Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 10283

Every now and again you run into an astronomical object where everything about it is mind blowing. And I get to share it with you! Let me introduce you to a binary star that will crush your imagination and make you realize the Universe is way cooler than you knew.

A few million years ago, and 6,000 light years from Earth, two stars were born out of the gas and dust in the galaxy in a cluster with many other stars. These two formed together, so close their mutual and growing gravity bound them together, forcing them to orbit one another. And they grew huge: By the time they switched on and became true stars, they each had more than two dozen times the mass of the Sun.

They were monsters. Huge, hot, and incredibly luminous, each blasting out as much as 100,000 times as much energy as the Sun does. Replace the Sun with one of these beasts and the Earth would evaporate like an ice cube on a scorching hot skillet.

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Some thoughts on rejuvenation, the world it’ll leave behind, and the world it may create.

Human beings like feeling safe. The unknown always presents a certain percentage of risk, though probably much less so today than in the past. Back in the days of our primitive ancestors, leaving an old way for a new one might more easily have led to death than it can today, so it’s no surprise that we have evolved to be suspicious of novelties coming our way; this might well be one reason why enacting change is not very easy for our species.

Sometimes, what we already have is not the best arrangement; other options might prove better, though they do come with some uncertainty. Will the new option really bring benefits? Will it be worth the cons of discarding the old way of doing things? How much work will it take to move from the old way to the new one? Will the new way only bring benefits, or will it have challenges and problems as well?

For our aforementioned ancestors, the choices to be made were relatively simple but had potentially life-threatening consequences. Should I try this new berry that I’ve never seen before? Should I trust this stranger? Should I venture into this new territory? In such primitive times, it’s likely that the boldest among them didn’t live long enough to pass on their boldness, making diffidence toward novelty a valuable trait that we still possess today. The only problem is that this isn’t the Paleolithic anymore; choices are not so clear-cut, and atavistic instincts are largely inadequate to properly weigh our options in present-day complex situations, as we live in an age when change is constant, fast, and often dramatic and inevitable.

Continue reading “Thoughts on the world behind and the world ahead” | >

Johnson and Johnson recently announced that it was halting a clinical trial for a new Alzheimer’s drug after safety issues emerged. This latest failure adds to the dozens of large, costly clinical trials that have shown no effect in treating this devastating disease.

The growing list of failures should give us pause for thought – have we got the causes of Alzheimer’s all wrong?

In the first analysis of the disease, the German physician, Alois Alzheimer, noted odd changes in the brain of a patient who died of the condition. Alzheimer identified two kinds of protein aggregates that are not found in younger brains: plaques that are found between brain cells and tangles that are found inside brain cells.

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Keith’s note: China is getting ready to launch a new space station which, when complete, will be on par with Mir with many capabilities similar to those offered by the ISS. China is openly seeking governmental and commercial participation. Meanwhile they are about to land a rover on the far side of the Moon as part of a methodical plan to land humans there.

Meanwhile NASA is trying to rid itself of the ISS through various half-hearted efforts to commercialize this amazing resource that rely on smoke and mirrors and faith-based funding plans. NASA is also puffing itself up again for the third time in less than 20 years to #GoBackToTheMoon or something with budgets that do not come close to making such a thing possible. Oh by the way #JourneyToMars is still on the books.

One would think that the prudent thing would be to leverage our interests with those of China as we have done with Russia and many other nations around the world. But short-sighted legislation and targeted xenophobia currently prevents this.

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What would it say about the fundamental structure of the universe?

Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider have made a major new detection of the famous Higgs boson, this time catching details on a rare interaction with one of the heaviest fundamental particles known to physics — the top quark.

The brief mingling of these incredibly rare encounters has provided physicists with important information on the nature of mass, and whether there is more to physics than the existing model predicts.

Results produced by the ATLAS and CMS experiments from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) help confirm the strength of the bond between Higgs bosons and top quarks.

Continue reading “The LHC Has Detected The Higgs Boson Again, This Time With a Massive Twist” | >

From the figures above, the past year has highlighted how pretty much anything can be put on the blockchain as a way of raising capital. But as it provides access to greater liquidity to investors rather than a conventional equity investment, it’s also demonstrating how a tokenized world is steadily being seen as the norm.

As Krauwer states, though, for an actual token economy to emerge, buyers would need insight in what they buy. “Token owners would need to know how they can keep track of the underlying asset. In addition, they would need a way to store their tokens and trade them with others.”

Not only that, but sellers would benefit from such a platform that would capture their assets in a token and connect them with possible buyers. Additionally, providing some type of quality assurance on top of the tokens would help too.

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When the disembodied cockroach leg twitched, Yeongin Kim knew he had finally made it.

A graduate student at Stanford, Kim had been working with an international team of neuroengineers on a crazy project: an artificial nerve that acts like the real thing. Like sensory neurons embedded in our skin, the device—which kind of looks like a bendy Band-Aid—detects touch, processes the information, and sends it off to other nerves.

Yup, even if that downstream nerve is inside a cockroach leg.

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Very promising since “Identifying what changes are happening in the brain when interventions successfully reduce depressive symptoms could allow us to create more effective, pharmaceutical-free approaches to help alleviate depression in people who experience chronic traumatic brain injury symptoms,” said study author Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman, founder and chief director of the Center for BrainHealth.

Images show prefrontal connectivity patterns after cognitive training in individuals who suffered traumatic brain injury. Kihwan Han et al (2018) _____ Cognitive training reduces depression, rebuilds injured brain structure & connectivity after traumatic brain injury (UT-Dallas release): “New research from the Center.

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