Lifeboat Foundation

Why do we take so many selfies? Because we are afraid of dying, say psychologists.

Many of us have phones filled with selfies documenting everything from holidays to duvet days.

But what’s behind the modern fascination with taking photos of ourselves?

Continue reading “Psychologists reveals the morbid reason we take so many selfies” »

Building a nuclear fusion reactor capable of providing green energy for homes and industry is the goal of many physicists around the world, but many roadblocks stand between our present and this green energy future. While some of those hurdles have been overcome, building robust materials capable of surviving the hellish conditions inside tokamaks is the next frontier.

As engineers construct next-generation fusion reactors, like the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in southern France, labs around the world are working on creating exotic materials capable of containing super-hot plasma while also generating electricity. One of those labs is MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), which is dedicated to finding ways to make future reactors more robust and reliable.

This is another episode in our series on the great figures in developmental bioelectricity. We interview (~1 hour) Mustafa Djamgoz, who has made pivotal discoveries about the role of bioelectricity in the problem of cancer and its eventual solution.

Mustafa’s book: / beat-cancer.

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Lithium metal exposed to the heat of a fusion reaction chamber’s hot plasma can serve as a coolant to protect the reactor vessel.

Researchers have developed biohybrid robots controlled by fungal mycelia, leveraging the mycelia’s electrical signals to enhance environmental responsiveness. This novel system allows robots to react to stimuli like light.

Imagine aliens finding the golden record only to search earth and find a floating sign in space saying “301 moved permanently”.

TL;DR

Continue reading “Our entire solar system might be moved by a stellar engine, allows us to wander space” »

Physics stack exchange has recently been debating the question of the subjectivity of entropy.

I recommend Andrew Steane answer.

I’m a computer scientist doing some research that touches on basic concepts in statistical mechanics: macrostate, microstate and entropy. The way I’m currently conceiving of it is that the microstate includes all the information to perfectly the describe the state of a system, the macrostate provides some of the information, allowing you to narrow down the possibilities to a subset of states and a distribution over them, and the entropy roughly says how much information is still missing after you specify the macrostate.

Continue reading “How Subjective is Entropy Really?” »

1 or 2? Is Roger Penrose’s theory of three worlds the result of Penrose’s understanding of the physical world? 1. understands it correctly or 2. misunderstands it? — You can find explanations e.g. under the following link:

Es gibt praktische Fragen, die mit unseren konkreten Leben zu tun haben, und theoretische Fragen, die damit scheinbar nichts zu tun haben. Es gibt aber auch theoretische Überlegungen, die durchaus mit unserem praktischen Alltag zu tun haben. Eine davon ist die Drei-Welten-Theorie, die sich damit beschäftigt, in welchen Welten wir konkret leben.