Lifeboat Foundation

You are not seeing double. The link will take you to Part 2 of 2022 science and technology breakthroughs.

In 2022 strides were made in mRNA vaccines, immunotherapy, cancer treatments, organ transplants, protein folding and genome sequencing.

In 2022 a new space telescope, a mission to bash an asteroid, fusion ignition, and the first small modular reactor design approved.

Cotra’s work is particularly relevant in this context as she based her forecast on the kind of historical long-run trend of training computation that we just studied. But it is worth noting that other forecasters who rely on different considerations arrive at broadly similar conclusions. As I show in my article on AI timelines, many AI experts believe that there is a real chance that human-level artificial intelligence will be developed within the next decades, and some believe that it will exist much sooner.

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Computers and artificial intelligence have changed our world immensely, but we are still at the early stages of this history. Because this technology feels so familiar, it is easy to forget that all of these technologies that we interact with are very recent innovations, and that most profound changes are yet to come.

Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and… breakthroughs in wireless power transfer? Yep, scientists at a branch of the Walt Disney Company called Disney Research have found a way to charge devices on a room-scale without using any wires.

Wireless power is an idea that goes back to the 19th century, with Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla perhaps being its most famous proponent. But getting it to work has been a bit of a problem, with the extent of modern wireless power coming mostly in the form of electric toothbrushes or flat charging pads for phones.

Continue reading “Disney Researchers Make Wireless Power Transfer Breakthrough” »

The breakthrough came in an impossibly small slice of time, less than it takes a beam of light to move an inch. In that tiny moment, nuclear fusion as an energy source went from far-away dream to reality. The world is now grappling with the implications of the historic milestone. For Arthur Pak and the countless other scientists who’ve spent decades getting to this point, the work is just beginning.

Pak and his colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are now faced with a daunting task: Do it again, but better—and bigger.

That means perfecting the use of the world’s largest laser, housed in the lab’s National Ignition Facility that science-fiction fans will recognize from the film “Star Trek: Into Darkness,” when it was used as a set for the warp core of the starship Enterprise. Just after 1 a.m. on Dec. 5, the laser shot 192 beams in three carefully modulated pulses at a cylinder containing a tiny diamond capsule filled with hydrogen, in an attempt to spark the first fusion reaction that produced more energy than it took to create. It succeeded, starting the path toward what scientists hope will someday be a new, carbon-free power source that will allow humans to harness the same source of energy that lights the stars.

Lawrence Livermore National Lab fires 192 lasers at a fuel pellet and yields 1.5 times more energy output than input, a fusion breakthrough.

With the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) mounted on the NASA and European Space Agency Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been observing the Sun’s corona since 1995 to track space weather that may have an impact on Earth. However, LASCO has an observational gap that prevents scientists from seeing the middle solar corona, where the solar wind is generated.

A team of scientists from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), NASA, and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) has discovered web-like plasma structures in the Sun’s middle corona. The researchers describe their innovative new observation method, imaging the middle corona in ultraviolet (U.V.) wavelength.

The findings could lead to a better understanding of the solar wind’s origins and interactions with the rest of the solar system.

What’s next? Tell me 3 more children’s novels you recall after Harry potter. I have missed another Alice in Wonderland. When was the last time you found a new character that you deeply connect with?Isn’t that the reason? Good things must have been written and are being written. I was deep down in the rabbit hole of thoughts. I thought about starting a story at least. Just to challenge me. I started writing when I discovered the wordInnovations are not faster to reach the ones who lack data and access. Then I came up with a place. Just Another Hobit land or fairyland or what?The ones that were in my mind. 800 words were written. Link to get the ebook: The Friendly Unicorn and His Magical FriendsHere they are:

An important breakthrough in understanding how inflammation is regulated has been made by scientists from Trinity College Dublin. They have just discovered that a key immune alarm protein previously believed to calm down the immune response actually does the opposite.

Their work has numerous potential impacts, especially in the context of understanding and responding to autoimmune disorders and inflammation.

Our immune system serves a very important function in protecting us from infection and injury. However, when immune responses become too aggressive this can lead to damaging inflammation, which occurs in conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. Inflammation is triggered when our bodies produce “alarm proteins” (interleukins), which ramp up our defenses against infection and injury by switching on different components of our immune system.