Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Happy birthday, IBM! You’re 100 years old! Or are you?

It’s true that the businesses that formed IBM began in the late 1800s. But it’s also true that a birth occurred in February 1924, with the renaming of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. as the International Business Machines Corp. And a hundred years after that event, it serves as an important reminder that the world of computing and IT that IBM played a pivotal role in building has a longer history than we are likely to think. “Data processing” was coined over a century ago, while “office appliance” was in use in the 1880s. From the 19th century, through the 20th, and into the 21st, IBM was there, making HP, Microsoft, and Apple appear more like children or grandchildren of the IT world; Facebook, Google, and Twitter/X more like great-grandchildren. So let’s take a moment to contemplate the origins of an iconic corporation.

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Drawing together an array of interdisciplinary studies across archaeology, ecology, anthropology, and evolutionary theory, Erle Ellis, professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, explains the evolution of the cultural practices that have enabled societies to develop unprecedented capabilities to scale up and transform the ecological systems that sustain them.

From using fire to cook food and manage vegetation to the technologies and institutions that support intensive agriculture, increasingly urbanized societies, and global supply chains stretching across the planet, human societies have evolved the social, cultural, and ecological capabilities to reshape the planet and to thrive in the process.

Ellis is a leading scientist investigating the Anthropocene, the current geological age defined by the human transformation of the planet. He is the founder and director of the Anthroecology Lab, which studies relationships between human societies and ecosystems at local to planetary scales with the aim of guiding more sustainable human relations with the biosphere. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Oxford Martin School, where he recently presented his work on Anthropocene opportunities.

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Russia is planning on launching a nuclear weapon into orbit, where it will threaten US national security by either being used to strike the US within a matter of moments or be used to knock out US satellite grids in a single explosion. The US is convening national security meetings to find a way to stop this launch from happening.

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Asteroids are frequently associated with being large chucks of rocks and nothing else. However, a recent study published in The Planetary Science Journal could change that as a team of researchers led by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have discovered water molecules on an asteroid’s surface, marking a first-of-its-kind discovery that could help scientists use asteroids to better understand the formation and evolution of the early solar system and other exoplanetary systems, as well. This is because dry asteroids typically form close to the Sun while icy asteroids form much farther out.

“Asteroids are leftovers from the planetary formation process, so their compositions vary depending on where they formed in the solar nebula,” said Dr. Anicia Arredondo, who is a SwRI Research Scientist and lead author of the study. “Of particular interest is the distribution of water on asteroids, because that can shed light on how water was delivered to Earth.”

For the study, the researchers used the FORCAST (Faint Object infraRed CAmera for the SOFIA Telescope) instrument onboard the SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) aircraft to analyze four asteroids: Iris, (11) Parthenope, (18) Melpomene, and (20) Massalia. In the end, the team discovered levels of water molecules on Iris and Massalia that are consistent with levels of water molecules that have been previously identified on the sunlit portion of the Earth’s Moon using FORCAST and SOFIA, as well. The reason the team could not conclude that Parthenope and Melpomene contained water molecules was due to the unacceptable noise levels within the data.

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Summary: Researchers developed 20 novel recombinant rabies viral vectors that present unparalleled advantages for neural circuit mapping in aging and Alzheimer’s disease studies. These vectors are engineered to highlight microstructural changes in brain neurons through enhanced fluorescent proteins, offering insights into neural networks at both micro and macro scales.

The vectors’ unique ability to target specific neuron components and perform live imaging makes them potent tools for dissecting neural circuitry in healthy and diseased states. This innovation opens new pathways for targeted treatment strategies and will be shared with the neuroscience community through UCI’s Center for Neural Circuit Mapping.

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