Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Physics is the business of figuring out the structure of the world. So are our brains. But sometimes physics comes to conclusions that are in direct conflict with concepts fundamental to our minds, such as the realness of space and time. How do we tell who’s correct? Are time and space objective realities or human-invented concepts?

Episode Companion Playlist.

Continue reading “What’s Your Brain’s Role in Creating Space & Time?” | >

Hydrogen energy promises a clean and sustainable future, but its production often depends on expensive platinum-based catalysts, making it costly. The industry needs more affordable alternatives to platinum to make hydrogen energy more viable.

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Researchers from the Tokyo University of Science (TUS) have developed a new catalyst called bis(diimino)palladium coordination nanosheets (PdDI). These low-cost palladium-based nanosheets match platinum’s performance in producing hydrogen.

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France just achieved a nuclear fusion breakthrough, making limitless energy virtually inevitable.

In a major achievement, France’s WEST Tokamak reactor has maintained a plasma reaction for over 22 minutes, setting a new world record in the quest for sustainable fusion energy.

énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA), the experiment surpassed China’s previous record of 1,066 seconds, reaching 1,337 seconds of sustained plasma. + This milestone is a major step toward commercial fusion power, which promises unlimited, clean energy by harnessing the same process that powers the Sun. The challenge lies in achieving a self-sustaining reaction while maintaining extreme temperatures of up to 150 million°C (270 million°F) without damaging reactor components.

While WEST itself won’t become a commercial reactor, the data gathered will be instrumental in developing ITER, the world’s largest fusion project, currently under construction in southern France.

CEA scientists plan to extend reaction times further, increasing power levels and plasma stability. If successful, these advancements could bring humanity closer to realizing the long-held dream of clean, virtually limitless energy, potentially transforming global power generation in the future.

Continue reading “Nuclear fusion: WEST beats the world record for plasma duration!” | >

Researchers across 14 medical centers in China, including Peking University People’s Hospital, have found that an investigational drug, berberine ursodeoxycholate (HTD1801), significantly lowered blood sugar levels and improved metabolic and liver health in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D). The findings and an invited commentary, both published in JAMA Network Open, suggest that HTD1801 could serve as a new oral treatment option for T2D and its related complications.

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In this work, I present a coherent and comprehensive argument for the nature of consciousness as the inherent ground of phenomena backed by experimental evidence confirming the predictions make by this hypothesis.

This argument makes its point by establishing an equivalence between all observers, generating a set of observational and mathematical predictions which were then tested and confirmed.

Furthermore, when the core tenet of the argument is accepted, it provides clear, testable explanations for most of the curently unresolved questions regarding consciousness, intelligence, and the nature of observed phenomena.

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An arms race is unfolding in our cells: Transposons, also known as jumping genes or mobile genetic elements as they can replicate and reinsert themselves in the genome, threaten the cell’s genome integrity by triggering DNA rearrangements and causing mutations. Host cells, in turn, protect their genome using intricate defense mechanisms that stop transposons from jumping.

Now, for the first time, a retrotransposon has been caught in action inside a cell: Refining cryo-Electron Tomography (cryo-ET) techniques, scientists imaged the retrotransposon copia in the egg chambers of the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster at sub-nanometer resolution. The paper is published in the journal Cell.

Among the international team of scientists achieving this detailed visualization are three scientists with Vienna BioCenter ties: Sven Klumpe, currently in the laboratory of Jürgen Plitzko at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, will join IMBA and IMP to build a group as a Joint Fellow; Julius Brennecke, a Senior Group Leader at IMBA, the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences; and Kirsten Senti, staff scientist in the Brennecke group. Also involved in this collaboration is the group of Martin Beck at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt.

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Researchers have developed a reactor that pulls carbon dioxide directly from the air and converts it into sustainable fuel, using sunlight as the power source.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, say their solar-powered reactor could be used to make fuel to power cars and planes, or the many chemical and pharmaceutical products we rely on. It could also be used to generate fuel in remote or off-grid locations.

Unlike most carbon capture technologies, the reactor developed by the Cambridge researchers does not require fossil-fuel-based power, or the transport and storage of carbon dioxide, but instead converts atmospheric CO2 into something useful using sunlight. The results are reported in the journal Nature Energy.

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In today’s AI news, CoreWeave has acquired AI developer platform Weights & Biases. According to The Information, CoreWeave spent $1.7 Billion on the transaction. Weights & Biases was valued at $1.25 Billion in 2023. The acquisition extends CoreWeave’s purpose-built cloud platform by enabling an end-to-end experience for customers, enhancing functionality for the world’s leading AI labs and enterprises to build, tune and deploy AI applications.

S Turing Award — often called the Nobel Prize of computer science — is going to Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, the pioneers of a key approach that underlies much of today Then, a team of researchers at Zoom has developed a breakthrough technique that could dramatically reduce the cost and computational resources needed for AI systems to tackle complex reasoning problems, Chain of draft (CoD), enables large language models (LLMs) to solve problems with minimal words — using as little as 7.6% of the text required by current methods while maintaining or even improving accuracy.

And soon, all businesses will be able to use Meta’s AI to power live, 24/7 customer service that can interact with customers on behalf of businesses on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Meta announced advancements in business AI—including the customer service AI agent that will make purchases and can respond to voice prompts from a user.

In videos, say goodbye to manual contract processing! IBM’s Brandon Swink explores how Generative AI, ECM, and Orchestration Hubs streamline document management and improve efficiency. Discover how these technologies transform your approach to complex documents.

And, in this episode of Top of Mind, Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Daryl Plummer explores the emerging world of guardian agents — AI designed to monitor other AI. Learn how guardian agents will become critical for organizations deploying AI agents for quality control, system observation and security from rogue AI behavior.

Continue reading “CoreWeave Acquires AI Developer Platform Weights & Biases For Reported

In today’s AI news, CoreWeave has acquired AI developer platform Weights & Biases. According to The Information, CoreWeave spent $1.7 Billion on the transaction. Weights & Biases was valued at $1.25 Billion in 2023. The acquisition extends CoreWeave’s purpose-built cloud platform by enabling an end-to-end experience for customers, enhancing functionality for the world’s leading AI labs and enterprises to build, tune and deploy AI applications.

S Turing Award — often called the Nobel Prize of computer science — is going to Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, the pioneers of a key approach that underlies much of today Then, a team of researchers at Zoom has developed a breakthrough technique that could dramatically reduce the cost and computational resources needed for AI systems to tackle complex reasoning problems, Chain of draft (CoD), enables large language models (LLMs) to solve problems with minimal words — using as little as 7.6% of the text required by current methods while maintaining or even improving accuracy.

And soon, all businesses will be able to use Meta’s AI to power live, 24/7 customer service that can interact with customers on behalf of businesses on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Meta announced advancements in business AI—including the customer service AI agent that will make purchases and can respond to voice prompts from a user.

In videos, say goodbye to manual contract processing! IBM’s Brandon Swink explores how Generative AI, ECM, and Orchestration Hubs streamline document management and improve efficiency. Discover how these technologies transform your approach to complex documents.

And, in this episode of Top of Mind, Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Daryl Plummer explores the emerging world of guardian agents — AI designed to monitor other AI. Learn how guardian agents will become critical for organizations deploying AI agents for quality control, system observation and security from rogue AI behavior..7 Billion” | >