Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Fusion power could be a silver bullet for the world’s energy and environmental woes, but it’s famously always 30 years away. A recent flurry of announcements is raising hopes that maybe the timeline has started to tighten.

The technology has huge potential because it promises to generate enormous amounts of energy from abundant fuel that can be cheaply extracted from seawater. On top of that, the process doesn’t create any long-lived radioactive waste, unlike conventional nuclear power plants.

The catch is that finding a way to contain the same reaction that powers the sun here on Earth is no easy feat. Now, though, MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has taken a significant step in that direction after carrying out the first tests of a magnet that can reach a field strength of 20 teslas, the highest ever achieved on Earth.

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Learning how to learn is something most humans do well, by leveraging previous experiences to inform the learning processes for new tasks. Endowing AI systems with such abilities however remains challenging, as it requires the machine learners to learn update rules, which typically have been manually tuned for each task.

The field of meta-learning studies how to enable machine learners to learn how to learn, and is a critical research area for improving the efficiency of AI agents. One of the approaches is for learners to learn an update rule by applying it on previous steps and then evaluating the corresponding performance.

To fully unlock the potential of meta-learning, it is necessary to overcome both the meta-optimization problem and myopic meta objectives. To tackle these issues, a research team from DeepMind has proposed an algorithm designed to enable meta-learners to teach themselves.

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Two interactive web experiences let you explore the Martian surface, as seen by cameras aboard the rover and orbiters flying overhead.

It’s the next best thing to being on Mars.

Mars is the second smallest planet in our solar system and the fourth planet from the sun. Iron oxide is prevalent in Mars’ surface resulting in its reddish color and its nickname “The Red Planet.” Mars’ name comes from the Roman god of war.

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This film looks like an unexpectedly positive, interesting take on post-apocalyptic AI and its creator (or creators) than we are usually presented with from Hollywood. Between this and the new Foundation adaptation (that comes out in less than a WEEK!), maybe it’s time to forgive them for their many sins and finally subscribe to Apples streaming service. Or maybe not. 🤔

First trailer for Finch starring Tom hanks.

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Ancient DNA extracted from human bones has rewritten early Japanese history by underlining that modern day populations in Japan have a tripartite genetic origin—a finding that refines previously accepted views of a dual genomic ancestry.

Twelve newly sequenced ancient Japanese genomes show that modern day populations do indeed show the genetic signatures of early indigenous Jomon hunter-gatherer-fishers and immigrant Yayoi farmers—but also add a third genetic component that is linked to the Kofun peoples, whose culture spread in Japan between the 3rd and 7th centuries.

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“We were confident that the rocks of the Champua region were even older than previously thought,” says Mazumder, 53 now an associate professor of applied geosciences at the German University of Technology in Oman.

They were right. In 2,018 they published a paper in the journal Scientific Reports on two zircon crystals they extracted from rocks taken from the Champua site. While the rocks were 3.4 billion years old, the crystals were much older, at an estimated 4 and 4.2 billion years old.

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