Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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EVTOL battery analysis reveals unique operating demands. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are taking cleaner transportation to the skies by creating and evaluating new batteries for airborne electric vehicles that take off and land vertically.

These aircraft, commonly called eVTOLs, range from delivery drones to urban air taxis. They are designed to rise into the air like a helicopter and fly using wing-borne lift like an airplane. Compared with helicopters, eVTOLs generally use more rotors spinning at a lower speed, making them both safer and quieter.

The airborne EV’s aren’t just flying cars, and ORNL researchers conclude that eVTOL batteries can’t just be adapted from electric car batteries. So far that has been the dominant approach to the technology, which is mostly in the modeling stage. ORNL researchers took a different tack by evaluating how lithium-ion batteries fare under extremely high power draw.

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Gut bacteria and a diet rich in the amino acid tryptophan can play a protective role against pathogenic E. coli, which can cause severe stomach upset, cramps, fever, intestinal bleeding and renal failure, according to a study published March 13 in Nature.

The research reveals how dietary tryptophan—an amino acid found mostly in animal products, nuts, seeds, whole grains and legumes—can be broken down by gut bacteria into small molecules called metabolites. It turns out a few of these metabolites can bind to a receptor on gut epithelial (surface) cells, triggering a pathway that ultimately reduces the production of proteins that E. coli use to attach to the gut lining where they cause infection. When E. coli fail to attach and colonize the gut, the pathogen benignly moves through and passes out of the body.

The research describes a previously unknown role in the gut for a receptor, DRD2 has otherwise been known as a dopamine (neurotransmitter) receptor in the central and peripheral nervous systems.

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To check out the physics courses that I mentioned (many of which are free!) and to support this channel, go to https://brilliant.org/Sabine/ and create your Brilliant account. The first 200 will get 20% off the annual premium subscription.

In this video I explain how Bohmian mechanics, also known as the Pilot Wave Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics works, and what is good and bad about it. I also tell you a little about the history of the subject because I think it is helpful to understand the situation in which the subject is today.

You can join the chat on this week’s video on Sunday, Oct 18, at 6pm CEST:

Or on Tuesday, Oct 20, at 6pm CEST:

Continue reading “David Bohm’s Pilot Wave Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” | >

Coming hot on the heels of two massive announcements last year, last week Nvidia and Cerebras showed yet again that the pace of computing is still accelerating.

The first CS-2 based Condor Galaxy AI supercomputers went online in late 2023, and already Cerebras is unveiling its successor the CS-3, based on the newly launched Wafer Scale Engine 3, an update to the WSE-2 using 5nm fabrication and boasting a staggering 900,000 AI optimized cores with sparse compute support. CS-3 incorporates Qualcomm AI 100 Ultra processors to speed up inference.

Note: sparse compute is an optimization that takes advantage of the fact that a multiplication by zero always results in zero to skip calculations that could include dozens of operands, one of which is a zero. The result can lead to a huge speedup in performance with sparse data sets like neural networks.

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The first patient with a Neuralink brain-computer implant played Nintendo’s Mario Kart video game with his mind in an impressive new demo video, calling it “lifechanging” at a company-wide meeting that was posted Friday on the social media platform X-formerly-Twitter.

“It’s been a wild ride,” said Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old Neuralink patient, during the celebratory company meeting.

“This is going to change the world,” added Arbaugh, who’s quadriplegic, meaning he’s paralyzed below his neck from a swimming accident, and requires the use of a wheelchair.

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