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Category: habitats – Page 63

Reddit-trained artificial intelligence warns researchers about… itself

But wait, should we believe it?

An artificial intelligence warning AI researchers about the dangers of AI sounds like the setup of a delightful B movie, but truth is often stranger than fiction.

A professor and a fellow at the University of Oxford came face to face with that reality when they invited an AI to participate in a debate at the Oxford Union on, you guessed it, the ethics of AI. Specifically, as Dr. Alex Connock and Professor Andrew Stephen explain in the Conversation, the prompt was “This house believes that AI will never be ethical.” The AI, it seems, agreed.

“AI will never be ethical,” argued the Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model, which was notably trained on Wikipedia, Reddit, and millions of English-language news articles published between 2016 and 2019. “It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and bad.”

How Sand Mining Is Quietly Creating A Major Global Environmental Crisis | Forbes

Globally, it’s estimated that we mine as much as 50 billion metric tonnes of sand every year to build our roads, bridges, skyscrapers, homes and more. Rapid urbanization around the world has made sand a high value commodity, so much so that, for some, it’s even worth killing for. But not all sand is the same, and experts say some mining operations are damaging ecosystems, infrastructure and putting people in danger around the world.

0:00 Intro.
1:06 How the world uses sand.
3:46 Inside the growing demand for sand.
6:08 How the world mines sand.
7:33 A look at the environmental effects of sand mining.
9:20 Explaining sand mafias and cartels.
11:14 Exploring alternative building materials.
13:04 The future of sand and concrete.

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Building a private space station: Q&A with Axiom Space CTO Matt Ondler

In 2020, Houston-based company Axiom Space got a NASA contract of its own, worth up to $140 million, to deliver at least one habitable private module to the ISS. Axiom plans to launch its first element to the orbiting lab in late 2024, then send several more up over the next few years. Eventually, the connected Axiom modules will detach from the ISS, leaving their natal nest like a bird that has learned how to fly.

Axiom has other irons in the spaceflight fire as well. For instance, the company has booked four commercial crewed flights to the ISS with SpaceX, the first of which is scheduled to launch in February.

3D Printed Architecture that prove the endless possibilities of this innovative technique!

Nowadays almost everything is being 3D printed, so why should architecture be an exception? Many architectural firms are adopting 3D printing as their preferred technique to build structures. And 3D printed architecture is slowly but surely gaining a lot of popularity and momentum. This emerging trend is paving a path for itself in modern architecture. And I mean, no wonder, it has a ton of benefits! It’s a simple, efficient, and innovative technique that lowers the risks of errors, and also manages to save on time. 3D printing eradicates a lot of tedious steps during the construction process and simplifies it. It is being used to build homes, habitats on Mars, and even floating islands! The potential and possibilities of 3D printing in architecture are endless and mind-blowing. We’ve curated a collection of 3D-printed architectural structures that are our absolute favorites – from a 3D printed sustainable office pod to a 3D printed housing community for the homeless, every single one of these designs unleashes the magic and potential of 3D printing!

Chinese rover spots ‘mystery house’ on far side of Moon

While the nature of the object can only be speculated until Yutu-2 gets closer, it is unlikely to be a bunker left behind by an interplanetary species.

It is more likely to be a boulder or a piece of debris, like several others in that region of the moon.

The Yutu-2 rover was launched in 2018 by China as part of the Chang’e-4 lunar lander mission. It entered lunar orbit on December 12, 2019, before scripting history on January 3, 2020, by becoming the first mission to accomplish a soft landing on the lunar surface.

Amazon is making its own containers and bypassing supply chain chaos with chartered ships and long-haul planes

This season, a handful of other major retailers — Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Ikea and Target — are also chartering their own vessels to bypass the busiest ports and get their goods unloaded sooner.

“The real purpose of these vessels when they were built was not containers. It was really lumber, chemicals, grain, agricultural products. But because of the ingenuity and creativity and lack of space, Amazon and many other smart people have quickly figured out how to convert some of these multipurpose vessels to container,” Ferreira said.

For some of the highest-margin goods, Amazon is avoiding ports altogether by reportedly leasing at least ten long-haul planes that can get smaller amounts of cargo directly from China to the U.S. much faster. One of the converted Boeing 777 planes can carry 220,000 pounds of cargo. According to capacity estimates from Ocean Audit, the small 1,000-container freighters being chartered by Amazon and others can hold 180 times that, with the biggest cargo ships carrying more than 3,600 times what the planes can hold.

Laser system could vaporize dangerous asteroids

Circa 2013 o.o

Earth dodged a gigantic space bullet Friday when the 143,000-ton asteroid known as 2012 DA14 came within 17,200 miles of the Indian Ocean. Scientists and engineers are looking for ways to head off such close calls by targeting potentially dangerous asteroids well before they’re in a position to do us any harm.

A group called the B612 Foundation (a reference to the home asteroid of the Little Prince in the classic French novella) recently announced a mission to build a spacecraft that would track dangerous midsize asteroids, and a fledgling company called Deep Space Industries has floated a plan to build swarms of robots that could mine — and even destroy — space rocks.

Bed Bath & Beyond

Just to show that AI is not about to take over in the near future, due to the high inflation in the US, I decided to shop around and buy a ton of mouthwash from https://bedbathandbeyond.com. (I got BreathRX which I recommend.) They sold me a bunch at half the average price I found on the internet, and I looked forward to getting a big box of it. (Or maybe two or three boxes.)

To my great surprise they decided to send me lots of little packages of 1 to 3 bottles from all over the country. In many cases, they would send me a box big enough to hold 12 bottles, put 1 bottle in it, wrap the bottle for safety, and then add air bubble packaging plus air bag packages. They must have lost a fortune on this order!

Shop online or in-store at Bed Bath & Beyond for the best bedding, bathroom, kitchen, and home décor! Plus, create a wish list with a wedding or gift registry.

‘Star Trek’ Meme Reminds Us To Be Thankful For Earth Itself

Facebook has been rife with “Star Trek” Thanksgiving memes for the last week or more which in and of itself is puzzling. “Star Trek” is hardly the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about when commemorating the first harvest feast shared by this country’s Pilgrim colonists and local Native Americans.

But it’s reasonable to assert that “Star Trek” and Thanksgiving are at least tangentially linked since the latter is a celebration of home and hearth whereas “Star Trek” is a celebration of humankind’s exploration of the cosmos. Certainly, this time of year represents an ideal time of year to be thankful for home and shelter.

As for “Star Trek”?

The Facebook meme’s link to “Star Trek” reminds us that we should also celebrate our home planet during this time of thanksgiving. With each passing observation, extrasolar planet hunters using both ground-and space-based telescopes are teaching us that earthlike analogs are very few and far between.

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