Lifeboat Foundation

Well, they don’t.

Thousands are currently engaged in solving the problem of death. Maybe they’ll succeed, and out of sheer boredom I’ll reread this sentence when I’m 900 years old, reflecting fondly on the first wasted century of my life. In the meantime, billions are going to die—some from disease, some in freak accidents, and a substantial number from what we generally call “old age.” That last sounds like a pleasant way to go, comparatively—a peaceful winding-down. But what exactly does it look like? What does it really mean to die from old age? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts to find out.

Astronomers have discovered an activity cycle in another fast radio burst, potentially unearthing a significant clue about these mysterious deep-space phenomena.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are extragalactic flashes of light that pack a serious wallop, unleashing in a few milliseconds as much energy as Earth’s sun does in a century. Scientists first spotted an FRB in 2007, and the cause of these eruptions remains elusive nearly a decade and a half later; potential explanations range from merging superdense neutron stars to advanced alien civilizations.

To advance his vision, last week EIC launched the OPEN100 project, which Kugelmass says will provide open-source blueprints for the design, construction, and financing of a 100-megawatt nuclear reactor. He claims the reactor can be built for $300 million in less than two years, significantly decreasing the per-kilowatt cost of nuclear power.

“Nuclear power isn’t just part of the solution to addressing climate change; it is the solution,” Kugelmass said in a press release. “OPEN100 will radically change the way we deploy nuclear power plants going forward, offering a substantially less expensive and less complicated solution.”

The logic behind the idea is that the biggest barrier to the widespread use of nuclear is the cost of building reactors, which most experts would agree is a major problem for the industry. Kugelmass thinks that’s because we’ve been focused on large, overly complicated reactors that take far too long to build. His solution is to go back to tried and tested pressurized water reactors from the previous century, and bring their cost down even further through standardization and a focus on speedy construction.

MetaRomantism and “Evil”

MetaRomanticism can be thought of as an attempt to reform Romanticism, which seems necessary since it seems to be a constant companion to Modernism and it is especially dangerous when it has access to Modernist tools that is uses while refusing to be rational. Perhaps this explains the horrors of Nazism in the 20th century. Nazis were irrationalist Romantics that stole the Modernist tools of Weimar Germany and nearly destroyed human civilization and they attached themselves to Dharma traditions that sometime support versions of annihilationism.

How can MetaRomanticism help?

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The iThrone solves the thorny problem of how to bring toilet tech to the billions of people still using latrines or outhouses.

A disease-detecting “precision health” toilet can sense multiple signs of illness through automated urine and stool analysis, according to a new study.

The “smart toilet” isn’t the kind that lifts its own lid in preparation for use; this toilet includes technology that can detect a range of disease markers in stool and urine, including those of some cancers, such as colorectal or urologic cancers.

The device could hold particular appeal for people genetically predisposed to certain conditions, such as irritable bowel syndrome, prostate cancer, or kidney failure, and want to keep on top of their health.

A Bangalore-based company claimed on Sunday that it had used radio frequency waves to lower air pollution over parts of Delhi, surprising sections of scientists who say they have never heard of such technology.

Devic Earth had installed devices that broadcast ultrahigh frequency (UHF) radio waves at two sites in the capital, responding to requests from Procam International, the organisers of the Delhi half-marathon, a Devic official said.

Company officials and the organisers have claimed the devices helped lower levels of tiny particulate matter (PM) in the air and served as a protective umbrella for the marathon runners. The devices used on Sunday were paid for by the organisers.

When it comes to electric vehicles, Yamaha’s electric bicycle division has been charging into the future while its electric motorcycle division has been oddly quiet and unproductive — at least outwardly.

But now we’re getting a new look at a series of electric motors that Yamaha has been developing — motors that could rapidly progress Yamaha’s EV efforts.

The St. Patrick Bay ice caps on the Hazen Plateau of northeastern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, have disappeared, according to NASA satellite imagery. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) scientists and colleagues predicted via a 2017 paper in The Cryosphere that the ice caps would melt out completely within the next five years, and recent images from NASA’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) have confirmed that this prediction was accurate.

Mark Serreze, director of NSIDC, Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, and lead author on the paper, first set foot on the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in 1982 as a young graduate student. He visited the ice caps with his advisor, Ray Bradley, of the University of Massachusetts.

“When I first visited those ice caps, they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape,” said Serreze. “To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away.”