Lifeboat Foundation

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Every day brings us new technological advances, today we’ll explore many of those of such as robotics, automation, rapid delivery, education, medical science, nanotechnology, and more.

Episodes referenced in the Episode:
Power Satellites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBCbdThIJNE
Fusion Power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTJHEdf6yM
Quiet Revolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvH-7XX6pkk.
The Santa Claus Machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmgYoryG_Ss.
Synthetic Meat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NULFAItoBs.
Cyborgs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGYKCTFIZLI
Mind Augmentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQpYOVvU17Y
Mind-Machine Interfaces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCLLzI4R3bc.
Life Extension https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKmdc2AuXec.
The Science of Aging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDpjv2z3dyE
Happily Ever After: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ypfzvQ-Q2w.
Attack of the Drones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oZCUtgnQkE
Advanced Metamaterials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0UZ6-oeiIE
Portable Power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffXqcf48D9Q
The Nuclear Option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aBOhC1c6m8
Moon: Industrial Complex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y47MMNqKGxE
Machine Rebellion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHd22kMa0_w.
The Paperclip Maximizer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mk7NVFz_88
Technological Stagnation: Coming Soon.
Non-Carbon Based Life: Coming Soon.

Continue reading “New Technologies that May be in the Cards” »

Scientists have discovered proof of a strange particle that strangely enough is also its own antiparticle. Even though it was initially postulated 80 years ago, it now seems that it just could be true.

Scientists from the University of California and Stanford University in California performed the research that was published in the journal Science. A particle might have its own antiparticle, according to a notion initially put out in 1937 by Italian scientist Ettore Majorana (who suddenly vanished in 1938). According to him, certain particles in the fermion class, which includes protons, electrons, and neutrons, ought to have unique antiparticles. These particles later came to be known as Majorana particles.

A particle with the same mass as a normal particle but the opposite electric or magnetic properties is said to be an antiparticle. The positron, for instance, is the antiparticle of the electron. If the two come into contact, they destroy one another.

This Encyclopedia Britannica list highlights 10 important dates in the exploration of Pluto, from its discovery in 1930 to the flyby of New Horizons in 2015 and beyond.

Art&science.

In “The Art of Memory”- a 1966 Non-fiction book by British historian, Frances Yates, she explained that artificial memory depended upon the recollection of images. Artificial memory was a kind of “inner writing” that the orator reviewed while presenting a speech, observing the places and their contents, the images, and recovering the memories for things (the subject matter) that those images represented.

Continue reading “Disremembering-Prelude” »

A new type of plasma accelerator combines two previous methods of producing an electron beam into one compact design.

Predictions indicate that wormholes and black holes may have nearly identical polarized light spectra, making these astrophysical objects difficult to distinguish.

Characterized by just three parameters—mass, spin, and charge—black holes could be considered one of the Universe’s simpler astrophysical objects. Yet, the number of open problems related to how the dark behemoths behave also marks them as one of the most enigmatic. One puzzle is why the plasma around black holes glows so brightly. Now, in 3D simulations of the magnetic fields within this plasma, Benjamin Crinquand of Princeton University and colleagues think they have found the answer: the breaking and reconnecting of magnetic-field lines [1]. The simulations predict that, under certain conditions, magnetic-field instabilities can induce radio-wave hot spots that rotate around the shadow of the black hole. This prediction could be tested by future versions of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)—the network of radio dishes used to capture the first black hole images (see Research News: First Image of the Milky Way’s Black Hole).

There are several mechanisms that physicists think could be behind a black hole’s light. One of those is so-called accretion power, where friction-like forces in the infalling plasma heat the plasma, leading to the emission of photons. Models of this process predict constant emission signals, which doesn’t seem to fit with observations of high-intensity bursts of gamma rays from black holes.

Another possibility—and the one that Crinquand and his colleagues consider—is that the energy needed to create this light is extracted from the magnetic field that threads through the plasma. When the lines associated with this field break apart and then reconnect—a process known as magnetic reconnection—magnetic-field energy can convert into plasma-kinetic energy that is then emitted as photons. This model would not replace the accretion one, but act in tandem with it.

A new study presents a new neurocomputational model of the human brain, which might shed light on how the brain develops complex cognitive skills and advance neural artificial intelligence research. An international team of scientists from the Institut Pasteur and Sorbonne University in Paris, the CHU Sainte-Justine, Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, and the University of Montreal conducted the study.

One of Stephen Hawking’s most famous theories has been confirmed to be correct, thanks to space-time ripples caused by the merger of the two distant black holes.

The black hole area theorem, which Hawking derived from Einstein’s theory of general relativity in 1971, states that the surface area of a black hole cannot decrease over time. This rule is of importance to physicists because it appears to set time to run in a certain direction: the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy, or disorder, of a closed system must always rise. Because the entropy of a black hole is proportional to its surface area, both must always increase.

The researchers’ confirmation of the area law, according to the new study, appears to suggest that the properties of black holes are crucial hints to the hidden laws that control the universe. Surprisingly, the area law appears to contradict another of the famous physicist’s proven theorems: that black holes should evaporate over incredibly long time scales, suggesting that determining the source of the conflict between the two theories might reveal new physics.