Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 10,820

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), Aalto University in Finland, and ETH Zurich have demonstrated a prototype device that uses quantum effects and machine learning to measure magnetic fields more accurately than its classical analogues. Such measurements are needed to seek mineral deposits, discover distant astronomical objects, diagnose brain disorders, and create better radars.

“When you study nature, whether you investigate the human brain or a supernova explosion, you always deal with some sort of electromagnetic signals,” explains Andrey Lebedev, a co-author of the paper describing the new device in npj Quantum Information. “So measuring magnetic fields is necessary across diverse areas of science and technology, and one would want to do this as accurately as possible.”

Read more

Every year, various members of the illusion community—which is made up of scientists, neurologists, researchers, and even artists—get together to decide which of their recently created mind-melters deserves the honor of Best Illusion of the Year. This year, Japan’s Kokichi Sugihara claimed the top prize with a deceptively simple illusion that plays with how our mind perceives 3D objects.

This isn’t the first time Kokichi Sugihara, a mathematician at Meiji University in Japan, has won the Best Illusion of the Year honor. Nor is it the first time his fantastic illusions have shown up on Gizmodo. Triply Ambiguous Object, his latest award-winning creation, appears to be a simple 3D structure, with a tiny flag mounted on one of its many corners.

Read more

A common virus seems to be behind a puzzling condition that’s paralyzing children, but uncertainties remain.

A s the summer of 2014 gave way to fall, Kevin Messacar, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, started seeing a wave of children with inexplicable paralysis. All of them shared the same story. One day, they had a cold. The next, they couldn’t move an arm or a leg. In some children, the paralysis was relatively mild, but others had to be supported with ventilators and feeding tubes after they stopped being able to breathe or swallow on their own.

The condition looked remarkably like polio—the viral disease that is on the verge of being eradicated worldwide. But none of the kids tested positive for poliovirus. Instead, their condition was given a new name: acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. That year, 120 people, mostly young children, developed the condition across 34 states. The cases peaked in September and then rapidly tailed off.

Read more

https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

Solar panels might be the energy source of the future, but they also create a problem without an easy solution: what do we do with millions of panels when they stop working?

In November 2016, the Environment Ministry of Japan warned that the country will produce 800,000 tons of solar waste by 2040, and it can’t yet handle those volumes. That same year, the International Renewable Energy Agency estimated that there were already 250,000 metric tons of solar panel waste worldwide and that this number would grow to 78 million by 2050. “That’s an amazing amount of growth,” says Mary Hutzler, a senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research. “It’s going to be a major problem.”

Usually, panels are warrantied for 25 to 30 years and can last even longer. But as the solar industry has grown, the market has been flooded with cheaply made Chinese panels that can break down in as few as five years, according to Solar Power World editor-in-chief Kelly Pickerel.

Read more