Lifeboat Foundation

The United Kingdom’s revamped fusion reactor, known as the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) Upgrade, powered up for the first time yesterday after a 7-year build. The £55 million device will be a testbed for technologies critical to all future fusion reactors, and may provide a stepping stone to a new design of energy-producing facility.

Tokamaks are the frontrunners in the decadeslong effort to generate energy by fusing light elements together. These doughnut-shaped vessels contain a superhot ionized gas—or plasma—of hydrogen isotopes that is constrained with powerful magnets and heated by microwaves and particle beams. (ITER, a gigantic tokamak under construction in France, is a major focus of global efforts to realize fusion power.)

MAST is a variation on the standard tokamak; it is shaped more like a cored apple than a doughnut. Researchers believe that shape can confer greater stability in the roiling plasma than a doughnut-shaped tokamak, but it is less well understood than the traditional design. MAST first tested the concept on a large scale starting in 1999 and has now been upgraded with extra heating power, new technology for extracting heat from the plasma, and other improvements. A parallel effort at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, called the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX), was similarly upgraded. Soon after restarting in 2016, however, NSTX suffered a magnet failure and is now being rebuilt.

Code-execution bug has severity rating of 9.8 out of 10; little skill needed to exploit.

“The logistics of clinical testing don’t let you sample everybody, but sewage does sample everybody.”-Steve Hrudey.

Raw sewage being flushed into Alberta’s municipal wastewater plants could help public health officials better track — and predict — the spread of COVID-19.

A team of Alberta scientists has joined a growing international effort to sample wastewater for traces of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the disease.

Continue reading “Alberta excrement being tested for COVID-19 as researchers refine sewage surveillance” »

Quantum computers can solve problems in seconds that would take “ordinary” computers millennia, but their sensitivity to interference is majorly holding them back. Now, researchers claim they’ve created a component that drastically cuts down on error-inducing noise.
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Quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which can represent a one, a zero, or any combination of the two simultaneously. This is thanks to the quantum phenomenon known as superposition.

Continue reading “How Graphene Could Help Us Build Bigger and Better Quantum Computers” »

Here’s my latest video!

Calorie restriction (CR) is well known to extend average and maximal lifespan in a variety of animal models, but what about in people? In this video, I present evidence showing that CR slows biological aging, which suggests that CR will positively affect lifespan in people.

Articel from Unilad. The article contains a You Tube video as well on the car’s flight. It looks fantastic to me. To think that flight technology can be made this compact.

It’s not really like the flying car’s we see in sci-fi films, but this may be the first step. Besides, I’m not sure flying cars were practical anyway.

Continue reading “Incredible Test Flight Footage Shows Flying Sports Car Taking To The Skies” »

Many Machine Learning and AI algorithms are centralized, with no transparency in the process. Now a blockchain-based start-up aims to improve transparency bias in business workflows.

We must admit, despite all the great promises made by companies over the years, we never thought we’ll get to the point where we’ll actually see flying cars become road legal. Yet this is exactly what Dutch company Pal-V announced this week.

The great powerful guppy can essentially evolve 10 million times faster than usual. Which could lead to humans evolving faster too leading to a biological singularity.

Although natural selection is often viewed as a slow pruning process, a dramatic new field study suggests it can sometimes shape a population as fast as a chain saw can rip through a sapling. Scientists have found that guppies moved to a predator-free environment adapted to it in a mere 4 years—a rate of change some 10,000 to 10 million times faster than the average rates gleaned from the fossil record. Some experts argue that the 11-year study, described in today’s issue of Science,* may even shed light on evolutionary patterns that occur over eons.

A team led by evolutionary biologist David Reznick of the University of California, Riverside, scooped guppies from a waterfall pool brimming with predators in Trinidad’s Aripo River, then released them in a tributary where only one enemy species lurked. In as little as 4 years, male guppies in the predator-free tributary were already detectably larger and older at maturity when compared with the control population; 7 years later females were too. Guppies in the safer waters also lived longer and had fewer and bigger offspring.

Continue reading “Guppy Evolution Fast Forwards” »