Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 7256

As we build the gateway in and out of Africa, preparing people for the future, application and ethical usage of science and technology in the age of exponential growth is a major concern for us.

We help institutions, organizations, and corporates to train, instruct, and design future based courses and programs for the future as it exponentially becoming faster than we think.

Our book was developed for a course on “Exponential Technologies and Business Opportunities in the Age of Singularities” for the Tekedia Institute USA with an extension in Africa as part of a Mini Masters of Business Administration program (mini MBA).

This volume is a contribution from Edward Hudgins, Ph.D., Brent Ellman, Chogwu Abdul, and Gennady Stolyarov II (edited by Edward Hudgins) which offer insights that will benefit any individual who comes about their lives and the future of their families, friends, neighbours, and countries.

Read more | >

Scientists from NASA ’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and international collaborators demonstrated a new method for mapping the location and size of trees growing outside of forests, discovering billions of trees in arid and semi-arid regions and laying the groundwork for more accurate global measurement of carbon storage on land.

Using powerful supercomputers and machine learning algorithms, the team mapped the crown diameter – the width of a tree when viewed from above – of more than 1.8 billion trees across an area of more than 500,000 square miles, or 1,300,000 square kilometers. The team mapped how tree crown diameter, coverage, and density varied depending on rainfall and land use.

Read more | >

If you’re a user of Google’s Messages app on your Android smartphone, then you will now likely have the RCS update intended to bring standard text messaging into the current century. RCS is now available in all major countries except China, Russia and Iran. Building on standard SMS capabilities, this adds chat functionality to compete with WhatsApp and iMessage. But, in truth, it doesn’t compete at all. There’s a glaring issue that doesn’t look like being properly fixed anytime soon. This is now bad enough that you should now go use something else.

The issue, of course, is end-to-end encryption. Six months ago, reports emerged that Google was developing this level of security to upgrade RCS. As of this week, this is now finally available for public beta testing. On the surface, its intent is to deliver Android users with an iMessage alternative. But there is a glaring issue—and it’s a deal breaker. This deployment of end-to-end encryption on RCS is not available for groups—that’s seemingly too complex to handle right now. And there’s also no word yet as to when this limited upgrade might be rolled out.

With that in mind, Android users should opt for a different iMessage-like alternative. Fortunately, there is a simple solution available now. While its standard messenger is not end-to-end encrypted by default, Android offers users the option to select an alternative default messenger that does. Signal is the best secure messenger available. And while its install base is modest in comparison to WhatsApp or iMessage, it’s growing fast.

Read more | >

Professor of theoretical epidemiology Sunetra Gupta has criticised the planned return to a Covid tier system in December.

Speaking with talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer, the Great Barrington Declaration co-author said it “still leaves the doors open to the enormous harms of lockdown”.

She added: “Lockdowns are a luxury of the affluent…the UK cannot afford it.”

It comes ahead of Boris Johnson setting out plans for a strengthened three-tier system of restrictions to replace England national lockdown and to pave the way for a limited relaxation at Christmas.

Continue reading “Professor Sunetra Gupta: ‘Lockdowns are a luxury of the affluent…the UK cannot afford it’” | >

Multilayer plastic materials are ubiquitous in food and medical supply packaging, particularly since layering polymers can give those films specific properties, like heat resistance or oxygen and moisture control. But despite their utility, those ever-present plastics are impossible to recycle using conventional methods.

About 100 million tons of multilayer thermoplastics — each composed of as many as 12 layers of varying polymers — are produced globally every year. Forty percent of that total is waste from the manufacturing process itself, and because there has been no way to separate the polymers, almost all of that plastic ends up in landfills or incinerators.

Now, University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers have pioneered a method for reclaiming the polymers in these materials using solvents, a technique they’ve dubbed Solvent-Targeted Recovery and Precipitation (STRAP) processing. Their proof-of-concept is detailed today (November 20, 2020) in the journal Science Advances.

Read more | >