Lifeboat Foundation

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The astronaut training billionaire Richard Branson to be the first passenger on Virgin Galactic has seen the Earth from 56 miles away. Now, the long-time bitcoin advocate wants to share what she saw: how blockchain and other technologies are enabling a borderless world.

The SLLIM is a liquid sodium nuclear fast reactor that generates 10 to 100 MW for many years, even decades, without refueling. It can’t meltdown, can operate without water, is factory fabricated and shipped to the construction site where it is installed below ground in a seismic-resistant cocoon.

Ukrainian optical company Ochis Coffee is introducing two stylish new sunglasses this year, both made from coffee grounds. Find out more about this eyewear.

Hurricane Dorian is now a “catastrophic Category 5” storm and the strongest on modern record as it approaches the northwestern Bahamas in the Caribbean, according to a National Hurricane Center update today (Sept. 1).

As of 11 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT), Dorian has maximum wind speeds of 180 mph (285 km/h) as the storm churns about 20 miles (30 km) east of Great Abaco Island, the NHC wrote in the update. The storm is about 205 miles (330 km) east of West Palm Beach, Florida.

“Devastating hurricane conditions are expected in the Abacos Islands very soon and these conditions will spread across Grand Bahama Island later today,” NASA officials said today in a morning update.

Several images labelled as “Candidate Landing Site for SpaceX Starship in Arcadia Region” were found in the latest data release from University of Arizona.

Humans today are mosaics, our genomes rich tapestries of interwoven ancestries. With every fossil discovered, with every DNA analysis performed, the story gets more complex: We, the sole survivors of the genus Homo, harbor genetic fragments from other closely related but long-extinct lineages. Modern humans are the products of a sprawling history of shifts and dispersals, separations and reunions—a history characterized by far more diversity, movement and mixture than seemed imaginable a mere decade ago.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

But it’s one thing to say that Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of modern Europeans, or that the recently discovered Denisovans interbred with some older mystery group, or that they all interbred with each other. It’s another to provide concrete details about when and where those couplings occurred. “We’ve got this picture where these events are happening all over the place,” said Aylwyn Scally, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cambridge. “But it’s very hard for us to pin down any particular single event and say, yeah, we’re really confident that that one happened — unless we have ancient DNA.”

On Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Alibaba cofounder Jack Ma took the stage at the World AI Conference in Shanghai to debate artificial intelligence and its implications for humanity. As expected, Ma took a far more optimistic stance than Musk. Ma encouraged people to have faith in humanity, our creativity, and the future. “I don’t think artificial intelligence is a threat,” he said, to which Musk replied, “I don’t know, man, that’s like, famous last words.” An edited transcript of the discussion follows.

Elon Musk: What are we supposed to say? Just things about AI perhaps? Yeah. Okay. Let’s see.

Jack Ma: The AI, right? Okay, great.

Near-death experiences have gotten a lot of attention lately. The 2014 movie Heaven Is for Real, about a young boy who told his parents he had visited heaven while he was having emergency surgery, grossed a respectable $91 million in the United States. The book it was based on, published in 2010, has sold some 10 million copies and spent 206 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Two recent books by doctors—Proof of Heaven, by Eben Alexander, who writes about a near-death experience he had while in a week-long coma brought on by meningitis, and To Heaven and Back, by Mary C. Neal, who had her NDE while submerged in a river after a kayaking accident—have spent 94 and 36 weeks, respectively, on the list. (The subject of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, published in 2010, recently admitted that he made it all up.) Science, cool facts, mind, emotion, breakthrough, science.

Their stories are similar to those told in dozens if not hundreds of books and in thousands of interviews with “NDErs,” or “experiencers,” as they call themselves, in the past few decades. Though details and descriptions vary across cultures, the overall tenor of the experience is remarkably similar. Western near-death experiences are the most studied. Many of these stories relate the sensation of floating up and viewing the scene around one’s unconscious body; spending time in a beautiful, otherworldly realm; meeting spiritual beings (some call them angels) and a loving presence that some call God; encountering long-lost relatives or friends; recalling scenes from one’s life; feeling a sense of connectedness to all creation as well as a sense of overwhelming, transcendent love; and finally being called, reluctantly, away from the magical realm and back into one’s own body.