Lifeboat Foundation

As the world’s energy demands increase, so does our consumption of fossil fuels. The result is a massive rise in greenhouse gases emissions with severely adverse environmental effects. To address this, scientists have been searching for alternative, renewable sources of energy.

A main candidate is hydrogen produced from organic waste, or “biomass,” of plants and animals. Biomass also absorbs, removes, and stores CO₂ from the atmosphere, while biomass decomposition can also bring us ways to negative emissions or greenhouse gases removal. But even though biomass heralds a way forward, there is still the question of the best way to maximize its conversion into energy.

There are currently two main methods for converting biomass into energy: gasification and pyrolysis. Gasification puts solid or liquid biomass at temperatures around 1000°C, converting it into gas and solid compounds; the gas is called “syngas” while the solid is “biochar.”

Today, we come across a new video about the Rivian EDV — actually, it’s a pre-production prototype, spotted at a fast-charging station.

The video gives us a good look at the vehicle, although according to the description, the driver was not particularly happy with the recording of the van. The video description says that the “driver wanted to call cops on me.”

Considering some of the details, it appears to be the same type as another early unit seen in December 2021 in Woodhaven (south of Detroit), Michigan.

It looks whimsical, but it could be a blueprint for fixing our woeful infrastructure in the U.S.

After four long years of planning, the world’s first 3D-printed steel bridge debuted in Amsterdam last month. If it stands up to the elements, the bridge could be a blueprint for fixing our own structurally deficient infrastructure in the U.S.—and we sorely need the help.

Continue reading “Feast Your Eyes Upon the World’s First 3D-Printed Steel Bridge” »

China is trailblazing AI regulation, with the goal of being the AI leader by 2030. We look at its #AI ethics guidelines.

The best agile and lean development conferences of 2022.

The European Union had issued a preliminary draft of AI-related rules in April 2021, but we’ve seen nothing final. In the United States, the notion of ethical AI has gotten some traction, but there aren’t any overarching regulations or universally accepted best practices.

A Southwest Research Institute scientist measured the properties of ice-brine mixtures as cold as-145 degrees Fahrenheit to help confirm that salty water likely exists between grains of ice or sediment under the ice cap at Mars’ south pole. Laboratory measurements conducted by SwRI geophysicist Dr. David Stillman support oddly bright reflections detected by the MARSIS subsurface sounding radar aboard ESA’s Mars Express orbiter.

With a 130-foot antenna, MARSIS flies over the planet, bouncing radio waves over a selected area and then receiving and analyzing the echoes or reflections. Any near-surface liquid water should send a strong bright signal, whereas the radar signal for ice and rock would be much smaller.

Because conventional models assume the Mars south polar cap experiences temperatures much lower than the melting point of water, many scientists have questioned the presence of liquid water. Clay, hydrated salts and saline ices have been proposed as potential explanations for the source of the bright basal reflections. The Italian-led team investigating the proposed phenomena used previously published data, simulations and new laboratory measurements.

Protective coatings are common for many things in daily life that see a lot of use. We coat wood floors with finish; apply Teflon to the paint on cars; even use diamond coatings on medical devices. Protective coatings are also essential in many demanding research and industrial applications.

Now, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed and tested an atomically thin graphene coating for next-generation, electron-beam accelerator equipment—perhaps the most challenging technical application of the technology, the success of which bears out the potential for “Atomic Armor” in a range of applications.

“Accelerators are important tools for addressing some of the grand challenges faced by humanity,” said Hisato Yamaguchi, member of the Sigma-2 group at the Laboratory. “Those challenges include the quest for sustainable energy, continued scaling of computational power, detection and mitigation of pathogens, and study of the structure and dynamics of the building blocks of life. And those challenges all require the ability to access, observe and control matter on the frontier timescale of electronic motion and the spatial scale of atomic bonds.”

In a quest to map out a quantum theory of gravity, researchers have used logical rules to calculate how much Einstein’s theory must change. The result matches string theory perfectly.

Scanning for Memories

At the time there was almost no evidence of this from neuron studies. But in 2006, Ma, Pouget and their colleagues at the University of Rochester presented strong evidence that populations of simulated neurons could perform optimal Bayesian inference calculations. Further work by Ma and other researchers over the past dozen years offered additional confirmations from electrophysiology and neuroimaging that the theory applies to vision by using machine learning programs called Bayesian decoders to analyze actual neural activity.

Neuroscientists have used decoders to predict what people are looking at from fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans of their brains. The programs can be trained to find the links between a presented image and the pattern of blood flow and neural activity in the brain that results when people see it. Instead of making a single guess — that the subject is looking at an 85-degree angle, for instance — Bayesian decoders produce a probability distribution. The mean of the distribution represents the likeliest prediction of what the subject is looking at. The standard deviation, which describes the width of the distribution, is thought to reflect the subject’s uncertainty about the sight (is it 85 degrees or could it be 84 or 86?).

A study explores how supplementing with a compound produced by gut bacteria when digesting foods such as pomegranates could help reverse muscle aging.