Lifeboat Foundation

Humans have always been storytellers. Weaving tales, exchanging knowledge, and planning for the future are quintessentially human endeavors that have shaped the course of our species. But when did this remarkable ability to communicate through language first emerge? Recent research suggests a far earlier origin than previously thought, shedding light on the fascinating journey of human evolution.

Dr. Steven Mithen, an esteemed archaeologist from the University of Reading, has delved deep into the annals of prehistory to uncover the roots of human speech. Contrary to conventional wisdom, which pegged the advent of language to around 200,000 years ago, Mithen’s groundbreaking analysis suggests a much more ancient beginning—approximately 1.6 million years ago, in the cradle of humanity, somewhere nestled in the vast expanse of eastern or southern Africa.

In his quest to unveil the origins of language, Mithen meticulously examined a plethora of evidence spanning archaeology, genetics, neurology, and linguistics. The culmination of his research paints a vivid picture of our ancestors’ journey towards spoken communication.

Vinge won multiple Hugo awards and created a sci-fi concept that drives AI researchers.

Matter energy and information.

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Something like this could help me take care of my mom! She’s 80!

White Rabbit (WR) is a technology developed at CERN, in collaboration with institutes and companies, to synchronise devices in the accelerators down to sub-nanoseconds and solve the challenge of establishing a common notion of time across a network. Indeed, at a scale of billionths of a second, the time light takes to travel through a fibre-optic cable and the time the electronics take to process the signal are no longer negligible. To avoid potential delays, the co-inventors of White Rabbit designed a new ethernet switch.

First used in 2012, the application of this fully open-source technology has quickly expanded outside the field of particle physics. In 2020, it was included in the worldwide industry standard known as Precision Time Protocol (PTP), governed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

What’s more, CERN recently launched the White Rabbit Collaboration, a membership-based global community whose objective is to maintain a high-performance open-source technology that meets the needs of users and to facilitate its uptake by industry. The WR Collaboration will provide dedicated support and training, facilitate R&D projects between entities with common interests and complementary expertise and establish a testing ecosystem fostering trust in products that incorporate the open-source technology. At CERN, the WR Collaboration Bureau – a dedicated team composed of senior White Rabbit engineers and a community coordinator – will facilitate the day-to-day running of the Collaboration’s activities and support its members.

The cerebral cortex forms early in development according to a series of heritable neurodevelopmental instructions. Despite deep evolutionary conservation of the cerebral cortex and its foundational six-layered architecture, significant variations in cortical size and folding can be found across mammals, including a disproportionate expansion of the prefrontal cortex in humans. Yet our mechanistic understanding of neurodevelopmental processes is derived overwhelmingly from rodent models, which fail to capture many human-enriched features of cortical development. With the advent of pluripotent stem cells and technologies for differentiating three-dimensional cultures of neural tissue in vitro, cerebral organoids have emerged as an experimental platform that recapitulates several hallmarks of human brain development.

Webb’s infrared views of Cepheids agreed with Hubble’s optical-light data.

Webb confirmed that the Hubble’s keen eye was right all along, erasing any lingering doubt about Hubble’s measurements.

The bottom line is that the Hubble Tension between what happens in the nearby Universe compared to the early Universe’s expansion remains a nagging puzzle for cosmologists.

In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaitre made a startling discovery that forever changed our perception of the Universe. Upon observing galaxies beyond the Milky Way and measuring their spectra, they determined that the Universe was expanding. By the 1990s, with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists took the deepest images of the Universe to date and made another startling discovery: the rate of expansion is speeding up! This parameter, denoted by Lambda, is integral to the accepted model of cosmology, known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model.

Since then, attempts to measure distances have produced a discrepancy known as the “Hubble Tension.” While it was hoped that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would resolve this “crisis in cosmology,” its observations have only deepened the mystery. This has led to several proposed resolutions, including the idea that there was an “Early Dark Energy” shortly after the Big Bang. In a recent paper, an international team of astrophysicists proposed a new solution based on an alternate theory of gravity that states that our galaxy is in the center of an “under-density.”

Continue reading “If Our Part of the Universe is Less Dense, Would That Explain the Hubble Tension?” »

THIS week news broke that declining fertility rates could affect most countries in a quarter of a century.

The U.S. Sun spoke with one scientist who thinks humanoids will fill this gap in future populations.

According to The Financial Times, 75 percent of nations are predicted to fall beneath population replacement birthrates by 2050.