Lifeboat Foundation

Consciousness is a terrible curse. Or so says a character in screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich. Part theater of the absurd and part neuroscience fiction, the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s work captures the splintering between what we perceive and what we feel as our brains grapple with multiple layers of reality. Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, one of the world’s leading sleep researchers, casts new light on the science of the mind, probing where and how consciousness is generated in the brain. Watch this spellbinding conversation between Kaufman, Tononi, and moderator Alan Alda as they explore and explain the art, science, and mystery of consciousness.

The World Science Festival gathers great minds in science and the arts to produce live and digital content that allows a broad general audience to engage with scientific discoveries. Our mission is to cultivate a general public informed by science, inspired by its wonder, convinced of its value, and prepared to engage with its implications for the future.

Continue reading “Consciousness: Explored and Explained” »

A giant asteroid’s impact is considered the likely cause of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs almost 66 million years ago.

While there is no potential harm from an asteroid on the Earth at present, it is still important to keep our defense system ready in order to prevent catastrophic consequences such as impacts by deflecting trajectories of asteroids if one is ever discovered.

With this aim, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, the world’s first planetary defense test mission, last November. DART is the first-ever mission dedicated to investigating and demonstrating one method of asteroid deflection by changing an asteroid’s motion in space through kinetic impact. In summary, it is to collide with an asteroid and deflect it from its orbit in order to provide valuable information for the development of such a planetary defense system.

This episode focuses on many of the problems with travel between stars at relativistic velocities, like collision avoidance, radiation, ship geometry, armor, and point-defense.

We will also look at some of the possible engine types and discuss realistic maximum speeds they offer.

Continue reading “Interstellar Travel Challenges” »

Cortical Labs takes neurons from mice and put them on chips, then teaches them how to play ping pong.

Can you make smarter AI systems by combining biological neurons with silicon chips? In this episode of The AI Show with John Koetsier, we’re going to chat with Hon Weng Chong, CEO and co-founder of Cortical Labs and Andy Kitchen, the company’s CTO, about biological AI: mixing real brain cells with silicon computer chips.

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It looks like algorithms can write academic papers about themselves now. We gotta wonder: how long until human academics are obsolete?

In an editorial published by Scientific American, Swedish researcher Almira Osmanovic Thunström describes what began as a simple experiment in how well OpenAI’s GPT-3 text generating algorithm could write about itself and ended with a paper that’s currently being peer reviewed.

Continue reading “Researcher Tells AI to Write a Paper About Itself, Then Submits It to Academic Journal” »

Summary: A new robotic system can identify volatile organic compounds associated with diseases by analyzing bodily emissions.

Source: Tsinghua University Press.

Scientists are working on diagnostic techniques that could sniff out chemical compounds from breath, sweat, tears and other bodily emissions and that act as fingerprints of thousands of diseases.

Mars may be more like some areas of Earth than we think.

For the first time ever, NASA rover Curiosity has taken a crucial measure of an ingredient necessary for life in Mars’ rocks: Organic carbon.

Do you remember the days in schooling when we attended math classes? The most common question was when we would ever use trigonometric functions or other mumbo-jumbo in real life.

How is it possible for a virtual world to create the exact replica of a person in zeroes and ones? There is not just one technology aiding in creating the fascinating world of Metaverse and IoT is one amongst them.

Metaverse though considered, a world under construction, has already created exciting promises. An individual can replicate his identity and even enhance them. How is it possible for a virtual world to create the exact replica of a person in zeroes and ones? There is not just one technology aiding in creating the fascinating world of Metaverse and IoT is one amongst them.

IoT connects digital devices via sensors and gadgets. It connects voice-activated speakers, medical gadgets, thermostats, and weather sensors, to data sources. Metaverse’s IoT applications collect and distribute data from the physical world to create an accurate representation of an object. A person’s replica in a Metaverse might have a unique biophysical response for example when the real person relocates to a place with different weather.

3D environments become easy and seamless to adapt in Metaverse as it connects a range of real-life devices through IoT. Making simulations within the Metaverse, particularly with digital twins becomes a lot easier making the physical and digital worlds indistinguishable all while providing a tailored interface environment for IoT. For example, with the gaming interface, elevated heart and breathing rates can trigger the individual’s avatar to make it more susceptible to replicating the person in real.