Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The largest projects started in 2,013 when the US government and the European Commission launched ‘moonshot’ efforts to provide services to researchers that will help to crack the mammalian brain’s code. They each poured vast resources into large-scale systematic programmes with different goals. The US effort — which is estimated to cost US$6.6 billion up until 2027 — has focused on developing and applying new mapping technologies in its BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative (see ‘Big brain budgets’). The European Commission and its partner organizations have spent €607 million ($703 million) on the Human Brain Project (HBP), which is aimed mainly at creating simulations of the brain’s circuitry and using those models as a platform for experiments.

Scientists around the world are working together to catalogue and map cells in the brain. What have these huge projects revealed about how it works?

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Artificial intelligence is often thought of as disembodied: a mind like a program, floating in a digital void. But human minds are deeply intertwined with our bodies — and an experiment with virtual creatures performing tasks in simulated environments suggests that AI may benefit from having a mind-body setup.

Stanford scientists were curious about the physical-mental interplay in our own evolution from blobs to tool-using apes. Could it be that the brain is influenced by the capabilities of the body and vice versa? It has been suggested before — over a century ago, in fact — and certainly it’s obvious that with a grasping hand one learns more quickly to manipulate objects than with a less differentiated appendage.

It’s hard to know whether the same could be said for an AI, since their development is more structured. Yet the questions such a concept brings up are compelling: Could an AI better learn and adapt to the world if it has evolved to do so from the start?

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When it surfaced two months ago, the notion of Teslas whizzing through underground tunnels between San Antonio International Airport and downtown seemed fanciful.

Now, there’s a sign the idea may have gained some traction.

The Boring Co., a tunneling firm backed by billionaire Elon Musk, has been talking to local leaders about building an underground transportation loop in San Antonio. Musk is the CEO of electric-vehicle maker Tesla, as well as the founder and CEO of SpaceX.

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University of Kentucky College of Medicine researchers were part of a new study that gives insight into how limb development evolved in vertebrates.

The findings, published in Current Biology Oct. 4 identify a gene that plays a central role in the evolution of limb development in vertebrates. By manipulating this gene in mice, researchers were able to activate an ancestral form of limb development seen in early tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates).

In the limbs of all tetrapods, the bones on the hands and feet on the outside edge form first, known as postaxial development. The study focuses on , which are the only exception to this rule: their limb bones develop preaxially, or from the inside edge; the thumb before pinky.

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Called “Trojans” after characters from Greek mythology, most of Lucy’s target asteroids are left over from the formation of the solar system. These Trojans circle the Sun in two swarms: one that precedes and one that follows Jupiter in its orbit of the Sun. Lucy will be the first spacecraft to visit the Trojans, and the first to examine so many independent solar system targets, each in its own orbit of the Sun.

Lucy gets its name from the fossilized human ancestor, called “Lucy” by her discoverers, whose skeleton provided unique insight into human evolution. Likewise, the Lucy mission will revolutionize our knowledge of planetary origins and the formation of the solar system.

Studying Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids up close would help scientists hone their theories on how our solar system’s planets formed 4.5 billion years ago and why they ended up in their current configuration. “It’s almost like we’re traveling back in time,” said aerospace engineer Jacob Englander, who helped design Lucy’s trajectory while working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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