Lifeboat Foundation

Innovation For A Sustainable Global Energy Transformation — Dr. Roland Roesch, Ph.D. — Director, Innovation and Technology Centre, International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)

Dr. Roland Roesch, Ph.D. is Director, Innovation and Technology Centre (IITC), of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA — https://www.irena.org/) where he oversees the Agency’s work on advising member countries in the area of technology status and roadmaps, energy planning, cost and markets and innovation policy frameworks.

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Professor Barry Kemp, who has died the day after his 84th birthday, was an eminent Egyptologist who directed the excavations at the site in Middle Egypt known as Amarna.

‘The danger of being an absolute ruler is that no one dares tell you that what you have just decreed is not a good idea’

A joint team of physicists from Skoltech, MIPT, and ITMO developed an optical component that helps manage the properties of a terahertz beam and split it into several channels. The new device can be used as a modulator and generator of terahertz vortex beams in medicine, 6G communications, and microscopy. The paper appears in the journal Advanced Optical Materials.

Apologies for the (hopefully now somewhat less) clickbait-y title. Now, of course, I know that the Big Bang did not happen at any point connected to a single point in our current $3$-dimensional observable universe by a one-dimensional causal curve. I also know that at any point in the universe, all other points seem to be moving away from that point. However, according to our current understanding of physics, the universe is (at least) $4$-dimensional. Just like how in the classical “balloon” analogy for an expanding universe, the points do in fact all move away from a common point on the interior of the balloon, all spacetime points do move away from the Big Bang, or at least some kind of cosmological horizon which surrounds it — this is how I understand going forward in time, at least. Does it make sense to think of this as a sort of “center” for the full, $4$-dimensional spacetime? Or are there further subtleties to this situation?

I don’t subscribe but if you do, you’ll get more but the short summary kinda gives a general idea. Astronomers spotted 60 stars with potential Dyson sphered around them but it isn’t 100% verifiable. It could be a simpler explanation they say.

Sufficiently advanced aliens would be able to capture vast quantities of energy from their star using a massive structure called a Dyson sphere. Such a device would give off an infrared heat signature — and astronomers have just spotted 60 stars that seem to match.

By Jonathan O’Callaghan

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Watch out qubits!

Scientists successfully measure high-dimensional qudits, cousins to quantum computing qubits.

Elliott Sober an argument against reductionism.

Shared with Dropbox.

Iris Berent argues that the debate stems from the delusional biases in the way humans think about the separation of body and mind.

Elon Musk traveled to Bali this weekend to officially launch Starlink, the SpaceX satellite internet service, in Indonesia this Sunday.

At a launch event with ministers in a health clinic in Indonesia, Musk stressed the significance of providing internet access to far-reaching corners of the vast archipelago, comprised of 17,000 islands across three time zones.