Lifeboat Foundation

AI technology generates original proteins from scratch.

I have said 3D printed houses could help with the housing crisis.

“Project Milestone serves as the world’s first 3D printed concrete “commercial housing project,” according to its maker.”

But not according to ICON 3D, and the link below shows Africa’s largest 3D printing housing project in Kenya. I have been talking about 3D printed houses for years. Its good people have caught up.

Continue reading “A couple just moved into a 3D printed concrete home for about $1,400 a month— see what it’s like to live in” »

Since the focus on Martian exploration ramped up in the mid-1990s, most of the familiarity with the Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) sequence of landers and rovers to the surface of other planets has taken place against the backdrop of Mars.

But when NASA‘s upcoming Dragonfly mission arrives at Titan for its own EDL, it will experience a starkly different set of conditions that both add new complexity and ease some structural considerations for the system that will deliver the rotorcraft into Titan’s atmosphere.

Circa 2013 face_with_colon_three

A ten-dimensional theory of gravity makes the same predictions as standard quantum physics in fewer dimensions.

Year 2017 face_with_colon_three

A basic question [1] in the study of the gauge-gravity duality is this: which field theories have a gravity dual? In the case of applications to actual strongly coupled systems such as the Quark–Gluon Plasma [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], this question becomes: does every realistic strongly coupled system have such a dual? To settle this, one needs to examine the most extreme cases. The most extreme strongly-coupled systems currently accessible to experiment are probably (see below) the plasmas produced by collisions of heavy ions at the LHC [7], [8] ; so one needs to consider whether holography works in this case.

In [9] we adduced evidence suggesting that it does not. The problem is a very fundamental one: it appears that the purported gravity dual in some cases does not exist when one attempts to interpret it (as one ultimately must [10]) as a string-theoretic system.

Continue reading “On the existence of a holographic description of the LHC quark–gluon plasmas” »

Year 2022, this basically could shield the earth or Mars from solar radiation if we needed it. 😗

First experimental measurement of pure electron outflows associated with magnetic reconnection driven by electron dynamics in laser-produced plasmas.

Magnetic reconnections in laser-produced plasmas have been investigated in order to better understand the microscopic electron dynamics, which are relevant to space and astrophysical phenomena. Osaka University scientists, in collaboration with researchers at the National Institute for Fusion Science and other universities, have reported the direct measurements of pure electron outflows relevant to magnetic reconnection using a high-power laser, Gekko XII, at the Institute of Laser Engineering, Osaka University in Japan. Their findings will be published today (June 30, 2022) in Springer Nature, Scientific Reports.

Continue reading “High-Power Laser Creates a Miniature Magnetosphere” »

Is it a new form of recycling or a pipe dream?

Using the European VLBI Network (EVN), an international team of astronomers has performed high-resolution imaging observations of a powerful and radio-loud high-redshift quasar known as J2102+6015. Results of the observational campaign, presented January 18 on the preprint server arXiv, could help us better understand the nature of this peculiar quasar and other powerful radio sources.

Quasars, or quasi-stellar objects (QSOs), are extremely luminous active galactic nuclei (AGN) containing supermassive central black holes with accretion disks. Their redshifts are measured from the strong spectral lines that dominate their visible and ultraviolet spectra.

Astronomers are especially interested in finding new high-redshift quasars (at redshift higher than 4.5) as they are the most luminous and most distant compact objects in the observable universe. Spectra of such QSOs can be used to estimate the mass of supermassive black holes that constrain the evolution and formation models of quasars. Therefore, high-redshift quasars could serve as a powerful tool to probe the early universe.

Some philosophers search for the mark of the cognitive: a set of individually necessary and jointly suΜcient conditions identifying all and only the instances of cognition. They claim the mark is necessary to answer diΜcult questions concerning the nature and distribution of cognition.

Here, I will argue that, as things stand, given the current landscape of cognitive science, we are not able to identify a mark of the cognitive. I proceed as follows. First, I clarify some factors motivating the search for the mark of the cognitive, thereby highlighting the desiderata the mark is supposed to satisfy. Then, I highlight a tension in the literature over the mark. Given the literature, it is not clear whether the search aims for a mark capturing the intuitive notion of cognition or a genuine scientiΞc kind.