Lifeboat Foundation

Some recent progress on our backup of civilization project …

A SECRET project to back-up planet Earth in the event of apocalypse is underway in a James Bond-style villain bunker in the Swiss Alps.

As a hotbed of conflict explodes around the globe with fears of all-out World War Three mounting, a US firm has installed a British-designed “superman” memory disk containing a compendium of human history.

Continue reading “Inside secret Bond-style Alpine vault ‘backing up Earth’ in case of WW3” »

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Evidence that amyloid-beta particles are infectious and cause dementia in rare cases involving people who got growth hormone from cadavers.

Aβ is described as “prion like”…a seed can lead to more Aβ

The findings support a controversial hypothesis that proteins related to the neurodegenerative disease can be ‘seeded’ in the brain through material taken from cadavers.

A collaborative research team co-led by Professor Shuang ZHANG, the Interim Head of the Department of Physics, The University of Hong Kong (HKU), along with Professor Qing DAI from National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, China, has introduced a solution to a prevalent issue in the realm of nanophotonics – the study of light at an extremely small scale. Their findings, recently published in the prestigious academic journal Nature Materials, propose a synthetic complex frequency wave (CFW) approach to address optical loss in polariton propagation. These findings offer practical solutions such as more efficient light-based devices for faster and more compact data storage and processing in devices such as computer chips and data storage devices, and improved accuracy in sensors, imaging techniques, and security systems.

Surface plasmon polaritons and phonon polaritons offer advantages such as efficient energy storage, local field enhancement, and high sensitivities, benefitting from their ability to confine light at small scales. However, their practical applications are hindered by the issue of ohmic loss, which causes energy dissipation when interacting with natural materials.

Over the past three decades, this limitation has impeded progress in nanophotonics for sensing, superimaging, and nanophotonic circuits. Overcoming ohmic loss would significantly enhance device performance, enabling advancement in sensing technology, high-resolution imaging, and advanced nanophotonic circuits.

A bizarre object discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope may be a pair of ‘rogue’ planets ― but a new study finds they are emitting radio signals rarely seen from other worlds.

China Telecom claims it has built the country’s first supercomputer constructed entirely with Chinese-made components and technology (via ITHome). Based in Wuhan, the Central Intelligent Computing Center supercomputer is reportedly built for AI and can train large language models (LLM) with trillions of parameters. Although China has built supercomputers with domestic hardware and software before, going entirely domestic is a new milestone for the country’s tech industry.

Exact details on the Central Intelligent Computing Center are scarce. What’s clear so far: The supercomputer is purportedly made with only Chinese parts; it can train AI models with trillions of parameters; and it uses liquid cooling. It’s unclear exactly how much performance the supercomputer has. A five-exaflop figure is mentioned in ITHome’s report, but to our eyes it seems that the publication was talking about the total computational power of China Telecom’s supercomputers, and not just this one.

The study shows that analyzing ancient organisms can help unravel the evolutionary history of life on Earth, Craig said.

“Positively identifying any fossil over a billion years old is inherently challenging. For example, the oldest dinosaur fossils are only about 250 million years old, and the ones in this study are almost seven times older,” he said. “That’s why research such as this is exceptionally difficult, but highly rewarding, and when conclusions such as the ones in this study can be reached with high confidence, it represents a significant discovery.”

For example, a video of a swinging pendulum would look the same if you played it backward. We see time as irreversible because of another law of nature, the second law of thermodynamics. This law says that the disorder in a system always increases. If the broken glass reassembled itself, the disorder would decrease.

The same law applies to the aging of materials. But physicists from Darmstadt have found out that this is not the case. They have discovered that the motion of molecules in glass or plastic can be reversed in time if you look at it from a special angle.

Findings show that older people’s pupils constricted less in response to color chroma, particularly for green and magenta hues, suggesting a decline in color sensitivity with age.