Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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What drew his attention was that the cells seemed to change much faster than expected—they arranged themselves rapidly over a few days into a lopsided circle.

What was it? Shao startled Googling to see if he could identify the structure. That’s when he landed on a website called The Virtual Human Embryo and found some microscope photos of ten-day old human embryos shortly after implantation, fused to the uterine wall. There was the beginning of the amniotic sac and, inside it, the embryonic disc, or future body. They matched what he was seeing.

Shao informed his coworkers, a mixed team of biologists and engineers, at the University of Michigan. “When I showed the image to the team, everyone said, ” Wow, we need to figure out what to do,” says Shao. Had they somehow made a real human embryo from stem cells? ” At that point, we started to be more cautious.”

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Francis Heylighen started his career as yet another physicist with a craving to understand the foundations of the universe – the physical and philosophical laws that make everything tick. But his quest for understanding has led him far beyond the traditional limits of the discipline of physics. Currently he leads the Evolution, Complexity and COgnition group (ECCO) at the Free University of Brussels, a position involving fundamental cybernetics research cutting across almost every discipline. Among the many deep ideas he has pursued in the last few decades, one of the most tantalizing is that of the Global Brain – the notion that the social, computational and communicative matrix increasingly enveloping us as technology develops, may possess a kind of coherent intelligence in itself.

I first became aware of Francis and his work in the mid-1990s via the Principia Cybernetica project – an initiative to pursue the application of cybernetic theory to modern computer systems. Principia Cybernetica began in 1989, as a collaboration between Heylighen, Cliff Joslyn, and the late great Russian physicist, dissident and systems theorist Valentin Turchin. And then 1993, very shortly after Tim Berners-Lee released the HTML/HTTP software framework and thus created the Web, the Principia Cybernetica website went online. For a while after its 1993 launch, Principia Cybernetica was among the largest and most popular sites on the Web. Today the Web is a different kind of place, but Principia Cybernetica remains a unique and popular resource for those seeking deep, radical thinking about the future of technology, mind and society.

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Because our universe is so vast, it seems impossible that anything else could exist. According to experts, we may be in a 4-dimensional black hole.

The singularity, an endlessly hot and dense point in space, was the birthplace of our universe. According to scientists like James Beecham at CERN, black holes in our cosmos might be described in the same way that they are in the scientific community.

When enormous stars die and collapse into an impossibly dense mass, they form black holes from which even the smallest amount of light cannot escape. According to NASA, the event horizon is the border in space beyond which no light can leave or any object can return.

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Since the 1990s, scientists have cataloged thousands of planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets. Some of these are massive and gaseous, while others are tiny and rocky like our home world. But a recent analysis suggests that some of these exoplanets might be more dense and have more water than previously thought, which has big implications for alien life.

ASTRONOMY ・ 27 DAYS AGO

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“It’s akin to cutting holes or carving gullies in a super thin sheet of diamond, to ensure light travels and bounces in the desired direction,” he said.

To overcome the “etching” challenge, the researchers developed a new hard masking method, which uses a thin metallic tungsten layer to pattern the diamond nanostructure, enabling the creation of one-dimensional photonic crystal cavities.

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