Lifeboat Foundation

“In one sense, universities have become victims of their own success at teaching online, but some academics are concerned that continued closures could hurt poorer students without access to computers or study space, while others mourn the loss of face-to-face connection while teaching.” Universities have become bloated cliques. Has Covid shown we don’t need mini-towns and fat fees? Poorer students might welcome online courses at 10% of the cost surely and shorter completion time, surely?

Governments are prioritising reopening schools and businesses over campuses. But some academics fear the impact on disadvantaged students – and on their teaching.

We need to massively reforest the planet, in a very short period of time. Flash Forest’s drones can plant trees a lot faster than humans.

[Photo: courtesy Flash Forest] One of Flash Forest’s prototype drones.

Circa 2019.

Gain of function research was heavily debated amidst many CDC mishaps. It was stopped, and then outsourced to China due to lax regulations. Now we have an outbreak that no one can confirm it’s origin, but the epicenter is in close proximity to a Wuhan lab working on the same pathogen, with direct bat to human transmission.

Knowing this, this story disturbs me, as we have no international protocols and regulations to prevent mishaps. The last thing we need is a lab mishap, and monkeys riding on horses with guns, all pissed off at humans. We are already experiencing the Contagion movie, and biblical plagues like locusts, the last we need is planet of the apes.

Continue reading “Scientists are making human-monkey hybrids in China” »

Artist’s impression of the first stars. (Wise, Abel, Kaehler (KIPAC/SLAC))

Since the ancient times, humans have been observant and curious to know why everything around us exists. Looking up into the sky, we see many celestial objects such as stars and planets. In the past few centuries, we have made many jumps in the field of space exploration. Telescopes have been created, the stars have been mapped, people have flown in space and even lived there for over six months. These activities have played a major role in the development of our knowledge about space, yet there is so much more we need to discover.

One thing we need to find is how to make space travel quicker and more efficient. Why making space travel better, out of all the problems mankind faces? Currently, our global population is about 7.6 billion and is exponentially rising. By 2025, in just seven years, the global population will be roughly 8.1 billion. Since our resource availability is going down and our population is rising, the Earth can not sustain such an imbalance. This why we must start looking to live on other planets and in order to do this, shortening the time it takes to reach such planets is a necessity.

As a society, when we think of space in general, we just think “oh yeah, that’s cool” but there are multiple problems with space travel. One major issue is the lack of experience. The last Moon landing was in 1972 and space shuttles have been out of use 2011. We can’t just get up and say “you know what, let’s go to space” as it takes many years of preparation and training. This ties to two other major problems:

The Czinger 21C is a 1,233bhp 3D printed hypercar complete with a turbo V8 revving to 11,000rpm, a 1+1 layout and $1.7m price tag. Oh, and the big news is it’s 3D printed. Well, large sections of the chassis are, paving the way for a revolutionary new car manufacturing process that could change… everything. It’s mind-blowing stuff, so let Jack Rix be your guide around California’s Koenigsegg rival.

WATCH MORE TOP GEAR:
http://bit.ly/TG-S27
http://bit.ly/StigCams
http://bit.ly/TG-Mercedes

Continue reading “Czinger 21C: the world’s first 3D printed hypercar | Top Gear” »

This week:

👨‍🚀 Counting down to the return of human spaceflight from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center 🚀 A successful International Space Station resupply mission 🌒 A new virtual tool to help develop lunar landers for #Artemis missions.

So this is what astronauts get up to in space! 🌌.

Plants can produce energy-rich biomass with the help of light, water and carbon dioxide. This is why they are at the beginning of the food chains. But the carnivorous plants have turned the tables and hunt animals. Insects are their main food source.

A publication in the journal Current Biology now sheds light on the secret life of the green carnivores. The plant scientist Rainer Hedrich and the evolutionary bioinformatician Jörg Schultz, both from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, and their colleague Mitsujasu Hasebe from the University of Okazaki (Japan) have deciphered and analyzed the genomes of three carnivorous plant species.

They studied the Venus flytrap Dionaea muscipula, which originates from North America, the globally occurring waterwheel plant Aldrovanda vesiculosa and the spoon-leaved sundew Drosera spatulata, which is widely distributed in Asia.