Lifeboat Foundation

Every once in a while I have a contentious discussion with someone about traveling to Mars, and the risks involved. One of the hardest risks to describe is the threat from galactic cosmic rays. Here is a short article about a new facility investigating the effects of galactic cosmic rays.

The very important point here is that we are not discussing electromagnetic radiation. These ions have been shown to sometimes penetrate spacecraft and inflict damage on astronauts brains. Earthlings do not have to worry about these as much because we have a magnetosphere that shields us from ions.

To better understand and mitigate the health risks faced by astronauts from exposure to space radiation, we ideally need to be able to test the effects of Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) here on Earth under laboratory conditions. An article publishing on May 19, 2020 in the open access journal PLOS Biology from Lisa Simonsen and colleagues at the NASA Langley Research Center, USA, describes how NASA has developed a ground-based GCR Simulator at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL), located at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Continue reading “Galactic cosmic rays now available for study on Earth, thanks to NASA” »

Modeling and rendering of dynamic scenes is challenging, as natural scenes often contain complex phenomena such as thin structures, evolving topology, translucency, scattering, occlusion, and biological motion. Mesh-based reconstruction and tracking often fail in these cases, and other approaches (e.g., light field video) typically rely on constrained viewing conditions, which limit interactivity. We circumvent these difficulties by presenting a learning-based approach to representing dynamic objects inspired by the integral projection model used in tomographic imaging. The approach is supervised directly from 2D images in a multi-view capture setting and does not require explicit reconstruction or tracking of the object. Our method has two primary components: an encoder-decoder network that transforms input images into a 3D volume representation, and a differentiable ray-marching operation that enables end-to-end training. By virtue of its 3D representation, our construction extrapolates better to novel viewpoints compared to screen-space rendering techniques. The encoder-decoder architecture learns a latent representation of a dynamic scene that enables us to produce novel content sequences not seen during training. To overcome memory limitations of voxel-based representations, we learn a dynamic irregular grid structure implemented with a warp field during ray-marching. This structure greatly improves the apparent resolution and reduces grid-like artifacts and jagged motion. Finally, we demonstrate how to incorporate surface-based representations into our volumetric-learning framework for applications where the highest resolution is required, using facial performance capture as a case in point.

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face_with_colon_three circa 2015 this guppy could lead to rapid biological singularity.

Some species are evolving far more quickly than Darwin ever imagined.

Hey all! I’ve recently made a video on how humans can one day become AI and how this can be good for individuals and humanity on its own! If you are interested, please give it a watch!

AI is oftentimes the ultimate bane of science-fiction. Artificial intelligence oftentimes becomes smarter than humanity and turns on us in sci-fi movies and films. However, what if people could become AI one day and use this to their advantage? And if so, would people choose to become AI? Here’s why I believe this may be possible and why people may actually voluntarily choose to become AI themselves- thus blurring the lines between computer science and biology.

Continue reading “Why Fear AI When You Can Become It? | Mind Uploading” »

Scientists have recently explored the unique properties of nonlinear waves to facilitate a wide range of applications including impact mitigation, asymmetric transmission, switching and focusing. In a new study now published on Science Advances, Bolei Deng and a team of research scientists at Harvard, CNRS and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in the U.S. and France harnessed the propagation of nonlinear waves to make flexible structures crawl. They combined bioinspired experimental and theoretical methods to show how such pulse-driven locomotion could reach a maximum efficiency when the initiated pulses were solitons (solitary wave). The simple machine developed in the work could move across a wide range of surfaces and steer onward. The study expanded the variety of possible applications with nonlinear waves to offer a new platform for flexible machines.

Flexible structures that are capable of large deformation are attracting interest in bioengineering due to their intriguing static response and their ability to support elastic waves of large amplitude. By carefully controlling their geometry, the elastic energy landscape of highly deformable systems can be engineered to propagate a variety of nonlinear waves including vector solitons, transition waves and rarefaction pulses. The dynamic behavior of such structures demonstrate a very rich physics, while offering new opportunities to manipulate the propagation of mechanical signals. Such mechanisms can allow unidirectional propagation, wave guiding, mechanical logic and mitigation, among other applications.

In this work, Deng et al. were inspired by the biological retrograde peristaltic wave motion in earthworms and the ability of linear elastic waves to generate motion in ultrasonic motors. The team showed the propagation of nonlinear elastic waves in flexible structures to provide opportunities for locomotion. As proof of concept, they focused on a Slinky – and used it to create a pulse-driven robot capable of propelling itself. They built the simple machine by connecting the Slinky to a pneumatic actuator. The team used an electromagnet and a plate embedded between the loops to initiate nonlinear pulses to propagate along the device from the front to the back, allowing the pulse directionality to dictate the simple robot to move forward. The results indicated the efficiency of such pulse-driven locomotion to be optimal with solitons – large amplitude nonlinear pulses with a constant velocity and stable shape along propagation.

In a study published on May 7, 2020, in Current Biology, researchers from University of Sydney have identified the single gene that determines how Cape honey bees reproduce without ever having sex. One gene, GB45239 on chromosome 11, is responsible for virgin births.

“It is extremely exciting,” said Professor Benjamin Oldroyd in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences. “Scientists have been looking for this gene for the last 30 years. Now that we know it’s on chromosome 11, we have solved a mystery.”

Behavioral geneticist Professor Oldroyd said: “Sex is a weird way to reproduce and yet it is the most common form of reproduction for animals and plants on the planet. It’s a major biological mystery why there is so much sex going on and it doesn’t make evolutionary sense. Asexuality is a much more efficient way to reproduce, and every now and then we see a species revert to it.”

North Korea has an active nuclear weapons program & has repeatedly tested nuclear explosive devices. It is also believed to possess biological & chemical weapons.

Researchers said this building material has structural load-bearing function, is capable of self-healing and is more environmentally friendly than concrete – which is the second most-consumed material on Earth after water.

The team from the University of Colorado Boulder believe their work paves the way for future building structures that could “heal their own cracks, suck up dangerous toxins from the air or even glow on command”.

Wil Srubar, who heads the Living Materials Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder and is one of the study authors, said: “We already use biological materials in our buildings, like wood, but those materials are no longer alive.

Algae isn’t just found in your garden pond or local river. Sometimes it explodes into vast “blooms” far out to sea, that can be the size of a small country. Such algal blooms can match even a rainforest at taking carbon out of the air. And then, in just a week or two, they are gone – sometimes consumed by viruses.

Given the scale of blooms and their vital role in both marine ecology and climate regulation we must know more about these viruses. Research conducted with our Weizmann Institute colleague Yoav Lehahn and others and published in the journal Current Biology, is the first attempt to quantify the affect of viruses on large scale algal blooms.

Algae in this context refers to tiny sea organisms known as phytoplankton which exist right at the bottom of the marine food web, providing the ultimate source of all organic matter in the sea. They do this by consuming carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, “fixing” this carbon into organic matter (themselves) in the same way trees take carbon out of the air.