Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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An evolution of its 2018 ‘Valkyrie’ hypersonic airliner concept.

If you work out of an office, you know that the coffee machine is the favorite spot in the office to hang out or have conversations at. From giving us the first cup of the day to keeping us awake for late-night meetings, that machine is a lifesaver. But just for a day, try not getting your coffee from the coffee machine. Don’t skip coffee entirely, but instead, go out to your local coffee shop that doesn’t use coffee machines or make yourself a flask at home. You will realize that hand-made coffee is inherently better than the one that is made from a machine. Not just making coffee, but highly creative jobs–like designing an outfit or writing a book–are considered best left to human creators. Many do not think that machines could emulate them. But with the takeover of artificial intelligence, this belief is steadily being challenged. Creativity and AI are together transforming many spaces that were traditionally reserved for the “artists.” In this article, we’ll be exploring these spaces and how AI is making a significant impact on them.

Creativity and AI Are Literally Changing the World When you think “creative,” the first things that come to mind are music, poetry and novels. The best works in these three areas of art have been the results of human imagination and innovation. Every significant progress in these fields has challenged traditional ways of creating art and presented a new side to human creativity. For example, there was a time when classical music was considered to be the peak of musical art, but today, we see hip-hop and K-pop taking over the world, their styles and structures very different from classical music.

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Of course, a minimum level of fidelity is required, but what’s far more important is perceptual consistency. By this, I mean that all sensory signals (i.e. sight, sound, touch, and motion) feed a single mental model of the world within your brain. With augmented reality, this can be achieved with relatively low visual fidelity, as long as virtual elements are spatially and temporally registered to your surroundings in a convincing way. And because our sense of distance (i.e. depth perception) is relatively coarse, it’s not hard for this to be convincing.

But for virtual reality, providing a unified sensory model of the world is much harder. This might sound surprising because it’s far easier for VR hardware to provide high-fidelity visuals without lag or distortion. But unless you’re using elaborate and impractical hardware, your body will be sitting or standing still while most virtual experiences involve motion. This inconsistency forces your brain to build and maintain two separate models of your world — one for your real surroundings and one for the virtual world that is presented in your headset.

When I tell people this, they often push back, forgetting that regardless of what’s happening in their headset, their brain still maintains a model of their body sitting on their chair, facing a particular direction in a particular room, with their feet touching the floor (etc.). Because of this perceptual inconsistency, your brain is forced to maintain two mental models. There are ways to reduce the effect, but it’s only when you merge real and virtual worlds into a single consistent experience (i.e. foster a unified mental model) that this truly gets solved.

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Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler 21/12/2021. The power plant of technical service providers Faber Infrastructure and YESSS Elektro illuminates St. Pius Church and supplies two construction planning office containers with environment-friendly solar power. This is where the consulting engineers of the Ahr Valley Cooperation prepare their damage surveys for the residents affected by the flood disaster in Rhineland-Palatinate’s Ahr Valley – strictly on a cost-covering basis and not for profit.

See also: Economic losses from weather extremes amplify each other.

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They say ‘I believe in nature. Nature is harmonious’. Every big fish is eating every smaller fish. Every organ is fighting constantly invading bacteria. Is that what you mean by harmony? There are planets that are exploding out there. Meteorites that hit another and blow up. What’s the purpose of that? What’s the purpose of floods? To drown people? In other words, if you start looking for purpose, you gotta look all over, take in the whole picture. So, man projects his own values into nature. — Jacque Fresco (March 13, 1916 — May 18, 2017)

When most of us use the word ‘nature‘, we really don’t know much about it in reality. — Ursa.

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The first-generation AI systems did not address these needs, which led to a low adoption rate. But the second-generation AI systems are focused on a single subject – improving patients’ clinical outcomes. The digital pills combine a personalised second-generation AI system along with the branded or generic drug and improve the patient response as it increases adherence and overcomes the loss of response to chronic medications. It works on improving the effectiveness of drugs and therefore reducing healthcare costs and increasing end-user adoption.

There are many examples to prove that there is a partial or complete loss of response to chronic medications. Cancer drug resistance is a major obstacle for the treatment of multiple malignancies, one-third of epileptics develop resistance to anti-epileptic drugs; also, a similar percentage of patients with depression develop resistance to anti-depressants. Other than the loss of response to chronic medications, low adherence is also a common problem for many NCDs. A little less than 50% of severely asthmatic patients adhere to inhaled treatments, while 40% of hypertensive patients show non-adherence.

The second-generation systems are aimed at improving outcomes and reducing side effects. To overcome the hurdle of biases induced by big data, these systems implement an n = 1 concept in a personalised therapeutic regimen. This focus of the algorithm improves the clinically meaningful outcome for an individual subject. The personalised closed-loop system used by the second-generation system is designed to improve the end-organ function and overcome tolerance and loss of effectiveness.

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Lakeview Generating Station was once a coal plant in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto. But now, developers are reimagining it to become a mixed-use, lakefront village, where residents can walk or bike anywhere within the site in just 15 minutes.

Lakeview Village, as the new development will be named, will reclaim access and views of the lake, both of which the former coal plant had restricted for locals. As reported by Fast Company, the government shut down the plant in 2005, and initially planned to replace it with a gas-fired power plant. But the community protested this idea, instead pushing for the site to become something meaningful for the residents.

“There were a lot of grassroots community efforts that really resisted and had a more ambitious vision for what the waterfront could be here, toward a mixed-use, sustainable waterfront community,” Brian Sutherland, vice president of development at Argo Development Corporation, told Fast Company. Argo is leading the redevelopment project.

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Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing recently reported intriguing new evidence for a possible mouse origin of the Omicron variant. Their paper, posted on the BioRxiv preprint server, was quickly picked up and published a few days later by the Journal of Genetics and Genomics, and defies the prevailing theory which claims that the polymutant spike sequence of Omicron must have evolved under protracted infection in a severely immunocompromised patient.

Their main idea is that a mouse could have somehow been infected with the human virus by “reverse zoonotic transfer,” whereupon the virus evolved all or many of its 45 novel mutations, and then subsequently was transferred back to humans. While this theory might explain why Omicron appears so anomalous when plotted on a phylogenetic tree against the usual suspects, there is one major problem: The mouse homolog of the human ACE2 receptor (hACE2), which the virus typically uses to gain entry into , has little affinity for the standard issue SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

So little in fact, that in order to study the virus in this preferred research animal, scientists must artificially introduce hACE2 in order to create mice that show any significant respiratory distress upon infection. These are made in several ways, each showing unique tissue tropisms, penetrance and correspondingly different effects. Researchers have conducted knock-in experiments in which the human hACE2 sequence is integrated into the and induced under the control of a number of different promoters. Adenoviruses can also be used to infect cells and create replicating plasmids that propagate the hACE2 code.

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Horizon Aeronautics is prototyping an eVTOL hovercycle concept that uses a complex and interesting split-swashplate “Blainjett” variable pitch rotor system that only exposes half of each fan. Very odd, but Horizon says it’s highly efficient.

To understand how this Blainjett propulsion system works – and before anyone asks, no, these guys are no relation to me – you first need to understand how the swashplate and cyclic controls work to distribute thrust as a helicopter’s top rotor spins. Each blade can vary its pitch independently, with the height of the swashplate determining the pitch. With the swashplate sitting flat, pushing the whole thing up and down will change the pitch of all the blades at once.

But with the cyclic control, helicopter pilots are able to tilt the swashplate. Pushing the stick forward, for example, tilts it such that the blades gradually tilt as they spin around, getting flatter as they pass the front of the aircraft, then pitching up to develop more lift as they go around the back. The result is an asymmetry in lift, with more at the back of the disc, and the aircraft pitches forward and accelerates in that direction. The cyclic control can do this in any direction; it’s part of what makes helicopters such dynamic aircraft.

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