Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The non-nuclear weapons states must resist that pressure, and continue their historic efforts to protect humanity from the grave threat posed by nuclear weapons. And the citizens of nuclear weapons states must hold their governments accountable for their unconscionable refusal to meet their treaty obligations and negotiate the elimination of these weapons, which are the greatest threat to the security of all peoples throughout the world.

The United Nations has the opportunity to take a major step toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. It is an opportunity that must not be lost.

More than four decades ago, the nations with nuclear arsenals and the world’s non-nuclear states entered into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); the nuclear states — the US, Russia, UK, France and China — pledged that if the states that did not have nuclear weapons agreed not to develop them, they would enter into good-faith negotiations toward the elimination of their nuclear arsenals. During the ensuing years, the three nations that did not sign the NPT — namely India, Pakistan, and Israel — developed nuclear weapons. All of the non-nuclear weapons states that signed the treaty except North Korea have kept their pledge.

Unfortunately, the nuclear powers have not kept their part of the bargain. While the US and Russia have dismantled many of their nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War, they retain thousands of them, enough to destroy the world many times over.

Continue reading “6 Nobel Laureates: Stop the Nuclear Insanity” | >

Is the future really going to be so bad that you wouldn’t want to live longer? Hardly!

#aging

The future looks grim? That’s quite an interesting claim, and I wonder whether there is any evidence to support it. In fact, I think there’s plenty of evidence to believe the opposite, i.e. that the future will be bright indeed. However, I can’t promise the future will certainly be bright. I am no madame clearvoyant, but neither are doomsday prophets. We can all only speculate, no matter how ‘sure’ pessimists may say they are about the horrible dystopian future that allegedly awaits us. I’m soon going to present the evidence of the bright future I believe in, but before I do, I would like to point out a few problems in the reasoning of the professional catastrophists who say that life won’t be worth living and there’s thus no point in extending it anyway.

First, we need to take into account that the quality of human life has been improving, not worsening, throughout history. Granted, there still are things that are not optimal, but there used to be many more. Sure, it sucks that your pet-peeve politician has been appointed president of your country (any reference to recent historical events is entirely coincidental), and it sucks that poverty and famine haven’t yet been entirely eradicated, but none of these implies that things will get worse. There’s a limit to how long a president can be such, and poverty and famine are disappearing all over the world. It takes time for changes to take place, and the fact the world isn’t perfect yet doesn’t mean it will never be. Especially people who are still chronologically young should appreciate the fact that by the time they’re 80 or 90, a long time will have passed, and the world will certainly have changed in the meanwhile.

Continue reading “Why live longer when the future looks so grim?” | >

Physicists engaged in the construction of a nuclotron-based ion collider (NICA) facility in Dubna, outside Moscow plan to combine efforts to create of a unique electron positron collider at Novosibirsk’s Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics. Promoters say the project would allow Russia to take the lead in a very promising niche of particle physics.

Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics Deputy Director Yevgeny Levichev discussed Russian physicists’ ambitious plans with Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency on Tuesday.

The Institute plans to create the Super Tau Charm Factory, a particle accelerator which would study the collision of beams of electrons (matter) and positrons (antimatter) in an effort to help to identify phenomena and processes beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.

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Germany had so much renewable energy last week that customers were briefly being paid to consume electricity, it has been reported.

As spotted by Quartz, who cite data from German think tank Agora Energiewende, fair weather and high winds on Sunday 8 May saw wind, solar and hydroelectric power plants producing 54.6GW of power, roughly 80 per cent of the 68.4GW of power being consumed across the country at that time.

As a result, the price of power plummeted, and went negative from 7AM to 5PM, bottoming out at -€130 per MWh at 1PM. Energy providers were essentially being paid by producers to take the electricity off their hands.

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In Brief Scientists from the Imperial College have discovered that light could possibly exist in a previously unknown form, as a mix with a single electron. This interaction creates light that has the properties of both particles.

For something that seems so integral to our lives, we are still discovering many things about light. Its most fundamental properties still astound us, and its interactions with other particles are full of surprises. Case in point, scientists from the Imperial College in London seem to have just discovered a new form of light, one made by combining light with a single electron particle.

This new form of light carries properties of both particles.

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In Brief DARPA has created self-steering bullets which use a real-time optical guidance system to hit both moving and accelerating targets with high accuracy.

You may have seen the movie Wanted. Sure, the movie was almost unrecognizable from the Mark Millar comic book series it was very loosely based on. But that didn’t stop anyone from pretending to be a bullet-curving, badass, supervillain-with-a-heart sniper like Angelina Jolie after seeing it.

But the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) new self-steering bullet is about to change the pretend part into reality.

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“By comparing clonal and sexual daughters from the same mothers, we found sexually produced offspring get less sick,” Auld said.

PARIS – From an evolutionary perspective, sexual reproduction could be seen as a nonstarter. Compared to cloning, which also exists in nature, it is a major waste of time and energy.

Think of the ungainly, preening peacock — an easy snack for tigers and wild dogs — strutting his stuff to impress the ladies.

Even without predators, sex and its attendant rituals can be dangerous, such as when stags butt heads or male lions fight for mating rights.

Continue reading “Sex exists to avoid disease, study demonstrates” | >

Last year – although a rather grim one by other measures – was a splendid one for research. From gravitational waves to cooing dinosaurs, we’ve uncovered a lot about the world around us, but as a remarkable new study has revealed, there’s a lot within us we’ve yet to discover too.

Writing in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology, scientists have officially announced the discovery of a new organ inside the human body. That’s right, there’s a brand new organ hiding in our abdomen and it’s only just been classified.

Known as the mesentery (meaning “in the middle of the intestines”), it can be found in our digestive systems. Leonardo da Vinci actually gave one of the first descriptions of it back in the day, but until around 2012 it was thought to be a series of separate structures keeping the intestines attached to the abdominal wall, like a series of support girders.

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