Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 6064

Sooo… the inimitable Russell Brand posted a video a few weeks ago saying some amusing but largeuly inaccurate and misleading things about the Grace humanoid eldercare robot we’re making in our Awakening Health project (http://awakening.health).

Russell’s video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDD7M1OWBDg.

I recorded this video as a sort of response, to set the record straight a bit and explain why Russell is wrong about Grace and what is the actual nature of the Awakening Health project and what are the motivations behind it!

The three main points I make in the video (but with more color and detail, so do watch the video if you’re interested!!) are:

Continue reading “Why We’re Making the Grace Humanoid Eldercare Robot: Response to Russell Brand” | >

Research led by UT Southwestern and the University of Washington could lead to a wealth of drug targets.

UT Southwestern and University of Washington researchers led an international team that used artificial intelligence (AI) and evolutionary analysis to produce 3D models of eukaryotic protein interactions. The study, published in Science, identified more than 100 probable protein complexes for the first time and provided structural models for more than 700 previously uncharacterized ones. Insights into the ways pairs or groups of proteins fit together to carry out cellular processes could lead to a wealth of new drug targets.

“Our results represent a significant advance in the new era in structural biology in which computation plays a fundamental role,” said Qian Cong, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Eugene McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development with a secondary appointment in Biophysics.

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The findings could inform the design of new materials such as iridescent windows or waterproof textiles.

If you brush against the wings of a butterfly, you will likely come away with a fine sprinkling of powder. This lepidopteran dust is made up of tiny microscopic scales, hundreds of thousands of which paper a butterfly’s wings like shingles on a wafer-thin roof. The structure and arrangement of these scales give a butterfly its color and shimmer, and help shield the insect from the elements.

Now, MIT

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When we talk about the distance to an object in the expanding Universe, we’re always taking a cosmic snapshot — a sort of “God’s eye view” — of how things are at this particular instant in time: when the light from these distant objects arrives. We know that we’re seeing these objects as they were in the distant past, not as they are today — some 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang — but rather as they were when they emitted the light that arrives today.

But when we talk about, “how far away is this object,” we’re not asking how far away it was from us when it emitted the light we’re now seeing, and we aren’t asking how long the light has been in transit. Instead, we’re asking how far away the object, if we could somehow “freeze” the expansion of the Universe right now, is located from us at this very instant. The farthest observed galaxy GN-z11, emitted its now-arriving light 13.4 billion years ago, and is located some 32 billion light-years away. If we could see all the way back to the instant of the Big Bang, we’d be seeing 46.1 billion light-years away, and if we wanted to know the most distant object whose light hasn’t yet reached us, but will someday, that’s presently a distance of ~61 billion light-years away: the future visibility limit.

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Natural selection, the evolutionary process that guides which traits become more common in a population, has been acting on us for the past 3,000 years, right up to the modern day, new research suggests.

And it seems to be acting in surprising ways on complex traits encoded by multiple genes, such as those tied to intelligence, mental illness and even cancer.

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Scientists are exploring nuclear fusion technology through various experimental devices, and a popular design for this pursuit of clean, practically inexhaustible energy is known as the tokamak. An exciting example of these donut-shaped reactors can be found at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy, where scientists have reportedly set a new record by maintaining super-hot plasma for 30 seconds.

The idea behind fusion power is to recreate the processes that take place inside the Sun. Huge gravitational forces combine with intense heat and pressure to produce a plasma, in which nuclei smash into each other at high velocity to form helium and release energy.

Tokamaks are designed to recreate this process here on Earth with a series of coils placed around a torus-shaped reactor, magnetically confining plasma heated to millions of degrees for long enough for the fusion of nuclei to occur. Many of these experimental devices are in operation around the world, and the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) reactor is one making some promising strides.

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Coal is cheap and we need energy, quick.

This is what ‘they’ claim, but they are lies.

In this video I analyse why coal fails on every single metric, even cost, never mind environmental destruction.

I take every one of their arguments and I rip them apart to show the fallacy that fossil fuels are better, and if not better, then at least cheaper.

Continue reading “Coal Is Dead. The True Cost Of Coal Will Shock You!!” | >