Lifeboat Foundation

A fleet of roughly 125 tankers could return subpolar regions close to pre-industrial…

Since the 1990s, scientists have cataloged thousands of planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets. Some of these are massive and gaseous, while others are tiny and rocky like our home world. But a recent analysis suggests that some of these exoplanets might be more dense and have more water than previously thought, which has big implications for alien life.

There are four main types of exoplanets: Neptunian, gas giant, super-Earth and terrestrial. It’s not easy spotting these planets directly, let alone figuring out what they’re made of. One of the most tried-and-true methods of exoplanet hunting is called transit photometry, which is basically pointing a telescope at a star and measuring the light when a planet swings past. A dip in brightness indicates a planet is there.

Continue reading “A newly-discovered planet that is half-water, half-rock is straight out of science fiction” »

Despite many studies have revealed that developing honey bee (Apis mellifera) larvae are posting a high risk on exposure to insecticides, the toxicology information on bee…

The fact that our actions have an impact on the large number of people who will live after us should matter for how we think about our own lives. Those who ask themselves what they can do to act responsibly towards those who will live in the future call themselves ‘longtermists.’ Longtermism is the ethical view that we should act in ways that reduce the risks that endanger our future, and in ways that make the long-term future go well.¹

Before we look ahead, let’s look back. How many came before us? How many humans have ever lived?

It is not possible to answer this question precisely, but demographers Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub have tackled the question using the historical knowledge that we do have.

Artificial intelligence is quickly advancing in the field of video generation. That could have a profound effect on our social media feeds one day.

Microsoft recently acknowledged a problem with file copy speeds on its Windows 11 2022 feature update as a big slow-down of up to 40% was noticed. However, the problem could actually be even worse.

Flint tools discovered more than 50 years ago in the Tunel Wielki cave have been dated to half a million years ago. — HeritageDaily — Archaeology News.

Objects in our visual environment often move unpredictably and can suddenly speed up or slow down. The ability to account for acceleration when interacting with moving objects can be critical for survival. Here, we investigate how human observers track an accelerating target with their eyes and predict its time of reappearance after a temporal occlusion by making an interceptive hand movement. Before occlusion, observers smoothly tracked the accelerating target with their eyes. At the time of occlusion, observers made a predictive saccade to the location where they subsequently intercepted the target with a quick pointing movement.