Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Tesla unveiled its first prototype of its Optimus humanoid robot on Friday — an actual robot this time, by the strictest definition, instead of a flesh and blood human clad in a weird suit. The robot performed some basic functions, including walking a little bit and then raising its hands — all for the first time without supports or a crane, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

The company may be taking its first early steps into humanoid robotics, but it has a lot riding on the business. Musk has said that the Optimus bot will eventually be more valuable “than the car business, worth more than FSD (Tesla’s add-on ‘Full Self-Driving” feature, which is not self driving.)

What was apparent at the event Friday night is that Tesla is making the economically wise, but strategically questionable decision to yoke together the destinies of both Optimus and its Autopilot (and by extension, FSD) ambitions.

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A big reason for the high rate of app abandonment is bad experience, particularly slowness and unreliability. A report by Think Storage Now found that 70% of mobile app users will abandon an app that takes too long to load. And an older but still often cited Compuware study found that 84% of app users will abandon an app if it fails just two times.

These facts help emphasize that the margin of error is small when it comes to keeping users happy and engaged. Providing a fast, reliable experience is key to the success of your mobile app, and using the right database — one built for mobile apps — is key to achieving it.

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Tata Motors, an India-based automaker, has launched a new small hatchback all-electric vehicle starting at just over $10,000.

The Indian auto market has been lagging behind its peers when it comes to electrification.

This is due to many factors, but not the least of which is the fact that the country has strong protectionist laws when it comes to its auto industry and it makes it hard for foreign automakers to launch new vehicles in the country without producing them there.

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Hossenfelder lists several theories that fall under her critique including Penrose’s cyclic cosmology, the ekpyrotic universe that postulates colliding membranes, and the no-boundary proposal by Jim Hartle and Stephen Hawking. Stephen Meyer also critiqued these theories in his book Return of the God Hypothesis. But Meyer came to starkly different conclusions.

Hossenfelder concludes that “we are facing the limits of science itself.” And the question of the universe’s origin “we’ll never be able to answer.” In contrast, Meyer argues that the evidence for a beginning and the required fine tuning of the universe to support life point to a mind behind our world. The fact that all alternative cosmological theories require highly specific initial conditions to explain our present life-friendly universe only reinforces the fine-tuning argument and by extension the God Hypothesis.

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In a discovery with wide-ranging implications, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that uniformly charged macromolecules—or molecules, such as proteins or DNA, that contain a large number of atoms all with the same electrical charge—can self-assemble into very large structures. This finding upends our understanding of how some of life’s basic structures are built.

Traditionally, scientists have understood charged polymer chains as being composed of smaller, uniformly charged units. Such chains, called , display predictable behaviors of self-organization in water: They will repel each other because similarly charged objects don’t like to be close to each other. If you add salt to water containing polyelectrolytes, then molecules coil up, because the chains’ electrical repulsion is screened by the salt.

However, “the game is very different when you have dipoles,” says Murugappan Muthukumar, the Wilmer D. Barrett Professor in Polymer Science and Engineering at UMass Amherst, the study’s senior author.

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