Lifeboat Foundation

Commonwealth Fusion Systems a spinout from MIT has received additional funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures (which investment from billionaires Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani, and Richard Branson).

Commonwealth Fusion Systems will use new superconducting materials to make far stronger magnets for a smaller Tokamak fusion system. The planned fusion experiment, called Sparc, is set to be far smaller – about 1/65th of the volume – than that of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project, an international collaboration.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ portfolio company @CFS_energy is building on decades of government-funded research to accelerate the path toward clean, limitless commercial fusion energy. #cleanenergy https://www.cfs.energy/

Continue reading “Commonwealth Fusion stronger magnet tokomak gets billionaire funding” »

Elon Musk unveiled prototypes of Tesla’s Solar Roof tiles In October 2016. They came in four styles that looked just like normal roofing material but were essentially miniaturized versions of traditional solar panels.

The announcement helped Tesla justify its $2.6 billion acquisition of SolarCity one month later and represented Musk’s vision for what the businesses could do together.

Continue reading “What Happened To Tesla’s Solar Roof Tiles?” »

Liz talking about gene therapy.

Liz Parrish in conversation with Nick Delgado, PhD, ABAAHP, CHT, Lifestyle Anti-Aging Medicine Author.

Continue reading “Liz Parrish in an insightful conversation with Nick Delgado (Sept 22, 2018 @RAADfest)” »

Publication science is struggling to keep up. “Research in this area is not fast-moving,” says Sara Schroter, a senior researcher at The BMJ. In a recent Nature opinion piece, Rennie called for rigorous studies to demonstrate the pros and cons of many new developments, including open peer review and preprints. In JAMA, he and Executive Managing Editor Annette Flanagin lamented that few people are studying “important issues and threats to the scientific enterprise, such as reproducibility, fake peer review, and predatory journals.”

Decades spent studying peer review, publication bias, and more have challenged the status quo, but journalologists say they have a long way to go.

The mathematics of mind-time

The special trick of consciousness is being able to project action and time into a range of possible futures.

Karl Friston

Continue reading “Consciousness is not a thing, but a process of inference” »

Perhaps you read the stories last week (including the NYT piece linked to below) about the researchers at Johns Hopkins, led by Gul Dolen, who gave ecstasy (MDMA) to octopuses and found that they, like humans, became more social on the drug. Dr. Dolen talked about using the octopus as a model organism in neuroscience research during last Friday’s day-long workshop hosted by the NIH BRAIN 2.0 working group.

By dosing the tentacled creatures with MDMA, researchers found they share parts of an ancient messaging system involved in social behaviors with humans.

BrainNet allows collaborative problem-solving using direct brain-to-brain communication. The ability to send thoughts directly to another person’s brain is the stuff of science fiction. At least, it used to be.

We followed the recycling process from the bins to the plant to understand where our recycling actually goes.

The occurrence of geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) poses serious threats to modern technological infrastructure. Large GICs result from sharp variations of the geomagnetic field (dB∕dt) caused by changes of large-scale magnetospheric and ionospheric currents. Intense dB∕dt perturbations are known to occur often in high-latitude regions as a result of storm time substorms. Magnetospheric compressions usually caused by interplanetary shocks increase the magnetopause current leading to dB∕dt perturbations more evident in midlatitude to low-latitude regions, while they increase the equatorial electrojet current leading to dB∕dt perturbations in dayside equatorial regions. We investigate the effects of shock impact angles and speeds on the subsequent dB∕dt perturbations with a database of 547 shocks observed at the L1 point. By adopting the threshold of dB∕dt = 100 nT/min, identified as a risk factor to power systems, we find that dB∕dt generally surpasses this threshold when following impacts of high-speed and nearly frontal shocks in dayside high-latitude locations. The same trend occurs at lower latitudes and for all nightside events but with fewer high-risk events. Particularly, we found nine events in equatorial locations with dB∕dt 100 nT/min. All events were caused by high-speed and nearly frontal shock impacts and were observed by stations located around noon local time. These high-risk perturbations were caused by sudden strong and symmetric magnetospheric compressions, more effectively intensifying the equatorial electrojet current, leading to sharp dB∕dt perturbations. We suggest that these results may provide insights for GIC forecasting aiming at preventing degradation of power systems due to GICs.