Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 63

In what’s being called “an unprecedented scientific and human adventure at the North Pole,” the $23 million Tara Polar Station will be the home of a team of 18 people made up of scientists, artists, physicians, journalists, and sailors.

The mission of this drifting science station is to gather data and perform research during the period from November to February, a part of the year that lacks observations because of the dangers inherent in a region of the world that is warming faster than anywhere else.

“We have basically no information,” Tara Ocean Foundation’s Chris Bowler told New Scientist. “Which is alarming, considering it is such a fragile place and it is changing so rapidly.”

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Eco-driving involves making small adjustments to minimize unnecessary fuel consumption. For example, as cars approach a traffic light that has turned red, “there’s no point in me driving as fast as possible to the red light,” she says. By just coasting, “I am not burning gas or electricity in the meantime.” If one car, such as an automated vehicle, slows down at the approach to an intersection, then the conventional, non-automated cars behind it will also be forced to slow down, so the impact of such efficient driving can extend far beyond just the car that is doing it.

That’s the basic idea behind eco-driving, Wu says. But to figure out the impact of such measures, “these are challenging optimization problems” involving many different factors and parameters, “so there is a wave of interest right now in how to solve hard control problems using AI.”

The new benchmark system that Wu and her collaborators developed based on urban eco-driving, which they call “IntersectionZoo,” is intended to help address part of that need. The benchmark was described in detail in a paper presented at the 2025 International Conference on Learning Representation in Singapore.

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Since the dawn of philosophy, thinkers from Plato to Kant have considered how beauty affects human experience, and whether it has the power to transform our state of mind.

Now, a new study from the University of Cambridge suggests that stopping to contemplate the beauty of artistic objects in a gallery or museum boosts our ability to think in abstract ways and consider the “bigger picture” when it comes to our lives.

Researchers say the findings offer that engaging with artistic beauty helps us escape the “mental trappings of daily life,” such as current anxieties and to-do lists, and induce “psychological distancing”: the process of zooming out on your thoughts to gain clarity.

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Scientists from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and Harvard University have experimentally demonstrated that it is possible to reprogram the mechanical and structural behavior of innovative artificial materials with magnetic properties, known as metamaterials, without the need to modify their composition. This technology opens the door to innovations in fields such as biomedicine and soft robotics, among others.

The study, recently published in the journal Advanced Materials, details how to reprogram these by using flexible magnets distributed throughout their structure.

What is innovative about our proposal is the incorporation of small flexible magnets integrated into a rotating rhomboid matrix that allows the stiffness and energy absorption capacity of the structure to be modified by simply changing the distribution of these magnets or applying an . This confers unique properties that are not present in conventional materials or in nature.

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Scientists identified a new electrically conductive bacterium, Ca. Electrothrix yaqonensis, with potential applications in pollution cleanup and bioelectronics. Researchers have discovered a previously unknown species of bacteria capable of conducting electricity, potentially paving the way for i

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Revolutionary AI-driven 3D heart scans cut the need for invasive tests and have already saved millions of pounds, according to new analysis. Now rolled out across 56 NHS hospitals in England, the clever tech enables doctors to diagnose and treat patients with suspected heart disease much faster by turning a CT scan of their heart […]

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Nvidia and ServiceNow have created an AI model that can help companies create learning AI agents to automate corporate workloads.

The open-source Apriel model, available generally in the second quarter on HuggingFace, will help create AI agents that can make decisions around IT, human resources and customer-service functions.

“If you look at the foundation models, they’re very big, very slow,” Dorit Zilbershot, ServiceNow’s group vice president of AI experiences and innovation, said in an interview. “This is only a 15-billion-parameters model, it’s highly trained on reasoning. We expect the reasoning to be very, very important.

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