Lifeboat Foundation

Water is a crucial and irreplaceable part of daily human life. As the world’s population expands and global temperatures rise, the demand for water proportionally increases.

In the last twenty years, worldwide water reserves have been depleting, even though the total storage capacity has expanded due to the building of additional reservoirs.

Led by Dr. Huilin Gao, associate professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M University, researchers used a new approach with satellite data to estimate the storage variations of 7,245 global reservoirs from 1999 to 2018.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll.
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-…n-physics/

Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That’s what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at “fundamental” physics of particles and fields. (Condensed matter and biophysics etc. are just fine.) In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it’s not really a “crisis” in any real sense. But there are ways I think the academic community could handle the problem better, especially by making more space for respectable but minority approaches to deep puzzles.

Continue reading “Mindscape 245 | Solo: The Crisis in Physics” »

In 1,846, astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier sat down and attempted to locate a planet that had never been seen before by humans. Uranus (grow up) had been moving in unexpected ways, as predicted by the Newtonian theory of gravity.

Though the discrepancies were small, there was a difference between the observed orbit of Uranus and the way Newtonian physics predicted its orbit to be. In July, Le Verrier proposed that the difference could be explained by another planet beyond Uranus, and made predictions as to the orbit of this previously unknown body.

Continue reading “Planet Vulcan: The Lost 19th Century World Einstein ‘Erased’ From Our Solar System” »

A makeshift lab in Fresno, California was illegally storing over 1,000 bioengineered mice and disease samples. Ana Kasparian and Wosney Lambre discuss on The Young Turks. https://shoptyt.com/collections/justice-is-coming.

Watch TYT LIVE on weekdays 6–8 pm ET. http://youtube.com/theyoungturks/live.

Continue reading “There Was A NASTY Illegal Lab Situation In California” »

Einstein showed that space and time are essentially the same thing, a single entity called ‘spacetime’. But space and time seem so radically different. How could space and time be literally the same thing? How would spacetime change our understanding of space and time? What are the implications?

Free access to Closer to Truth’s library of 5,000 videos: http://bit.ly/376lkKN

Continue reading “Juan Maldacena — What is Space-Time?” »

Every so often, along comes a story which, like [Fox Mulder] with his unexplained phenomena, we want to believe. EM drives and cold fusion for example would be the coolest of the cool if they worked, but sadly they crumbled when subjected to scientific inquiry outside the labs of their originators. The jury’s still out on the latest example, a claimed room-temperature superconductor, but it’s starting to seem that it might instead be a diamagnetic semiconductor.

We covered some of the story surrounding the announcement of LK-99 and subsequent reports of it levitating under magnetic fields, but today’s installment comes courtesy of a team from Beihang University in Beijing. They’ve published a paper in which they characterize their sample of LK-99, and sadly according to them it’s no superconductor.

Instead it’s a diamagnetic semiconductor, something that in itself probably bears some explanation. We’re guessing most readers will be familiar with semiconductors, but diamagnetic substances possess the property of having an external magnetic field induce an internal magnetic field in the opposite direction. This means that they will levitate in a magnetic field, but not due to the Meissner effect, the property of superconductors which causes magnetic field to flow round their outside. The Beijing team have shown by measuring the resistance of the sample that it’s not a superconductor.

Still a big maybe but it gives them other ideas/possibilities. Hopefully they succeed soon! My mother has glaucoma. It’ll probably be decades before this cure happens though. Unless it can be accelerated which is predicted by Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity is Near. I think other futurists have said similar things though I’m not familiar with all of them, I saw a talk by one for NASA.

In efforts to tackle the leading cause of blindness in developed countries, researchers have recruited nanotechnology to help regrow retinal cells.

Macular degeneration is a form of central vision loss, which has massive social, mobility, and mental consequences. It impacts hundreds of millions of people globally and is increasing in prevalence.

Continue reading “Scientists Regrow Retinal Cells in The Lab Using Nanotechnology” »

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Continue reading “Tryptophan + Niacin: No Additive Effect On NAD, Relative To Niacin Alone” »

Finding the origin of life on Earth has been a goal for scientists for decades. However, like anything, it’s always based on theories and possible evidence, which can often change and evolve as we learn about our world and the universe we are part of.