Lifeboat Foundation

Talk about comets or asteroids coming anywhere near us and mind immediately goes back to what happened to dinosaurs. It just needed a space rock to end the reign of those fearsome reptiles who dominated nearly the entire foodchain. The asteroid that killed dinosaurs was just 10 kilometres across. But now a comet larger than Mars’s moons is speeding up toward the solar system.

Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is a mammoth! Remember Hale-Bopp? The comet that went around us in the year 1997? It was called a massive comet. And Bernardinelli-Bernstein is 10 times the mass of Hale-Bopp.

Also Read | NASA posts image of ‘Hand of God’, netizens are awestruck.

“DeepGreen is offering a false or dystopian choice,” Deep Sea Conservation Coalition cofounder Matthew Gianni told The Guardian.

Dangling the possibility of widespread electric vehicle adoption by securing the resources necessary to manufacture more and better batteries is certainly tantalizing. But scientists told The Guardian that getting those metals from the seafloor — especially with machines that would cause a poorly-understood environmental impact in an area that’s nearly impossible to monitor and regulate — would come at too great a cost.

“There are some very significant questions being raised by scientists about the impacts of ocean mining,” University of California, Santa Barbara researcher Douglas McCauley told The Guardian. “How much extinction could be generated? How long will it take these extremely low-resilience systems to recover? What impact will it have on the ocean’s capacity to capture carbon?”

Not sure if this is new or not. We all know about the Carrington event, but it looks like tree rings reveal a number of much more massive events in the past 10,000 years — perhaps 10 times as strong as the Carrington event, perhaps 100 times or more. (This particular article only references the lower estimates.)

Recasting the iconic Carrington Event as just one of many superstorms in Earth’s past, scientists reveal the potential for even more massive, and potentially destructive, eruptions from the Sun.

A new group is seeking to warn European policymakers about AI’s ‘existential’ threat to humanity.

New research sheds light on the Fermi Paradox.

Italian-American nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi asked his colleagues a question during a lunchtime conversation. The Fermi Paradox is famous for questioning whether aliens exist.

Toxic microbial blooms thrived during the Great Dying, the most severe extinction in Earth’s history, and they are proliferating again due to human activity.

I tried to warn them.-Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has warned humanity many times about the dangers of superhuman AI. He thinks the advent of digital superintelligence will bring about profound changes to human civilization. Elon Musk thinks the technological singularity could either be super beneficial or it could be terrible for our society. Elon said that no one knows for sure the impact superhuman AI will have on our world but that one thing is for certain: We will not be able to control it. He thinks artificial intelligence will be used as a weapon and warns that the lack of AI regulation could mean it’s already too late for humanity.

Continue reading “I Tried Warning Them — Elon Musk on Superhuman AI” »

The existential threat of COVID-19 has highlighted an acute need to develop working therapeutics against emerging health threats. One of the luxuries deep learning has afforded us is the ability to modify the landscape as it unfolds — so long as we can keep up with the viral threat, and access the right data.

As with all new medical maladies, oftentimes the data needs time to catch up, and the virus takes no time to slow down, posing a difficult challenge as it can quickly mutate and become resistant to existing drugs. This led scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) to ask: how can we identify the right synergistic drug combinations for the rapidly spreading SARS-CoV-2?

Typically, data scientists use deep learning to pick out drug combinations with large existing datasets for things like cancer and cardiovascular disease, but, understandably, they can’t be used for new illnesses with limited data.

After 10,000 years of extinction, one company wants to bring the woolly mammoth back to life.

The biotech firm Colossal raised $15 million in a bid to revive the extinct woolly mammoth by manipulating the DNA of Asian elephants.