Month: July 2017

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Elon Musk on self-driving cars and AI’s perils

Elon Musk
Elon Musk surveys the future of technology during a fireside chat at the National Governors Association summer meeting. (C-SPAN via YouTube)

In the year 2037, non-autonomous vehicles will be as much of a curiosity as riding a horse is today, tech billionaire Elon Musk says.

Musk also says that the rapid rise of artificial intelligence is “really like the scariest problem for me,” and that the government has to set up something like the Federal Artificial Intelligence Administration before it’s too late.

The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla laid out his latest vision for the future of transportation, AI and space exploration over the weekend at the National Governors Association’s summer meeting in Providence, R.I. Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, whose state hosts Tesla’s first battery-producing Gigafactory, served as the emcee for the July 15 fireside chat.

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Webcams spot ‘aurora that nearly got away’

Aurora over Mount Adams
The colors of the aurora glow above Mount Adams in a webcam photo. (MtAdams.tv Photo)

You may not have been able to see the northern lights that arced over Western Washington and other northern regions of the U.S. early this morning, but your camera might have caught it.

Space weather forecasters said there was a heightened chance of auroral displays over the weekend, due to a storm of electrically charged particles that the sun shot in our direction a couple of days earlier.

Aurora-watchers in Canada and the Upper Midwest came up with spectacular  pictures  overnight, but the effect was more hit-or-miss in Washington state.

The best strategy is to set a digital camera on a tripod for a long, long exposure – long enough to capture stars in the frame.

That’s why the MtAdams.tv webcam, set up south of the mountain in Trout Lake, Wash., got such great shots.

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Jeff Bezos wins an award … from Buzz Aldrin!

Jeff Bezos and Buzz Aldrin
Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos receives the Buzz Aldrin Space Innovation Award from Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin during a gala at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Buzz Aldrin via Twitter)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin space venture have picked up a good number of awards over the past year, but this weekend’s award was the first of its kind.

The Buzz Aldrin Space Innovation Award was created by the famed Apollo 11 moonwalker, who gave Bezos his weighty glass trophy during a July 15 gala at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

In a day-after tweet, the 87-year-old Aldrin said he was “delighted” to have Bezos and Blue Origin as the award’s first honorees. Bezos tweeted his thanks in return.

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Numbers tell tales on ‘Game of Thrones’

"Game of Thrones" title

“Game of Thrones,” the HBO sword-sorcery-and-sex series that begins its seventh season tonight, has spawned a geekier kind of game: doing data analytics to study who’s on top and who’ll get the ax (figuratively and literally).

The Wall Street Journal delved deeply into the data geekery last week, noting that fans have recorded the screen time and other statistics for nearly 200 notable characters over the course of the past 60 episodes. Intricate algorithms seek to correlate the characters’ characteristics with their chances of surviving the poison pens wielded by book author George R.R. Martin and the series’ screenwriters.

Indian data scientist Shail Deliwala ran the numbers and came up with several correlations. Some mesh with common sense (for example, characters with lots of dead relatives are less likely to survive), while others mesh more with literary sense (for example, the larger the attacking force, the higher the chances that the defenders will prevail).

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Solar storm heightens outlook for aurora

Aurora over Seattle
The northern lights shine above Seattle’s Space Needle and Queen Anne Hill in a photo captured by Tim Durkan from West Seattle in May. (Tim Durkan Photo)

What could make a summer weekend with clear skies even more perfect? How about the northern lights?

The chances of seeing auroral displays are better than usual tonight and Sunday night. That’s due to a geomagnetic storm that’s expected to sweep past Earth this weekend.

The storm was spawned on July 13 by an outburst of electrically charged particles from the sun, known as a coronal mass ejection or CME. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center says the outburst is directed at Earth, and the peak of the wave should arrive sometime on Sunday.

The most violent outbursts have been known to disrupt satellite communications and power grids, but this one is expected to be merely moderate to strong – producing heightened auroras but no big disruptions.

For most people, the big questions are: Can I see the aurora? And if so, where and when?

Get the answers on GeekWire.

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How tech wizards created ‘Planet of the Apes’

Andy Serkis in "War for the Planet of the Apes"
A comparison of motion-capture footage featuring Andy Serkis and the character he plays in “War for the Planet of the Apes” shows how the actor is transformed into an ape. (Twentieth Century Fox / Weta Digital)

“War for the Planet of the Apes,” the latest installment of the blockbuster movie reboot, is all about revealing the humanity in Caesar and his legions of gene-altered apes – but it takes legions of wizards to make sure that humanity comes through.

Fortunately, there are wizards galore at Weta Digital, the special-effects studio behind film extravaganzas ranging from “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” to “Avatar” and the upcoming “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.”

Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Dan Lemmon said “War for the Planet of the Apes,” opening today, set a new bar for his New Zealand-based team.

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Startups make a splash in Airport Shark Tank

Sleepbox
Sleepbox has been field-tested in Moscow. (Sleepbox / Arch Group Photo / Ilya Ivanov)

A stealthy company that’s been collecting data from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport’s baggage handling operation for the past 10 months has won this year’s Airport Shark Tank competition.

And so has a Boston company that builds booth-sized pods for travelers looking for a private place to work or chill out.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Alitheon and Boston-based Sleepbox shared the honors in the July 13 startup contest, which was inspired by the “Shark Tank” TV show and organized by the American Association of Airport Executives to cap off its third annual Airport Innovation Forum.

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Strange signals from space spark interest

Arecibo telescope
The 1,000-foot radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory played a role in “Contact.” (UPRA Photo)

The 1,000-foot-wide radio telescope at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory will take a closer look at a red dwarf star known as Ross 128 after picking up what one astronomer said were “some very peculiar signals” during a 10-minute observing session in May.

“The signals consisted of broadband quasi-periodic non-polarized pulses with very strong dispersion-like features,” Abel Mendez, a planetary astrobiologist at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, said in an online advisory. Mendez is also director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory.

Mendez said the signal did not appear to be earthly interference, “since they are unique to Ross 128, and observations of other stars immediately before and after did not show anything similar.”

He said the most likely explanations for the signals are that they’re flare-type emissions from the star, or emissions from another object in the field of view, or a radio burst from a satellite in high orbit.

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Asteroid miners hail Luxembourg’s new law

Lawmakers in the tiny European country of Luxembourg today approved a measure affirming that space resources can be privately owned. The law, adopted nearly unanimously by Luxembourg’s parliament, also sets up procedures for authorizing and supervising space exploration missions. It will go into force on Aug. 1. Planetary Resources – which is headquartered in Redmond, Wash., but has a Luxembourg-based subsidiary – hailed today’s action as further evidence of the nation’s status as a global leader in the space resources sector.

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Relativity Space CEO teases stealthy venture

Relativity Space's Tim Ellis
Relativity Space CEO Tim Ellis testifies at a Senate subcommittee hearing about commercial space vehicles (U.S. Senate via SpaceKSCBlog / YouTube)

The hush-hush space startup Relativity Space is still in stealth mode, but CEO and co-founder Tim Ellis lifted the veil just a bit on the company’s business plan and eight-figure funding today in Washington, D.C.

Ellis shared the witness table with other space executives and experts at a Capitol Hill hearing organized by the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness to focus on public-private space partnerships.

“There are people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the very nature of space exploration,” Subcommittee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said in his opening remarks. “And if they keep pressing forward, they just might.”

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