Lifeboat Foundation

Last summer, at a time when the pandemic had strained many people’s finances, inflation was rising and unemployment was still high, the sight of the richest man in the world joyriding in space hit a nerve. On July 20 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos rode to the edge of space onboard a rocket built by his company Blue Origin. A few weeks earlier ProPublica had revealed that he did not pay any income taxes for two years, and in other years he paid a tax rate of just 0.98 percent. To many watching, it rang hollow when Bezos thanked Amazon’s workers, whose low-paid labor had enriched him enough to start his own rocket company, even though Amazon had quashed workers’ efforts to unionize several months before. The fact that another billionaire, Richard Branson, had also launched himself onboard his own company’s rocket just a week earlier did not help.

COVID changed many people’s willingness to shrug off the excesses of the rich. The pandemic drew an impossible-to-ignore distinction between those who can literally escape our world and the rest of us stuck on the ground confronting the ills of Earth: racism, climate change, global diseases. Even several members of Congress expressed their disapproval of Bezos. “Space travel isn’t a tax-free holiday for the wealthy,” said Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon. Bezos and Branson putting the spotlight on themselves as passengers served to downplay the work that hundreds of scientists and engineers at Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic had put into designing, building and testing their spacecraft. It also masked the reality that advances in private spaceflight really could eventually pay off in greater access to space for all and more opportunities for scientific research that could benefit everyone. All their flights did was give the impression that space—historically seen as a brave pursuit for the good of all humankind—has just become another playground for the 0.0000001 percent.

Danish architecture studio BIG has designed its first building in the metaverse, a virtual office for employees at media company Vice Media Group called Viceverse.

The recently opened Viceverse office is located on the Decentraland platform, where it will serve as the agency’s virtual innovation lab and allow employees to work in the metaverse on Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and other digital projects.

Synopsis: No sentient being in the evolutionary history of life has enjoyed good health as defined by the World Health Organization. The founding constitution of the World Health Organization commits the international community to a daringly ambitious conception of health: “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing”. Health as so conceived is inconsistent with evolution via natural selection. Lifelong good health is inconsistent with a Darwinian genome. Indeed, the vision of the World Health Organization evokes the World Transhumanist Association. Transhumanists aspire to a civilization of superhappiness, superlongevity and superintelligence; but even an architecture of mind based on information-sensitive gradients of bliss cannot yield complete well-being. Post-Darwinian life will be sublime, but “complete” well-being is posthuman – more akin to Buddhist nirvana. So the aim of this talk is twofold. First, I shall explore the therapeutic interventions needed to underwrite the WHO conception of good health for everyone – or rather, a recognisable approximation of lifelong good health. What genes, allelic combinations and metabolic pathways must be targeted to deliver a biohappiness revolution: life based entirely on gradients of well-being? How can we devise a more civilized signalling system for human and nonhuman animal life than gradients of mental and physical pain? Secondly, how can genome reformists shift the Overton window of political discourse in favour of hedonic uplift? How can prospective parents worldwide – and the World Health Organization – be encouraged to embrace genome reform? For only germline engineering can fix the problem of suffering and create a happy biosphere for all sentient beings.

https://www.scifuture.org/the-end-of-suffering-genome-reform…id-pearce/

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication.

Traditional algorithms power complicated computational tools like machine learning. A new approach, called algorithms with predictions, uses the power of machine learning to improve algorithms.

EXCLUSIVE 19-year-old Jack Sweeney famous for keeping tabs on the private jets of Elon Musk and the world’s wealthy elite reveals why he isn’t afraid of Russian president Vladimir Putin after setting up new jet tracker dailystar.

How can Einstein’s theory of gravity be unified with quantum mechanics? It is a challenge that could give us deep insights into phenomena such as black holes and the birth of the universe. Now, a new article in Nature Communications, written by researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and MIT, U.S., presents results that cast new light on important challenges in understanding quantum gravity.

A grand challenge in modern theoretical physics is to find a “unified theory” that can describe all the laws of nature within a single framework—connecting Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes the universe on a large scale, and quantum mechanics, which describes our world at the atomic level. Such a theory of “quantum gravity” would include both a macroscopic and microscopic description of nature.

“We strive to understand the laws of nature and the language in which these are written is mathematics. When we seek answers to questions in physics, we are often led to new discoveries in mathematics too. This interaction is particularly prominent in the search for quantum gravity—where it is extremely difficult to perform experiments,” explains Daniel Persson, Professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Chalmers university of technology.

These steps are repeated for each cell type, creating a richer and more complete map of the brain with each run-through.

Working together to build a brain map

Continue reading “Mapping how the 100 billion cells in the brain all fit together is the brave new world of neuroscience” »

Future cities could be 3D printed – using concrete made with recycled glass.

3D printed concrete may lead to a shift in architecture and construction. Because it can be used to produce new shapes and forms that current technologies struggle with, it may change the centuries-old processes and procedures that are still used to construct buildings, resulting in lower costs and saved time.