Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have found that homeowners who seed their lawns with a special grass mix can feed dozens of species of bees that would otherwise go hungry. So, beginning this spring, Minnesota will pay thousands of residents to plant “bee lawns” under a new state program that has attracted attention from other states. Each homeowner will get as much as $350 to do the work.

Why grass mix brings all the bees to the yard.

Ann Druyan, who co-wrote the original 1980s series with her late husband, is back at work as this season’s executive producer, writer and director. Her book, “Cosmos: Possible Worlds,” was recently published as a companion to the series, which will be aired on March 9 at 8/7c on National Geographic. We were lucky enough to catch up with Druyan to talk more about her latest projects.

You’ve described this season of “Cosmos” as the “boldest” season yet. Can you elaborate on that, without giving too much away?

I think it’s the boldest in that it appears to present such an optimistic vision of the future, and that sets it apart, I think, in many ways from most of our entertainment. Of course, our entertainment is just a reflection of the reality we’re coping with, but this “Cosmos” is not only a vision of a magnificent future, but a vision of a magnificent future if we learn to use our science in high technology with wisdom. It’s the future we can still have and so many of the stories in both book and show are the stories of our ancestors who endured terrible situations. Every single person alive today is descended from humans who have been back to the wall repeatedly, but rose to the challenge.

Continue reading “Why ‘Cosmos’ producer Ann Druyan is optimistic about the future” »

Hi all! I hope you’re doing well and staying healthy! As a hobby, I have begun a futurist YouTube channel. I have just uploaded a video on why I personally believe that there may be an exodus to virtual reality in the future. Please take a look at it and subscribe and like it if you enjoyed the video!

Virtual reality is oftentimes the ultimate promise of science-fiction. Leaving behind the boring real-world for an exciting world that operates outside the bounds of reality is something that is promised to us by sci-fi. But does that mean that a large number of people would be willing to do that forever? Here’s why I believe they would.

Continue reading “Why There May Be A Virtual Reality Exodus” »

Circa 2014

Circumcision and sexual activity are but two factors that can influence the bacterial communities that inhabit male genitalia.

Preserved microorganisms have been found encased in 3.5-billion-year-old rocks, confirming that single-celled life was thriving early in Earth’s history.

Circa 2015 o.o take their Gene’s and could make immunity greater for stomaches.

Vultures have a unique genetic make-up allowing them to digest carcasses and guard themselves against constant exposure to pathogens in their diet, according to the first Eurasian vulture genome published in the open access journal Genome Biology. The study also finds that this species of Asian vulture is more closely related to the North American bald eagle than previously thought.

The cinereous vulture or black vulture, Aegypius monachus, is the largest bird of prey, and an iconic bird in the Far East. The species plays a key role in the ecosystem by removing rotting carcasses, thus preventing the spread of disease.

As their feeding habits involve constant exposure to pathogens, vultures are suspected to have strong immune systems, having evolved mechanisms to prevent infection by the microbes found in their diet. Despite the potential interest in the immune system of scavengers, little is known about the genetic variations involved in vultures’ immune processes.

Bethesda, Md., Thurs., May 6, 2010 — Researchers have produced the first whole genome sequence of the 3 billion letters in the Neanderthal genome, and the initial analysis suggests that up to 2 percent of the DNA in the genome of present-day humans outside of Africa originated in Neanderthals or in Neanderthals’ ancestors.

The international research team, which includes researchers from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health, reports its findings in the May 7, 2010, issue of Science.

The current fossil record suggests that Neanderthals, or Homo neanderthalensis, diverged from the primate line that led to present-day humans, or Homo sapiens, some 400,000 years ago in Africa. Neanderthals migrated north into Eurasia, where they became a geographically isolated group that evolved independently from the line that became modern humans in Africa. They lived in Europe and western Asia, as far east as southern Siberia and as far south as the Middle East.

Google announced Monday that it is making available an open-source library for quantum machine-learning applications.

TensorFlow Quantum, a free library of applications, is an add-on to the widely-used TensorFlow toolkit, which has helped to bring the world of machine learning to developers across the globe.

“We hope this framework provides the necessary tools for the quantum computing and machine learning research communities to explore models of both natural and artificial quantum systems, and ultimately discover new quantum algorithms which could potentially yield a quantum advantage,” a report posted by members of Google’s X unit on the AI Blog states.

J Gen Psychol. 2009 Jan;136:21–39. doi: 10.3200/GENP.136.1.21–40.

The authors examined the role of cognitive operations in discriminations between externally and internally generated events (e.g., reality monitoring) in healthy and pathological aging. The authors used 2 reality-monitoring distinctions to manipulate the quantity and quality of necessary cognitive operations: discriminating between I performed versus I imagined performing and between I watched another perform versus I imagined another performing. Older adults had more difficulty than did younger adults when discriminating between memories in both versions of the task. In addition, older adults with Alzheimer’s-type dementia showed marked difficulties when attributing a source to imagined actions. The authors interpret these findings in terms of an age difficulty or the failure to use cognitive operations as useful cues during source monitoring.