Lifeboat Foundation

The quality and complexity of dreams appear to change with our stages of sleep, according to a new analysis.

Before the twenty-first century, we used to think dreams only occurred during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, but more recent research shows people sometimes recall dreams even when they are woken from non-REM stages of sleep.

Whether these two types of dreaming are inherently different is something neuroscientists are still trying to figure out.

From a pile of seaweed to a packet of soy sauce.

The London startup Notpla has created a plastic alternative from seaweed that’s biodegradable — and even edible. And it’s hoping it could put a dent in the 300 million tons of plastic waste humans generate each year.

Notpla’s natural plastic-like casing is biodegradable within four to six weeks, the company says, compared to the several hundred years it takes synthetic plastics to biodegrade.

Summary: A new AI system helps researchers better understand the brain computations that underlie thought.

Source: Baylor University.

A team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University has developed artificial intelligence (AI) models that help them better understand the brain computations that underlie thoughts. This is new, because until now there has been no method to measure thoughts. The researchers first developed a new model that can estimate thoughts by evaluating behavior, and then tested their model on a trained artificial brain where they found neural activity associated with those estimates of thoughts. The theoretical study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The technology doesn’t seem to be here yet; obviously, the ice on Mars will be harvested to provide drinking and irrigation water.

If we ever intend to send crewed missions to deep-space locations, then we need to come up with solutions for keeping the crews supplied. For astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), who regularly receive resupply missions from Earth, this is not an issue. But for missions traveling to destinations like Mars and beyond, self-sufficiency is the name of the game.

Continue reading “How to make the food and water Mars-bound astronauts will need for their mission” »

Dogmatic individuals tend to form less accurate judgements thanks to a generic resistance to seeking out additional information, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The findings shed new light on the cognitive underpinnings of dogmatic worldviews.

“We have never been so free to decide if we have enough evidence about something or whether we should seek out further information from a reliable source before believing it,” explained study author Lion Schulz, a doctoral researcher in the Department of Computational Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

“In turn, if we don’t check on quick and uncertain judgements, this can leave us quite vulnerable to misinformation. Understanding the mechanism behind such decisions and how different people approach them is therefore important when we try to understand the current societal climate.”

Global #connectivity lets for #digitalidentity for billions of people worldwide, giving them access to #telehealth, #education, #careers, #entertainment and #finance services, as well as raising #cybersecurity and #dataprivacy concernsRe-sharing. Starlink can help telemedicine become more reliable and available to people in need. Especially those in rurual or far flung locations.

Video Source/Credit: SpaceX Youtube Channel

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s Starlink May Potentially Revolutionize Healthcare” »

Drone privacy laws vary all around the world — and what might get you a great shot in one country could get you jail time in another.

Surfshark, a digital security firm, introduces Mapped: The state of drone privacy laws in (nearly) every country.

Drone privacy is serious business – and what gets you a great image in one country could get you a jail term in another. Finding these laws, however, is hit or miss – so this new research from Surfshark is a great place to start for world travelers.

Continue reading “Drone Privacy Laws Around the World: Surfshark Maps it Out” »

A small group of economists from Italy, the U.K., and the U.S. has published a Policy Forum piece in the journal Science suggesting that consumers need to be protected from collusive price setting by AI systems. They also outline some possible ways to solve the problem.

For most countries, price collusion is illegal. It is where two or more makers or sellers of goods get together and agree to charge higher than market prices for the goods or services they are selling. Such practices are illegal because consumers wind up paying higher prices than they would if prices were market based. In their paper the economists reveal that many large corporations have taken to using computer systems with an AI component to set their prices. Using computers to set prices is not new, of course, some companies sell hundreds of thousands of products. Using computers to help set prices saves a lot of time and money. But until now, such systems have been constrained by the laws in which the companies operate—such laws can be baked in. But now, the authors contend, things have begun to change. AI systems have found, through learned experience, that uncommunicated collusion can lead to higher profits.

To those who saw it in its very first theatrical run, the opening crawl at the very top of the original 1977 “Star Wars” film automatically dispelled any notions about cosmic civilizations and a linear march of time. We all got the reference to a “galaxy far, far away” at the outset, but “a long time ago” was all at once brilliant and mind-blowing.

Inherent in that notion is the idea that civilizations outside our own solar system have been living and dying since time immemorial. And the civilizations depicted in this bit of space cinema also appear to have become masters of their own galactic quadrants, if not their whole galaxy.

Yet here on parochial Earth, we are wedded to the linear march of time in a way that is not likely to change until the very far future. Here, we are guided by our own history of technological advancement in a way that extraterrestrial civilizations may find antiquated. They may already be inured to the fact that they are mere technological babes in the woods when compared to much more advanced civilizations they, themselves, may have encountered.