Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Startup Deep Fission has come up with a new way to deal with the economic and safety problems of nuclear power that is, to say the least, novel. The idea is to build a reactor that’s under 30 inches (76 cm) wide and stick it down a mile-deep (1.6-km) drill shaft.

With its promise of limitless energy by breaking down matter itself, nuclear power has long held a utopian promise for humanity. However, economic and safety considerations, along with political opposition, have hindered its development – especially in the very countries that developed the technology.

The safety and economic factors are related because the high cost of building nuclear power stations has very little to do with the nuclear technology itself. Nuclear fuel, even with all the processing costs included, only comes to about US$1,663 per kilogram (2.2 lb). Because nuclear fuel has such an incredible energy density, that’s about 0.46 ¢/kWh – and the fuel costs keep dropping as the technology becomes more efficient.

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Researchers at Swansea University, in collaboration with Wuhan University of Technology, Shenzhen University, have developed a pioneering technique for producing large-scale graphene current collectors.

This breakthrough promises to significantly enhance the safety and performance of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), addressing a critical challenge in energy storage technology.

Published in Nature Chemical Engineering, the study details the first successful protocol for fabricating defect-free foils on a commercial scale. These foils offer extraordinary thermal conductivity—up to 1,400.8 W m–1 K–1 —nearly ten times higher than traditional copper and aluminum current collectors used in LIBs.

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Nvidia may have a sizable lead, but money is an excellent motivator, and tech companies old and new are striving to end its dominance of the AI chip market — or at least secure themselves a sizable slice of it.

While some of these groups, including AMD, are following Nvidia’s lead and optimizing GPUs for generative AI, others are exploring alternative chip architectures.

Intel, for example, markets field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) — an architecture with reprogrammable circuitry — as AI accelerators. Startup Groq, meanwhile, is developing a brand new kind of AI chip architecture it calls a “language processing unit” (LPU) — it’s optimized for large language models (LLMs), the kinds of AIs that power ChatGPT and other chatbots.

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ICYMI: Elon Musk’s social media platform X was instructed by a Brazilian court to name a local representative, but failed to do so.

The justice said the platform will stay suspended until it complies with his orders, and also set a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900) for people or companies using…

SAO PAULO — Brazil started blocking Elon Musk’s social media platform X early Saturday, making it largely inaccessible on both the web and through its mobile app after the company refused to comply with a judge’s order.

X missed a deadline imposed by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes to name a legal representative in Brazil, triggering the suspension. It marks an escalation in the monthslong feud between Musk and de Moraes over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation.

To block X, Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, told internet service providers to suspend users’ access to the social media platform. As of Saturday at midnight local time, major operators began doing so.

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Three days ago, an old Falcon 9 booster crashed and exploded while landing on a drone ship during its 23rd landing. This caused SpaceX to halt the launch of another Falcon 9 rocket scheduled a few hours later while they worked on the problem.

3 days later, SpaceX had already corrected the problem and did two more Falcon 9 launches and landings. The 3 days included one day to get permission from the Federal government to launch again.

No other space company moves this fast! Normally, a space company takes a year or two to recover from an accident.

For example, NASA didn’t launch again for over 2 1/2 years after the Challenger accident and again didn’t launch again for over 2 1/2 years after the Columbia accident. These massive delays didn’t even contribute much to safety. For example, the last time a Falcon 9 booster crashed and exploded was over 250 missions ago, more missions than all the Space Shuttles flew in total! The last time SpaceX actually lost customer cargo was 351 flights ago! (The Space Shuttle had a total of 135 flights, 2 being failures that killed a total of 14 people.)

Again, talking about safety, the Columbia blew up because its heat shield tiles failed. Well, in the last Starship test, many heat shield tiles failed although it landed safely, so Elon made a ton of changes to Starship including adding ablative shielding under critical heat shield tiles. The Space Shuttle never got protective ablative shielding, an example of why it had a poor safety record.

The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch the Falcon 9 while the investigation into Wednesday’s mishap wraps up.

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The retina and optic nerve share most of the brain’s biochemical properties – this way, they provide a ‘window’ into the biochemistry of the brain.

To address this lack of technological means for the early detection of TBI, Pola Goldberg Oppenheimer, a Professor in Micro-Engineering and Bio-Nanotechnology at the University of Birmingham, UK, has developed a groundbreaking laser-based, eye-safe device (EyeD) technology. This technology can detect molecular changes that reflect brain damage by scanning the back of the eye with a handheld device.

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