Lifeboat Foundation

“While exploring the coldest parts of the planet, even the smallest snacks can be a lifesaver. In case of emergencies (or sometimes to for a future treat), polar explorers will leave caches of food and supplies along their return route. … Recently, a teams of researchers camped out in Greenland’s arctic desert discovered one such cache—ration tins left behind by an expedition about 60 years ago.”

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When SETI astronomer Doug Vakoch heard the news that there might be an alien civilization around the mysterious star KIC 8462852, he took immediate action.

For the last week, Vakoch and his colleagues at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute have been pointing the ground-based Allen Telescope Array in California at the enigmatic star with one goal in mind.

“We’re trying to rule out the hypothesis that maybe it’s intelligence out there,” Vakoch told Business Insider.

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Excerpt from This Book Is From the Future: A Journey Through Portals, Relativity, Wormholes and Other Adventures in Time Travel by Marie D. Jones & Larry Flaxman.

Time travel has enchanted and intrigued us since the earliest days of fiction, when authors such as H.G. Wells, Samuel Madden, Charles Dickens and Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau stretched and challenged our imaginations with images and tales of men and women who invented amazing machines and devices that could take them back in time, or forward into the future.

Because of the restrictions of light speed, and the paradoxes of going back to the past without damaging the future timeline, and a host of other obstacles and challenges, we, in fact, have remained stuck in the present.

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Australian scientists created a computer simulation in which quantum particles can move back in time. This might confirm the possibility of time travel on a quantum level, suggested in 1991. At the same time, the study revealed a number of effects which are considered impossible according to the standard quantum mechanics.

Using photons, physicists from the University of Queensland in Australia simulated time-traveling quantum particles. In particular, they studied the behavior of a single photon traveling back in time through a wormhole in space-time and interacting with itself. This time-traveling loop is called a closed timelike curve, i.e. a path followed by a particle which returns to its initial space-time point.

The physicists studied two possible scenarios for a time-traveling photon. In the first, the particle passes through a wormhole, moving back in time, and interacts with its older self. In the second scenario, the photon passes through normal space-time and interacts with another photon which is stuck in a closed timelike curve.

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A representation of a stable sequential working memory; different information items or memory patterns are shown in different colors. (credit: Image adopted from Rabinovich, M.I. et al. (2014))

Try to remember a phone number. You’re now using “sequential memory,” in which your mind processes a sequence of numbers, events, or ideas. It underlies how people think, perceive, and interact as social beings. To understand how sequential memory works, researchers have built mathematical models that mimic this process.

Cognitive modes

Continue reading “Is your thinking chaotic? There’s a model for that.” »

When a star wanders too close to a black hole, immense gravitational forces begin to rip it apart in an epic cosmic slaying called a “tidal disruption event.” Some of the star’s mass is flung outward into space, while the rest is drawn in, triggering a powerful flare that showers the sky with x-rays.

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, a team of astronomers has now pieced together one such astronomical feasting frenzy. The event in question, appropriately named “ASASSN-14li,” was spotted near the center of PGC 043234, a galaxy that lies 290 million light years from Earth.

Continue reading “This Is What it Looks Like When a Black Hole Shreds a Star” »

Treating the brain isn’t like the rest of the body. Your blood-brain barrier shields it; filtering the blood to ensure nothing untoward makes it through. This protection is normally a good thing, but it becomes a problem if you want to deliver therapeutic drugs through it. This method could be a solution.

Smuggling therapeutics

Many diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease are extremely difficult to treat. Only very specific molecules can make it through the brain’s secure barrier, and most drugs don’t make the cut. This poses a challenge when you want to treat disease inside the brain, and so efforts have been focused on finding a way to overcome this. New research has now demonstrated a way of treating Parkinson’s disease with a surgical treatment that opens up a small route to bypass the barrier; essentially a smuggling hatch into your brain.

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The much pursued fountain of youth can become a reality if humans agree to share their DNA information, according to Google Ventures’ CEO Bill Maris, who has warned that “we’re all going to die” earlier if we keep our genetic codes secret.

Maris, who aims to digitize DNA, stressed during a Wall Street Journal technology conference in California that our genomes “aren’t really secret,” urging those protective of their genetic information to loosen the reins a bit.

Noting that genetic material is constantly left lying around in public, Maris addressed those who remain nervous about the digitization of DNA. “What are you worried about?” he said on Tuesday, adding that a person could easily gather information by fishing a used cup out of the trash and taking it to a lab for analysis.

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In one of my first articles for Lifeboat,* I provided an experimental methodology for demonstrating (or proving) the instantaneous ‘communication’ between quantum entangled particles. Even though changes to one particle can be provably demonstrated at its far away twin, the very strange experimental results suggested by quantum theory also demonstrate that you cannot use the simultaneity for any purpose. That is, you can provably pass information instantly, but you cannot study the ‘message’ (a change in state at the recipient), until such time as it could have been transmit by a classical radio wave.

Now, scientists have conducted an experiment proving that objects can instantaneously affect each other, regardless o the distance between them. [continue below]

[From The New York Times—Oct 21, 2015]:

Sorry Einstein.
Quantum Study Suggests ‘Spooky Action’ is Real

Continue reading “Quantum Theory: ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’ confirmed” »