Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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LG will build its next artificial intelligence (AI) research lab in Toronto, it announced Wednesday.

The South Korean electronics company said the Canadian lab is an extension of its newly expanded Silicon Valley AI Lab in Santa Clara, California. It also has AI labs in South Korea, India and Russia.

“Early implementations of AI in connected devices today are setting the stage for tomorrow’s smart cities, smart homes, smart businesses and smart devices, all with capabilities that no one has even dreamed of yet.” said LG President and Chief Technology Officer Il-pyung Park.

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Humanoid Robot torsos, legs, and arms are about where they need to be. But the robot hands are not quite where they need to be yet if we really want them to take all the jobs. The government is dumping a lot of money into robotic hand’s for amputees, which i’m sure they plan to eventually put on the humanoid robots, but it should be pushed along faster.

Imagine, for a moment, the simple act of picking up a playing card from a table. You have a couple of options: Maybe you jam your fingernail under it for leverage, or drag it over the edge of the table.

Now imagine a robot trying to do the same thing. Tricky: Most robots don’t have fingernails, or friction-facilitating fingerpads that perfectly mimic ours. So many of these delicate manipulations continue to escape robotic control. But engineers are making steady progress in getting the machines to manipulate our world. And now, you can help them from the comfort of your own home.

UC Berkeley and Siemens researchers have launched something called Dex-Net as a Service, a beta program that computes how and where a robot should grip objects like vases and turbine housings. You can even upload designs of your own objects. The goal: to one day get the robot in your home to call up to the cloud for tips on how to manipulate novel objects. Maybe we can even keep them from destroying the delicates.

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Current solar cells are able to convert into electricity around 20% of the energy received from the Sun, but a new technique has the potential to convert around 60% of it by funneling the energy more efficiently.

UK researchers can now ‘funnel’ electrical charge onto a chip. Using the atomically thin semiconductor hafnium disulphide (HfS2), which is oxidized with a high-intensity UV laser, the team were able to engineer an electric field that funnels electrical charges to a specific area of the chip, where they can be more easily extracted.

This method has the potential to harvest three times the energy compared with traditional systems. The researchers believe their breakthrough could result in solar panels, no bigger than a book, producing enough energy to power a family-sized house.

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Ten months after Hurricane Maria, Adjuntas still loses power any time a heavy rain or wind pounds the rickety power lines feeding this town high in the central mountains of Puerto Rico.

That leaves its 20,000 people once again in the dark, without light, fresh water or air conditioning—except for a handful of homes and businesses glowing in the night thanks to .

The people of Adjuntas call those places “cucubanos,” an indigenous Puerto Rican firefly. They’re part of a small but growing movement to provide the U.S. territory with sustainable, renewable energy independent of the decrepit grid.

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For as long as she can remember, she’s puzzled over what’s out there. As a kid drifting off to sleep on a trampoline outside her family’s home near Portland, Ore., she would track the International Space Station. She remembers cobbling together a preteen version of the Drake Equation on those nights and realizing that the likelihood of intelligent alien life was something greater than zero. Star Trek marathons with her father catalyzed her cosmic thinking, as did her mother’s unexpected death when Bailey was 8. The house lost some of its order—some of its gravity—which led to more nights gazing skyward on the trampoline.

In college, Bailey got a hard-won paid internship at the now-merged aerospace giant Hamilton Sundstrand and joined a team repairing turbine engines. She hated it. “It was the opposite of pushing the envelope,” she says. “Nothing new ever went into that building. Nothing new ever left that building.”

By the time she set off to get a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Duke University, the idea of logging 30 years at a place like Boeing Cor NASA had lost all appeal. She tried her hand at finance and later law, and was unlucky enough to excel at both. “I made it pretty far down that path, but then I thought, Wait, if I become a lawyer, then I’m a lawyer and that’s what I do,” she recalls. “What if I don’t want to do that on Tuesdays?”

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A fascinating study from scientists at Rockefeller University has shed new light on a deep brain mechanism that can stimulate awareness and cognition. The research homes in on a collection of giant neurons in the brain that seem to be able to modulate stimulation of the entire central nervous system.

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The enzyme laccase is able to alter the chemical structure of wood on its surface and thus facilitate biochemical modifications without changing the structure of the material. By attaching functional molecules, Empa researchers develop waterproof or antimicrobial wood surfaces, for instance. Also it is possible to make adhesive wood fibers, which can be pressed to fiberboards without any chemical binding agents. These solvent-free fiberboards are used for insulation of eco houses.

The problem: There are many variants of laccase, which differ in the architecture of the chemically active center, and not all of them react with the desired substrate. As it is extremely difficult to predict whether or not a particular laccase will react with a specific substrate, costly and time-consuming series of experiments are required to identify suitable laccase-substrate pairs. Molecular simulations could solve the problem: You simply need a precise structural analysis of the laccase to simulate the chemical reaction mechanism for every desirable combination on the computer. However, this requires a high computer computing—capacity and, even then, would be extremely time-consuming and expensive.

But there is a shortcut: “deep learning.” A computer program is trained to recognize patterns with data from the literature and own experiments: Which laccase oxidizes which substrate? What might be the best conditions for the desired chemical process to take place? The best thing about it: The search works even if not all details about the mechanism are known.

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