Looking for science fiction books to read? Here are my reviews of some excellent science fiction novels (more to come as well). I encourage you to utilize my reviews to help inform your decisions about your next literary adventure!
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: 98/100. Much of the essence of art is to reflect what makes us human, helping us better explain to ourselves what makes us tick. Station Eleven is a science fiction novel about a deadly flu pandemic which brings about the end of the world. Notably, it was written several years prior to the emergence of COVID-19. Emily St. John Mandel wields the premise masterfully to touch our souls and help us come to terms with human kindness, cruelty, hope, and vulnerability. Through its deep tragedy and heartfelt characters, the book manages to link questions of the individual and the global. We take a hard look at how the meaning of civilization connects to the meaning of life. Emily St. John Mandel’s prose puts billions to death. Those who survive must find purpose against the backdrop of the visceral viciousness of the apocalypse.
Bitcoin Vs Gold: Peter Schiff Vs Anthony Scaramucci.
Peter Shiff makes several points about gold:
Gold: it has physical properties that makes it real and valuable. It’ll never lose its value. Gold has a long history and has been used for thousands of years.
Peter Schiff makes several points against bitcoin:
Bitcoin is not anything real. It’s just a string of numbers.
It has no real value because there are no properties that makes it valuable.
As we age, our muscles gradually become smaller, weaker and less able to heal after injury. In a new study, UPMC and University of Pittsburgh researchers pinpoint an important mediator of youthfulness in mouse muscle, a discovery that could advance muscle regeneration therapies for older people.
Published today in Nature Aging, the study demonstrates that circulating shuttles called extracellular vesicles, or EVs, deliver genetic instructions for the longevity protein known as Klotho to muscle cells. Loss of muscle function and impaired muscle repair in old mice may be driven by aged EVs, which carry fewer copies of these instructions than those in young animals.
The findings are an important advance in understanding why the capacity for muscles to regenerate dwindles with age.
Inspired by the mastery of artificial intelligence (AI) over games like Go and Super Mario, scientists at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) trained an AI agent — an autonomous computational program that observes and acts — how to conduct research experiments at superhuman levels by using the same approach. The Brookhaven team published their findings in the journal Machine Learning: Science and Technology and implemented the AI agent as part of the research capabilities at NSLS-II.
As a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, NSLS-II enables scientific studies by more than 2000 researchers each year, offering access to the facility’s ultrabright x-rays. Scientists from all over the world come to the facility to advance their research in areas such as batteries, microelectronics, and drug development. However, time at NSLS-II’s experimental stations — called beamlines — is hard to get because nearly three times as many researchers would like to use them as any one station can handle in a day — despite the facility’s 24/7 operations.
“Since time at our facility is a precious resource, it is our responsibility to be good stewards of that; this means we need to find ways to use this resource more efficiently so that we can enable more science,” said Daniel Olds, beamline scientist at NSLS-II and corresponding author of the study. “One bottleneck is us, the humans who are measuring the samples. We come up with an initial strategy, but adjust it on the fly during the measurement to ensure everything is running smoothly. But we can’t watch the measurement all the time because we also need to eat, sleep and do more than just run the experiment.”
On December 2nd, we brought you the news that Microsoft Research developed a new method that allows it to read and write much faster in DNA format. In the last month or so, three other new developments have popped up in DNA storage.
Scientists at the Center for Synthetic Biology from the Northwestern University, Illinois, have revealed a demonstration on DNA storage encoding that manages to fulfill three bits of information in an hour, according to Technology Networks. This new method “relies on an enzymatic system.”
Then, a team from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has devised a microchip that can significantly improve the speed at which data can be written in DNA form, according to the BBC. The team expects a 100x improvement over current technologies for DNA storage.
Finally, a team in China at Southeast University in the country’s Jiangsu Provincemade has been reported to be engineering a new process that could produce the first mass-market DNA storage device, according to TechRadar.
Combining knowledge of chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering, scientists from McGill University develop a biomaterial tough enough to repair the heart, muscles, and vocal cords, representing a major advance in regenerative medicine.
“People recovering from heart damage often face a long and tricky journey. Healing is challenging because of the constant movement tissues must withstand as the heart beats. The same is true for vocal cords. Until now there was no injectable material strong enough for the job,” says Guangyu Bao, a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University.
The team, led by Professor Luc Mongeau and Assistant Professor Jianyu Li, developed a new injectable hydrogel for wound repair. The hydrogel is a type of biomaterial that provides room for cells to live and grow. Once injected into the body, the biomaterial forms a stable, porous structure allowing live cells to grow or pass through to repair the injured organs.
This is the same type of double double DOUBLE down on hyperbolic and aggressive anti expert BS that has pushed a not insignificant portion of the population of the US to throw a violent tantrum against covid19 vaccines and wearing a piece of cloth on their face to keep from DYING. Similarly, ultra environmentalists on the far left have ceased to try to protect the environment FOR future generations. Now they want to protect the environment FROM future generations. They’ve become ANTIHUMAN, often to a disturbingly horrific — if hilariously stupid — extent. LITERALLY. Unless you think we shouldn’t build anything on the sterile, irradiated and dead surface of the moon by polluting it — or any other moon, asteroid, or planet by stepping on it’s surface with our filthy monkey feet. Or throwing trash into the SUN because we’d be…
👉😏🙄POLLUTING IT!🙄🤪👈
There is a reason why experts are experts. It isn’t because they want to eat children on pizza with Hillary Clinton with space lizards, nor because they want an irradiated earth beneath their feet. Nuclear power is clean, cheap, and safe. Until fusion gets here, and with electric vehicles quickly becoming the dominant mode of transportation every minute that ticks by, nuclear power isn’t just preferential, its absolutely REQUIRED if we want to get a handle on global warming while simultaneously maintain or improve the standard and quality of life we are accustomed to, and that developing nations will, already are, and SHOULD be seeking for themselves too. Building nuclear power into the foundation of a developing nations energy generation and distribution infrastructure from day one will PREVENT all the massive amount of damage that will inevitably exponentially accelerate global warming and pollution, lowering the quality of life in that nation which will in turn prompt even GREATER use of fossil fuels to mitigate temporarily. Heat caused by fossil fuel powered global warming is dealt with symptomatically by turning up the air-conditioning. Dangerous spikes in particulates and pollution in the air is symptomatically dealt with by using high energy consuming industrial or home air filtration systems, etc. If all that energy comes from coal or other fossil fuels, that lovely tesla you’ve got plugged in to charge in your garage overnight is doing just as much damage to the environment as that douchebag down the street with his fire eagle painted hummer filling up on gasoline before he goes to a kid Rock show that he’s actually LOOKING FORWARD TO!
《☆This isn’t breaking news exactly, but still relevant. I apologize in advance for its, uh, occasional rantishness and length! 😉☆》
Helen Caldicott is the world’s most prominent anti-nuclear activist. Helen has been featured on CNN, 60 Minutes, CBC and Democracy Now speaking about the dangers of nuclear power and radiation.
Due to last years success, I am back with an updated list of my 5 most promising anti-aging compounds.
There are more than 200 different geroprotective compounds. Some of these are already available as supplements, some are in clinical trials and some have FDA approval. Which are my top 5 that I think i most promising in terms of their anti-aging effects (so focusing more on healthspan than lifespan). And note the use of “promising” — there is still much work to be done to better investigate the long-term safety, dose and timings of different supplements which you should always bear in mind.
Anyway, I made this video more for a bit of fun and to make a longer summary video to pull ideas together from multiple previous videos with some new info too! So hope you like it! And disclaimer — this is not recommendation or health advise — i am not a medical doctor!!
