative journalism project for the global commons

Scientists have long used NAD+ as a powerful anti-aging tool. While trying to find a cure for aging, scientists increased the levels of NAD+ within the mitochondria. The mitochondria responded by increasing their performance and energy, which effectively neutralizes the effects of aging.

Lead researcher Johan Auwerx explained that “this work could have very important implications in the field of regenerative medicine,” adding that it may one day be possible to bypass surgery and repair the body with a dietary supplement.

Specifically, nicotinamide riboside “effectively delayed early- and late-stage disease progression, by robustly inducing mitochondrial biogenesis in skeletal muscle and brown adipose tissue, preventing mitochondrial ultrastructure abnormalities and [mitochondrial DNA] deletion formation.”

Storage in your laptop or smartphone is a compromise between volume, access speed and physical size. But, the industry’s competition to shrink them while boosting their specifications is fierce. A few months after shipping a 16TB solid-state drive, Samsung has announced a fast, efficient 512GB SSD that’s half the size of a postage stamp.

Samsung’s press release claims that the drive is the first mass-produced 512GB SSD with non-volatile memory express (NVMe), a host-controller interface with a streamlined register for speed, in a single package. Unlike other hard drives in multi-chip packages (MCP), Samsung’s new drive is organized in a ball grid array into a collected unit, making it simpler to fit in and connect to other parts in the device. This makes the drive ideal for the ultra-slim notebook PC market, where space and weight are at a premium.

A senior Samsung VP said in a press release that the tiny drive triples the performance of a typical SATA SSD. Its read/write speeds of up to 1,500MB/s and 900MB/s, respectively, mean you could transfer a 5GB HD video in 3 seconds. Samsung will start selling the drive in June in 512GB, 256GB and 128GB models.

Continue reading “Samsung’s new 512GB SSD is smaller than a postage stamp” »

No more shaky cam!

Meet the world’s first action camera with built-in stabilization.

The new focus of military weapons right now is the railgun. It is capable of launching a projectile 125 miles at Mach 6 speeds using electromagnetic fields.

For several years now, America has been toying with the idea of railguns, weapons that fire not through gunpowder or chemical explosives, but through electromagnetic fields. Yes, these are electromagnetic projectile launchers. Now, they are not only close to reality, but right on the cusp of deployment.

Essentially, the railguns being developed right now operate on the following concept: There are electrical current charges on either side of the barrel of the gun, creating magnetic fields that push projectiles at amazing speeds.

Continue reading “America’s New Superweapon? Electromagnetic Projectile Launchers That Fire at 4500 MPH” »

The Void VR Theme Park https://www.facebook.com/UNILADGaming/videos/1213525475337994/

THE VOID VR Theme Park looks absolutely insane. Need to try this out…

Cracking an egg into a glass bowl and then watching the chick develop, grow, and hatch sounds like the most terrible idea ever. But this adorable and super-enthusiastic video from Japan shows that it can be done — and lets us watch the entire fascinating process first-hand.

If you’re anything like us, your first reaction to this is probably “What the eff is going on here?” and your second is, “Why the hell would anyone do this?”

The video doesn’t come with subtitles, so it unfortunately doesn’t give us many clues. But with the help of Sarah Caroline Bell over at The Huffington Post, we’ve done some digging, and it turns out the experiment is demonstration of technique developed in Japan a few years ago.

Continue reading “Watch a chick develop and hatch outside of the egg” »