Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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When Gabrielle Diamond and her boyfriend, Brian Cox, showed up for eviction court on October 15, they were more than a little nervous.

The two had been renting a bedroom in transitional housing for veterans in Kansas City, Missouri, since January, paying $600 per month for their month-to-month lease. Almost as soon as they moved in, Diamond says, the issues started. The building was unclean and attracted mice, and the landlord would make unannounced weekly visits; at one point, the couple were asked to move out temporarily for house repairs without any assistance, financial or otherwise.

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Understanding how matter interacts with light—its optical properties—is critical in a myriad of energy and biomedical technologies, such as targeted drug delivery, quantum dots, fuel combustion, and cracking of biomass. But calculating these properties is computationally intensive, and the inverse problem—designing a structure with desired optical properties—is even harder.

Now Berkeley Lab scientists have developed a machine learning model that can be used for both problems—calculating of a known structure and, inversely, designing a structure with desired optical properties. Their study was published in Cell Reports Physical Science.

“Our model performs bi-directionally with high accuracy and its interpretation qualitatively recovers physics of how metal and dielectric materials interact with light,” said corresponding author Sean Lubner.

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Scientists stress that the symptoms of space travel aren’t exactly the same as aging, and many changes reverse themselves once people return to Earth, but the comparisons are still useful. Spaceflight is an immersive experience that spares no traveler, while aging happens to every Earthling whether we like it or not. As such, life in space is a good model for understanding aging as a chronic process, Bailey says. The barren otherworld of outer space could even reveal new ways to protect ourselves against the process of growing old.

Space travel induces bodily changes that are remarkably similar to growing old, providing a unique way to boost medical research.

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Instead of inserting a card or scanning a smartphone to make a payment, what if you could simply touch the machine with your finger?

A prototype developed by Purdue University engineers would essentially let your body act as the link between your card or smartphone and the reader or scanner, making it possible for you to transmit information just by touching a .

The prototype doesn’t transfer money yet, but it’s the first technology that can send any information through the direct touch of a fingertip. While wearing the prototype as a watch, a user’s body can be used to send information such as a photo or password when touching a sensor on a laptop, the researchers show in a new study.

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A new tool that uses light to map out the electronic structures of crystals could reveal the capabilities of emerging quantum materials and pave the way for advanced energy technologies and quantum computers, according to researchers at the University of Michigan, University of Regensburg and University of Marburg.

A paper on the work is published in Science.

Applications include LED lights, solar cells and artificial photosynthesis.

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