Lifeboat Foundation

And how to keep secrets.

The team of NASA, the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME), and online educational platform Future Engineers has been a lot of fun to follow over the last year. Their collaborative 3D Printing in Space Challenges have resulted in some amazing, ingenious inventions from children as young as five years old, all aimed at improving the daily lives of astronauts now and in the future, on the International Space Station and, one day, on Mars.

Continue reading “Mars Medical Challenge Asks Students to Design 3D Printable Items to Keep Astronauts Healthy on Mars” »

Encryption is something we all rely on regularly to keep our information safe online, but many of us have experienced it since childhood, and in fact probably used it in school. If you ever wrote out a message in code that nobody could read without they knew the decipher rules, you messed around with encryption!

That same secret message technique has now been put to a much more worrying use. Google has created multiple AI and they’ve learned how to not only create their own encryption, but are now communicating using messages nobody else can read.

This Google Brain project is an experiment in deep learning techniques and involved the use of three neural networks (Alice, Bob, and Eve) created using artificial neurons. These neural nets work like a much simplified version of our brains, and they are slowly and steadily becoming more intelligent.

Continue reading “Google’s Alice AI Is Sending Secret Messages To Another AI” »

Maanasa Mendu thinks she’s cracked the code on how to make wind and solar energy affordable.

On Tuesday, Mendu, a 13-year-old from Ohio, won the grand prize in the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge for her work in creating a cost-effective “solar leaves” design to create energy. In addition to winning the title of “America’s Top Young Scientist,” she gets $25,000 for her achievement.

The leaves, designed to help developing areas in need of cheaper power sources, cost roughly $5 to make.

Continue reading “This brilliant 13-year-old figured out how to make clean energy using a device that costs $5” »

Cross-party report suggests the education system must be adapted to “focus on things that machines will be less good at for longer”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVett3htjBM

Interstellar travel is the term used for hypothetical manned or unmanned travel between stars. Interstellar travel will be much more difficult than interplanetary spaceflight; the distances between the planets in the Solar System are less than 30 astronomical units (AU)—whereas the distances between stars are typically hundreds of thousands of AU, and usually expressed in light-years. Because of the vastness of those distances, interstellar travel would require a high percentage of the speed of light, or huge travel time, lasting from decades to millennia or longer.

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When kids learn about the planet’s water cycle, they’re taught a simple concept: our atmosphere is filled with water vapour that has evaporated from the bodies of liquid water we see around us. When the vapour’s temperature gets low enough, it gets turned back into water.

The presence of that vapour becomes especially apparent in the summer when droplets collect on glasses of ice water and air conditioning units drip onto unsuspecting passersby.

An Israeli company called Water-Gen does not think of that condensation as a byproduct; instead, it has built machines specifically designed to create and harvest as much condensation as possible.

Continue reading “This device pulls clean drinking water out of thin air” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrSCinkFUtA

Is building our own starship Enterprise possible? Will we ever travel between the stars as easily as they do in Star Trek? JJ Abrams’ new feature, Star Trek Into Darkness, hits the screen in a golden age of scientific discoveries. HISTORY is there, giving viewers a deep look behind the scenes, on the set, and into the science–amazing new exoplanets, the physics of Warp drive, and the ideas behind how we might one day live in a Star Trek Universe.

“Asia Blog spoke to Parata ahead of the launch of the Center for Global Education at Asia Society to discuss the importance of globally-minded future generations.”

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