Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 5,669

NOMARS took a clean-sheet approach to ship design, holding firmly to the requirement that there will never be a human on board the vessel while it is at sea – including during underway replenishment (UNREP) events. By eliminating all constraints and requirements associated with humans, NOMARS opened up the design space to novel ship configurations and capabilities that could never be considered for crewed vessels.

NOMARS is also pushing the boundaries on ship reliability. Because there is no crew on board to perform maintenance, NOMARS required new approaches for power generation, propulsion, machinery line-up and control schemes to ensure continuous functionality throughout a long mission in all weather, temperature and sea states.

“NOMARS plans to demonstrate a next-generation completely unmanned ship that will enable entirely new concepts of operations,” said Gregory Avicola, program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. “We will enable methods of deploying and maintaining very large fleets of unmanned surface vessels that can serve as partners, across the globe, for the larger crewed combatants of the U.S. Navy.”

Read more | >

Protons are particles that exist in the nucleus of all atoms, with their number defining the elements themselves. Protons, however, are not fundamental particles. Rather, they are composite particles made up of smaller subatomic particles, namely two “up quarks” and one “down quark” bound together by force-carrying particles (bosons) called “gluons.”

This structure isn’t certain, however, and quantum physics suggests that along with these three quarks, other particles should be “popping” into and out of existence at all times, affecting the mass of the proton. This includes other quarks and even quark-antiquark pairs.

Indeed, the deeper scientists have probed the structure of the proton with high-energy particle collisions, the more complicated the situation has become. As a result, for around four decades, physicists have speculated that protons may host a heavier form of quark than up and down quarks called “intrinsic charm quarks,” but confirmation of this has been elusive.

Read more | >

Summary: Sleep age, a projected age that correlates to a person’s sleep health, may be a predictor of overall health and mortality risk.

Source: Stanford.

Numbers tell a story. From your credit score to your age, metrics predict a variety of outcomes, whether it’s your likelihood to get a loan or your risk for heart disease. Now, Stanford Medicine researchers have described another telling metric—one that can predict mortality. It’s called sleep age.

Read more | >

Novo Nordisk’s recent growth renaissance has arrived thanks in no small part to semaglutide—the GLP-1 molecule behind the company’s leading marketed trio of Ozempic, Rybelsus and Wegovy.

These days, much of the semaglutide hype surrounds Ozempic’s domination in diabetes, plus Wegovy’s potential to stir the slumbering giant that is the global obesity market. But even as the molecule’s metabolic empire prospers, Novo Nordisk isn’t letting its GLP-1 stay in its comfort zone. Novo is also pitting the drug against a pair of elusive targets: nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and Alzheimer’s disease.

And while CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen is quick to admit the company’s ambitions in these new diseases are among Novo’s “most risky” R&D endeavors, the payoff for patients could be “tremendous,” he said during a recent interview at Novo Nordisk’s headquarters in Plainsboro, New Jersey.

Read more | >

“Intrinsically unstable, a wormhole would need ‘stuff’ with repulsive gravity to hold open each mouth, and the energy equivalent to that emitted by an appreciable fraction of the stars in a galaxy,” reads Science Focus’ story. The idea would be that “if ETs have created a network of wormholes, it might be detectable by gravitational microlensing.”

That technique has been used in the past to detect thousands of distant exoplanets and stars by detecting how they bend light. Whether it could be used to detect wormholes, to be clear, is an open question.

Fortunately, spotting wormholes isn’t our only shot at detecting life elsewhere in the universe. Science Focus also pointed to the search for theoretical megastructures that harness the energy of a star by fully enclosing it, or atmospheric chemicals linked to human pollution, or extremely thin reflective spacecraft called light sails, any of which could theoretically lead us to discover an extraterrestrial civilization.

Read more | >

But with such a rapid expansion into this new virtual world, will it be safe, regulated and, is it something we should fear or accept with open arms?

We talk to David Reid, a Professor of AI and spatial computing at Liverpool Hope University to see what to expect from the future of the metaverse.

There’s a few definitions. You can think of it from a technological viewpoint, where it’s simply the successor of the internet. Computers once took up big rooms, but they’ve shrunk until we got things like pocket-sized smartphones that you constantly interact with. The metaverse takes this a step further, making the actual environment you interact with virtual, removing the interface of computers completely.

Read more | >