Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), will be joined by policymakers and members of the health industry to consider how to prepare for the emergence of an unknown pathogen.

Michel Demaré, chair of the board of pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, Brazilian health minister Nisia Trindade Lima and two other executives will also be on the panel, as will Shyam Bishen, a New York-based healthcare executive and member of the WEF’s executive committee.

He told CNBC on Monday that the forum had calculated that preparing the global health system for another pandemic would require “close to a trillion dollars,” describing the topic as a “big question.”

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Information is a valuable commodity. And thanks to technology, there are millions of terabytes of it online.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT are now managing this information on our behalf – collating it, summarising it, and presenting it back to us.

But this “outsourcing” of information management to AI – convenient as it is – comes with consequences. It can influence not only what we think, but potentially also how we think.

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Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed lighter, safer artificial muscles that outshine their predecessors. These advanced actuators boast a unique shell structure and utilize high-permittivity ferroelectric material, storing significant electrical energy.

Operating at lower voltages, the new design offers enhanced safety, waterproofing, and durability. The team claims that the innovation marks a leap forward by enabling safer, more versatile artificial muscles that herald a new era in robotics and prosthetics.

Dubbed HALVE actuators, the new artificial muscles emerge from the collaboration of researchers led by robotics professor Robert Katzschmann at ETH Zurich. HALVE, short for “hydraulically amplified low-voltage electrostatic,” signifies a paradigm shift in actuator design, according to the team.

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Experimental research conducted by a joint team from Los Alamos National Laboratory and D-Wave Quantum Systems examines the paradoxical role of fluctuations in inducing magnetic ordering on a network of qubits.

Using a D-Wave quantum annealing platform, the team found that fluctuations can lower the total energy of the interacting magnetic moments, an understanding that may help to reduce the cost of quantum processing in devices.

“In this research, rather than focusing on the pursuit of superior quantum computer performance over classical counterparts, we aimed at exploiting a dense network of interconnected qubits to observe and understand quantum behavior,” said Alejandro Lopez-Bezanilla, a physicist in the Theoretical division at Los Alamos.

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The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) has recaptured the escaped Japanese macaque that led authorities on a high-profile chase for nearly five days.

The macaque in question escaped its enclosure at Scotland’s Highland Wildlife Park zoo on Sunday, prompting a frenzied search throughout the region. Japanese macaques, of course, aren’t exactly Scottish locals; the event has reportedly been quite the ordeal for the area, especially considering how deft the monkey proved at evading recapture.

“You would think we were chasing an international fugitive,” area local Carl Nagle, who caught sight of the macaque on Sunday night as it chomped down on the Scotsman’s backyard birdseed, told The New York Times earlier this week, “instead of an innocent monkey.”

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Deloitte’s Global Generative AI Innovation Leader Nitin Mittal and Tomorrow CEO Mike Walsh explore the Fifth Industrial Revolution in which the catalyst for societal transformation is the augmentation and expansion of human intelligence.

Given the recency of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it might be a surprise that we are on the verge of an entirely new one. Rapid progress in computation, connectivity, and artificial intelligence (AI)—accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic—has brought forward the timeline for transformation. While prior industrial revolutions were premised on gains in operational efficiency, the next revolution will be powered by minds, not just machines—where the catalyst for societal transformation is the augmentation and expansion of human intelligence.

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A team from TU Dortmund University recently succeeded in producing a highly durable time crystal that lived millions of times longer than could be shown in previous experiments. By doing so, they have corroborated an extremely interesting phenomenon that Nobel Prize laureate Frank Wilczek postulated around ten years ago and which had already found its way into science fiction movies.

The results have been published in Nature Physics.

Crystals or, to be more precise, in space, are periodic arrangements of atoms over large length scales. This arrangement gives crystals their fascinating appearance, with smooth facets like in gemstones.

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The US is dealing with an “out-of-control” epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, according to the National Coalition of STD Directors.

The warning comes after the release of an annual data report on STIs by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The exasperation of public health officials can be felt in the very first sentence of the online announcement.

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