Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Finding and describing new species can be a tricky endeavor. Scientists typically look for distinctive characters that can differentiate one species from another. However, variation is a continuum that is not always easy to quantify. At one extreme, multiple species can look alike even though they are different species—these are known as cryptic species. At the other extreme, a single species can be highly variable, creating an illusion of being different species. But what happens when you encounter both extremes simultaneously?

Herpetologist Dr Chan Kin Onn (previously at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, Singapore, now with the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum, USA) led a study describing a new species of pit viper from Myanmar that is both similar and different from its sister species. The discovery is published in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

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Global decision-makers and the world’s leading financial body predict that artificial intelligence will result in dramatic job losses in 2024 and beyond.

During the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a survey of CEOs revealed that a quarter intend to cut their headcounts by at least five percent “due to generative AI,” per a press release from PwC, the firm that conducted it.

Translation: 25 percent of CEOs are aiming to replace human workers with AI because they think it’ll be cheaper. Vive la future!

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Black holes are powerful gravitational engines. So you might imagine that there must be a way to extract energy from them given the chance, and you’d be right.

Certainly, we could tap into all the heat and kinetic energy of a black hole’s accretion disk and jets, but even if all you had was a black hole in empty space, you could still extract energy from a trick known as the Penrose process.

First proposed by Roger Penrose in 1971, it is a way to extract rotational energy from a black hole. It uses an effect known as frame dragging, where a rotating body twists nearby space in such a way that an object falling toward the body is dragged slightly along the path of rotation.

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A new approach to solving arrays of two-dimensional differential equations may allow researchers to go beyond the one-dimensional oscillator paradigm.

A frictionless pendulum and a pendulum clock behave alike, but they belong to different worlds: Hamiltonian systems and dissipative systems, respectively. In the Hamiltonian world, completely integrable—that is, solvable—systems serve as a mathematical basis for dealing with more general cases that aren’t integrable. An analogous strategy doesn’t work for nonlinear non-Hamiltonian dissipative systems, however. In that case, the best researchers can achieve is partial integrability. Until recently, it was thought that an array of globally coupled oscillators could be partially integrable only if each oscillator has only one degree of freedom. Now Rok Cestnik and Erik Martens, both at Lund University in Sweden, report on a quasi-integrable system consisting of N two-dimensional oscillators described by ordinary differential equations (ODEs) [1].

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“We have not forgotten our science colleagues. In fact, they are important partners for the mission,” Giuseppe Mandorlo, Vigil project manager, said Jan. 29 at the American Meteorological Society annual meeting here.

Vigil will provide space weather data from sun-Earth Lagrange point 5. Data gathered from L5 could provide notice of four to five days of solar winds streaming toward Earth.

Data from Vigil sensors coupled with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Follow-On (SWFO L1) mission destined for L1 promise to improve early warning of solar storms, Mandorlo said.

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WASHINGTON — Quindar has raised an additional $6 million to further development of software to automate operations of satellite constellations.

The company announced Jan. 30 that it closed $6 million in funding as an extension to a $2.5 million seed round it announced a year ago. Venture capital firm Fuse led the round with participation from existing investors Y Combinator and Founders Fund.

Quindar has developed software designed to automate satellite operations. The company says it has validated that system with an unnamed customer who is using it to manage a growing fleet of spacecraft.

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Large energetic laser facilities provide an amazing tool for bringing matter into high energy density states but achieving a good energy conversion requires to optically smooth the high-power laser beams. Optical smoothing reduces the laser spatial and temporal coherences, allowing to mitigate the development of unwanted laser–plasma instabilities (LPI). Two schemes have been mainly developed: polarization smoothing and smoothing by spectral dispersion. Here, we focus on the latter. Smoothing by spectral dispersion consists in broadening the spectrum usually through a sinusoidal phase modulation and dispersing it with an optical grating. It is usually considered that the modulation frequency should be equal to the inverse of the time delay of the grating, because it maximizes the number of uncorrelated speckles patterns at a given bandwidth. However, current optical smoothing designs are still not sufficient for mitigating LPI. Because the optical smoothing system possesses degrees of freedom, we propose to improve the optical smoothing efficiency by a better tuning of those parameters. Considering the Laser Mégajoule optical system framework, we show that an increase in the modulation frequency allows a better efficiency of the smoothing while keeping the same bandwidth. We assess the efficiency by looking at a better mitigation of the stimulated Brillouin scattering that, due to its dangerousness in hohlraums developed for inertial confinement fusion applications in the indirect drive scheme, serves as a witness instability.

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