Lifeboat Foundation

Earth is getting a special celestial visitor this week in the shape of comet C/2018 Y1 Iwamoto — this sparkling, green-hued hunk of ice and minerals is already visible in the night sky through telescopes and even binoculars.

It’s the first binocular comet of 2019 – which means a comet that’s visible from Earth through binoculars, as you might have guessed from the name; we only get a few of them each year.

This particular comet was only discovered a couple of months ago – credit due to amateur astronomer Masayuki Iwamoto – and the icy rock is calculated to take 1,371 years to orbit the Sun on a stretched out, elliptical path.

Continue reading “Don’t Miss This Newly Discovered, Bright Green Comet Streaking Past Earth This Week” »

They made the detections with TESS data.

Yellowstone National Park sits atop a supervolcano that’s considered one of the greatest volcano threats. But NASA has an idea to stop an eruption.

Even astronauts have to deal with plumbing problems.

The Hawaii-based James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) has discovered a stellar flare 10 billion times more powerful than the Sun’s solar flares, a history-making discovery that could unlock decades-old questions about the origin of our own Sun and planets, giving insight into how these celestial bodies were born.

In a 2018 Science paper, co-authored with Jacob Bellmund, Christian Doeller, and Edvard Moser—neuroscientists from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and the Kavli Institute in Trondheim—Gärdenfors, of the University of Lund, buttressed his idea with recent advances in brain science. He argued that the brain represents concepts in the same way that it represents space and your location, by using the same neural circuitry for the brain’s “inner GPS.”

“Cognitive spaces are a way of thinking about how our brain might organize our knowledge of the world,” Bellmund said. It’s an approach that concerns not only geographical data, but also relationships between objects and experience. “We were intrigued by evidence from many different groups that suggested that the principles of spatial coding in the hippocampus seem to be relevant beyond the realms of just spatial navigation,” Bellmund said. The hippocampus’ place and grid cells, in other words, map not only physical space but conceptual space. It appears that our representation of objects and concepts is very tightly linked with our representation of space.

Gärdenfors’ theory highlights a fruitful path, not only for cognitive scientists, but for neurologists and machine-learning researchers.

Continue reading “New Evidence for the Strange Geometry of Thought” »

Mars One is done.

“The company that aimed to put humanity on the red planet has met an unfortunate, but wholly-expected end. Mars One Ventures, the for-profit arm of the Mars One mission was declared bankrupt back in January but wasn’t reported until a keen-eyed Redditor found the listing.”

Fancied being part of a reality TV show about colonizing Mars? Sorry.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope doesn’t usually get much assistance from its celestial subjects — but to take this image, the telescope opted for teamwork and made good use of a fascinating cosmic phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. See the result of this teamwork: https://go.nasa.gov/2SF31sW

God” according to Rev Benek is working thru people like me who are pioneers in the AI and uploading field — and I am developing a Zenet interface for artificial death simulating the Khemetic afterlife — not a Judeo-Christian version. Osiris is a key deity in Zenet, and has a special place in Mormonism btw. There are good technical reasons for using Zenet. Objectives for the dead are slightly different than play strategy for the living in Zenet (having already passed over the dangerous waters). It is the Bridge between Worlds perfect for artificial-death, no biblical or koranic account exists how to communicate between living and deceased. “The betterment of mankind” imo involves the Restoration of Ma’at. And the Egyptian afterlife is available to all races (not just chosen people) — “Hour Five is one of the most complex hours within the composition. In the upper registers, the gods are portrayed with a surveying cord, because the deceased are allotted space (in the form of fields) within this hour. The deceased are also allotted time, and hence the gods also carry the body of a serpent and the hieroglyphs meaning “lifetime” in the lower register. In order to accomplish this, the Apophis fiend, known as “the Retreater, must once again be battled and fettered. Behind Apophis we notice the ba-souls of the blessed dead, and at the beginning of the lower register are found the four ”races” of mankind, including Egyptians, Asiatics, Nubians and Libyans. Each race is represented by four individual figures, who are assured existence in the afterlife. They are placed in the care of Horus and Sakhmet. It should be noted that the Great Hymn of Akhenaten, Aten is said to care even for foreign people, and hence, they are sheltered in the realm of the dead, according to Even if the uploading doesn’t take, this belt and braces offering still offers (conventional religious) Immortality with Horus, Amen, Isis, Thoth and the gang. Why does it matter which ”God(s)” — so long as we make it to the (1st) afterlife with the bonus of communication with the living?

Funerary Text from Egypt’s New Kingdom.