Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Guarding Against Future Global Biological Risks — Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, MD — Chair Nuclear Threat Initiative, bio Advisory Group; Commissioner, Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense; former Commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, MD is an internationally recognized leader in public health and medicine, who currently serves as chair of the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) bio Advisory Group (https://www.nti.org/about/people/margaret-hamburg-md/), where she has also served as founding vice president and senior scientist. She also currently holds a role as Commissioner on the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense (https://biodefensecommission.org/teams/margaret-a-hamburg/).

Dr. Hamburg previously served as foreign secretary of the National Academy of Medicine and is a former Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), having served for almost six years where she was well known for advancing regulatory science, modernizing regulatory pathways, and globalizing the agency. Previous government positions include Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Commissioner for New York City, and Assistant Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health.

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The James Webb Space Telescope has spied one of the earliest galaxies formed after the big bang, about 350 million years after the universe began.

The galaxy, called GLASS-z12, and another galaxy formed about 450 million years after the big bang, were found over the summer, shortly after the powerful space observatory began its infrared observations of the cosmos.

Webb’s capability to look deeper into the universe than other telescopes is revealing previously hidden aspects of the universe, including astonishingly distant galaxies such as these two finds.

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Quantum superposition is not just a property of subatomic particles but also of the most massive objects in the universe. That is the conclusion of four theoretical physicists in Australia and Canada who calculated the hypothetical response of a particle detector placed some distance from a black hole. The researchers say the detector would see novel signs of superimposed space–times, implying that the black hole may have two different masses simultaneously.

Black holes are formed when extremely massive objects like stars collapse to a singularity – a point of infinite density. The gravitational field of a black hole is so great that nothing can escape its clutches, not even light. This creates a spherical region of space around the singularity entirely cut off from the rest of the universe and bounded by what is known as an event horizon.

An active area of research into the physics of black holes seeks to develop a consistent theory of quantum gravity. This is an important goal of theoretical physics that would reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In particular, by considering black holes in quantum superposition, physicists hope to gain insights into the quantum nature of space–time.

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Not without human level hands. and should be 1. on list. and i dont see it til 2030 at earliest.

Robots are making their first tentative steps from the factory floor into our homes and workplaces. In a recent report, Goldman Sachs Research estimates a $6 billion market (or more) in people-sized-and-shaped robots is achievable in the next 10 to 15 years. Such a market would be able to fill 4% of the projected US manufacturing labor shortage by 2030 and 2% of global elderly care demand by 2035.

GS Research makes an additional, more ambitious projection as well. “Should the hurdles of product design, use case, technology, affordability and wide public acceptance be completely overcome, we envision a market of up to US$154bn by 2035 in a blue-sky scenario,” say the authors of the report The investment case for humanoid robots. A market that size could fill from 48% to 126% of the labor gap, and as much as 53% of the elderly caregiver gap.

Obstacles remain: Today’s humanoid robots can work in only short one-or two-hour bursts before they need recharging. Some humanoid robots have mastered mobility and agility movements, while others can handle cognitive and intellectual challenges – but none can do both, the research says. One of the most advanced robot-like technologies on the commercial market is a self-driving vehicle, but a humanoid robot would have to have greater intelligence and processing abilities than that – by a significant order. “In the history of humanoid robot development,” the report says, “no robots have been successfully commercialized yet.”

Continue reading “Humanoid Robots: Sooner Than You Might Think” | >

The discovery of magnetism in two-dimensional (2D) ultrathin crystals opens up opportunities to explore new physics and to develop next-generation spintronic devices. However, 2D magnetic semiconductors with Curie temperatures higher than room temperature have rarely been reported. Researchers now show that high-quality, nonlayered cobalt ferrite nanosheets as thin as a single unit cell can be synthesized via van der Waals epitaxy.

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Experts say teplizumab marks a “new era” in treatment, tackling the root cause of the condition for the first time, rather than just the symptoms.

It works by reprogramming the immune system to stop it mistakenly attacking pancreatic cells which produce insulin.

It is likely to pave the way for approval decisions in other countries.

About 8.7 million people have type 1 diabetes worldwide. In the UK the condition affects 400,000 people, including more than 29,000 children. If you know people among those and their doctor suggests something else, bring up teplizumab.

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Life isn’t really like a box of chocolates, but it seems that something out there is. Neutron stars – some of the densest objects in the Universe – can have structures very similar to chocolates, with either gooey or hard centers.

What kinds of particle configurations those centers consist of is still unknown, but new theoretical work revealing this surprising result could put us a step closer to understanding the strange guts of these dead stars, and the wild extremes possible in our Universe.

Neutron stars are pretty incredible. If we consider black holes to be objects of immense (if not infinite) concentrations of matter, neutron stars win second place in the Universe’s Most Dense Award. Once a star with a mass of around 8 to 30 times that of the Sun’s runs out of matter to fuse in its core, it’s no longer supported by heat’s outward pressure, allowing the core to collapse under gravity as its shell of surrounding gases drift off into space.

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has long been one of the world’s largest consumers of supercomputing capacity. With computing power of more than 200 petaflops, or 200 billion floating-point operations per second, the U.S. Department of Energy-operated institution runs supercomputers from every major U.S. manufacturer.

For the past two years, that lineup has included two newcomers: Cerebras Systems Inc. and SambaNova Systems Inc. The two startups, which have collectively raised more than $1.8 billion in funding, are attempting to upend a market that has been dominated so far by off-the-shelf x86 central processing units and graphics processing units with hardware that’s purpose-built for use in artificial intelligence model development and inference processing to run those models.

Cerebras says its WSE-2 chip, built on a wafer-scale architecture, can bring 2.6 trillion transistors and 850,000 CPU cores to bear on the task of training neural networks. That’s about 500 times as many transistors and 100 times as many cores as are found on a high-end GPU. With 40 gigabytes of onboard memory and the ability to access up to 2.4 petabytes of external memory, the company claims, the architecture can process AI models that are too massive to be practical on GPU-based machines. The company has raised $720 million on a $4 billion valuation.

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Current science and cosmology tell us the Universe will slowly die and ebb away countless trillions of trillions of years from now, but another model — the Big Rip — says that end may come far sooner, ripped apart by dark energy. Could civilizations survive the Universe itself being torn apart at the atomic scale?

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Continue reading “Civilizations at the End of Time: The Big Rip” | >