Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: evolution – Page 31

We’re now adding a new location and entering into the next stage of the program’s evolution. Later this year, drone deliveries are coming to the West Valley of the Phoenix Metro Area in Arizona.

With this new location, we’ll be fully integrated into Amazon’s delivery network, meaning, for the first time, drones will deploy from facilities next to our Same-Day Delivery site in Tolleson. These smaller sites are hybrid—part fulfillment center, part delivery station. They allow us to fulfill, sort, and deliver products all from one site so we can get packages out to our customers even quicker. Our Same-Day Delivery sites are situated close to the large metro areas they serve, which means customers get their orders faster. And with connections to the larger Amazon fulfillment centers nearby, we are able to offer Same-Day Delivery on millions of items.

We’re currently working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and local officials in Tolleson to obtain all necessary permissions to conduct these deliveries in Tolleson. Once we’ve received all the necessary approvals, we’ll begin reaching out to customers in the West Valley so they can receive drone deliveries when the service goes live later this year.

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Scientists champion global genomic surveillance using the latest technologies and a ‘One Health’ approach to protect against novel pathogens like avian influenza and antimicrobial resistance, catching epidemics before they start.

The COVID-19 pandemic turned the world upside down. In fighting it, one of our most important weapons was genomic surveillance, based on whole genome sequencing, which collects all the genetic data of a given microorganism. This powerful technology tracked the spread and evolution of the virus, helping to guide public health responses and the development of vaccines and treatments.

But genomic surveillance could do much more to reduce the toll of disease and death worldwide than just protect us from COVID-19. Writing in the journal Frontiers in Science, an international collective of clinical and public health microbiologists from the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) calls for investment in technology, capacity, expertise, and collaboration to put genomic surveillance of pathogens at the forefront of future pandemic preparedness.

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The universe is still expanding at an accelerating rate, but it may have slowed down recently compared to a few billion years ago, early results from the most precise measurement of its evolution yet suggested Thursday.

While the preliminary findings are far from confirmed, if they hold up it would further deepen the mystery of dark energy—and likely mean there is something important missing in our understanding of the cosmos.

These signals of our universe’s changing speeds were spotted by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which is perched atop a telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in the US state of Arizona.

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I found this on NewsBreak:

The crew of the International Space Station has stumbled upon a drug-resistant bacteria on board, leaving them baffled as to how it arrived.

Scientists working in the low orbit lab have confirmed the discovery, which raises concerns about the potential evolution of more robust bacteria that could defy current treatments. The unique microgravity environment of the ISS is suspected to be a factor in the bacteria’s persistence.

The origin of the bacteria remains a mystery to the team, who can’t recall how it might have been introduced to the station. Life in space presents different growth conditions for organisms, leading to alternative evolutionary paths compared to their Earth-bound counterparts.

Continue reading “International Space Station crew find ‘drug-resistant bacteria’ and have no idea how it got there” | >

Thanks to the dizzying growth of cosmic observations and measurement tools and some new advancements (primarily the “discovery” of what we call dark matter and dark energy) all against the backdrop of General Relativity, the early 2000s were a time when nothing seemed capable of challenging the advancement of our knowledge about the cosmos, its origins, and its future evolution.

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Seven hundred million years ago, a remarkable creature emerged for the first time. Though it may not have been much to look at by today’s standards, the animal had a front and a back, a top and a bottom. This was a groundbreaking adaptation at the time, and one which laid down the basic body plan which most complex animals, including humans, would eventually inherit.

The inconspicuous animal resided in the ancient seas of Earth, likely crawling along the seafloor. This was the last common ancestor of bilaterians, a vast supergroup of animals including vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals), and invertebrates (insects, arthropods, mollusks, worms, echinoderms and many more).

To this day, more than 7,000 groups of genes can be traced back to the last common ancestor of bilaterians, according to a study of 20 different bilaterian species including humans, sharks, mayflies, centipedes and octopuses. The findings were made by researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona and are published today in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

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Saddened by the news of Prof. Daniel Dennett’s passing. a brilliant philosopher with with such great influence in cognitive science. It’s such a great loss.

Daniel Dennett, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tufts University, well-known for his work in philosophy of mind and a wide range of other philosophical areas, has died.

Professor Dennett wrote extensively about issues related to philosophy of mind and cognitive science, especially consciousness. He is also recognized as having made significant contributions to the concept of intentionality and debates on free will. Some of Professor Dennett’s books include Content and Consciousness (1969), Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (1981), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1992), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Breaking the Spell (2006), and From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017). He published a memoir last year entitled I’ve Been Thinking. There are also several books about him and his ideas. You can learn more about his work here.

Continue reading “Daniel Dennett (1942−2024)” | >

Quantum chaos focuses on the quantum manifestations of classical chaos. A characteristic of classical chaos is the exponential sensitivity of the dynamics with respect to infinitesimal changes in the initial conditions. Thus, to classify classical dynamics it is sufficient to follow phase space trajectories starting infinitesimally close to each other and to determine the evolution of their distances with respect to each other with time. Because of the uncertainty relation, this is no longer possible in the corresponding quantum system. One important aspect of quantum chaos is the understanding of features of the classical dynamics in terms of the fluctuation properties in the energy spectra of closed quantum systems or of the fluctuations exhibited by the scattering matrix elements describing open ones. The fluctuation properties are predicted to be universal, that is, to be the same for systems belonging to the same universality class and exhibiting the same chaotic behavior in the corresponding classical dynamics and to be describable by random matrix theory. Furthermore, random-matrix models that had been developed for the scattering matrix associated with compound-nuclear reactions have been shown to be applicable to quantum-chaotic scattering processes. A second important aspect within the field of quantum chaos concerns the semiclassical approach. In this context, one of the most important achievements was the periodic orbit theory pioneered by Gutzwiller, which led to understanding the impact of the classical dynamics on the properties of the quantum system in terms of purely classical quantities. The focus of research within the field of quantum chaos has been extended to relativistic quantum systems and to many-body quantum systems with focus on random matrix theory and the semiclassical approach. In distinction to single-particle systems, many-body systems like atomic nuclei do not have a classical analogue. In recent years different measures of chaos and models have been developed. Here, a prominent model is the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model which serves as a paradigm for the study of quantum chaos in strongly interacting many-body systems. The school is aimed at PhD students, post-docs and outstanding master students and the first part will provide a survey of single-and many-body quantum chaos and applications based on random-matrix theory and the semiclassical approach. The second part of the school will focus on current aspects of research in the context of many-body quantum chaos. There is no registration fee and limited funds are available for travel and local expenses. Organizers: Hilda Cerdeira (IFT-UNESP, Brazil) Barbara Dietz-Pilatus (Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Republic of Korea)

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