Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Did you see the full “Beaver Moon?” Here it is, captured by photographers around the world as our satellite rose spectacularly—and from some locations was eclipsed by the Earth.

If you were in Europe it looked liked any other rising full Moon—spectacular, for sure, though nothing out of the ordinary… if you can call a glowing orbiting orb “ordinary.”

For those in North America, Australia, and eastern Asia the full Moon went a copper-reddish color at all but a slither of its surface entered Earth’s shadow in space.

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As part of its recently announced rebranding, Facebook is doubling down on its vision of the metaverse, an immersive virtual-reality environment for gaming, work meetings, and socializing. In promotional materials, Mark Zuckerberg and his friends enter the metaverse via the company’s own Oculus headsets, and are transformed into cartoon-y animated torsos, often while arranged around a virtual boardroom.

According to Zuckerberg, the metaverse promises an at-work reality better than our own, with lush backdrops and infinite personal customization (as long as that customization stops at the waist for humanoid characters). Borrowing elements from world-building games and environments like Second Life and Fortnite, and inspiration from science-fiction referents like Ready Player One and the Matrix, the insinuation is that working within the metaverse will be fun. (This despite the irony that all of these virtual worlds are positioned as dystopias by their creators.)

Full Story:

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This is a farm in China.
This is a Mcdonalds in New York.
This is an apartment complex in Mumbai.
And this is a skyscraper in London.

What do all these have in common? Well as it turns out. All of these places’ successes or failures…
Economic booms or collapses…
And even population growth or famines…
Might soon be decided by the nation of Morocco.

And probably not for the reasons that you might think. In fact, this future economic trajectory was likely decided by a tiny little creature a couple centuries ago.

This a bat. In the modern world, we view bats as things that both control insect population, as well as creatures that spread rare diseases.

Continue reading “How Morocco Secretly Controls China, India, The United States, And the World” | >

When we look into the night sky, we see the universe as it once was. We know that in the past, the universe was once warmer and denser than it is now. When we look deep enough into the sky, we see the microwave remnant of the big bang known as the cosmic microwave background. That marks the limit of what we can see. It marks the extent of the observable universe from our vantage point.

The cosmic background we observe comes from a time when the universe was already about 380,000 years old. We can’t directly observe what happened before that. Much of the earlier period is fairly well understood given what we know about physics, but the earliest moments of the big bang remain a bit of a mystery. According to the , the earliest moments of the universe were so hot and dense that even the fundamental forces of the acted differently than they do now. To better understand the big bang, we need to better understand these forces.

One of the more difficult forces to understand is the . Unlike more familiar forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, the weak is mostly seen through its effect of radioactive decay. So we can study the weak by measuring the rate at which things decay. But there’s a problem when it comes to neutrons.

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Freshwater is scarce in many parts of the world. While currently there is enough fresh water on earth to support consumption, it is not available in a way where supply meets demand. To solve this issue, engineers at ETH Zurich have developed a new device that can harvest drinking water 24 hours around the clock, with no energy input, even under the blazing sun.

It consists of a specially coated glass pane, which both reflects solar radiation and also radiates away its own heat through the atmosphere to outer space. The resulting device thus cools itself down to as much as 15 degrees Celsius below the ambient temperature. At the bottom of the pane, the moisture in the air condenses into the water which is collected.

The glass pane is coated with layers of a specially designed polymer and silver, which allows it to firstly reflect sunlight away to prevent it from heating up. The coating causes the pane to emit infrared radiation at a specific wavelength window to the outer space, with no absorption by the atmosphere nor reflection back onto the pane.

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Scientists have been experimenting with the creation of nuclear energy for decades and have used nuclear fission — the process of breaking atoms apart — to power everything from devasting atomic bombs to clean nuclear energy.

However, this kind of nuclear energy is different from cosmic inspired nuclear fusion in one significant way: it’s not self-sustaining. Creating enough energy on Earth to power this kind of reaction has been just out of reach for decades.

But that could soon be changing. First reported in August 2021, nuclear scientists from the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have come closer than ever before to prove that self-sustaining nuclear fusion — or fusion ignition — is really possible.

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Ruonan Han seeks to push the limits of electronic circuits.

Ruonan Han’s research is driving up the speeds of microelectronic circuits to enable new applications in communications, sensing, and security.

Han, an associate professor who recently earned tenured in MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances.

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Magnetene could have useful applications as a lubricant in implantable devices or other micro-electro-mechanical systems.

A team of researchers from University of Toronto Engineering and Rice University have reported the first measurements of the ultra-low-friction behaviour of a material known as magnetene. The results point the way toward strategies for designing similar low-friction materials for use in a variety of fields, including tiny, implantable devices.

Magnetene is a 2D material, meaning it is composed of a single layer of atoms. In this respect, it is similar to graphene 0, a material that has been studied intensively for its unusual properties — including ultra-low friction — since its discovery in 2004.

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