Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego have built a squid robot that can propel itself through the water untethered, just like the real thing.

“Essentially, we recreated all the key features that squids use for high-speed swimming,” Michael T. Tolley, co-author of the paper published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics last month.

“This is the first untethered robot that can generate jet pulses for rapid locomotion like the squid and can achieve these jet pulses by changing its body shape, which improves swimming efficiency,” he added.

It moves by sucking in and expelling water behind it — just like the real thing.

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Vaccines could take years, and preventative drugs could help bridge the gap.

Though many people are pinning their hopes on a COVID-19 vaccine, another option is available: preventive treatment. At a Senate hearing this week, Anthony Fauci noted that a vaccine — which is probably months or years away — isn’t the only way to protect someone from a life-threatening virus.

These treatments could protect people against infection for a few weeks or months, said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. While most ongoing research studies are focused on finding treatments for people who are already sick with COVID-19, some researchers are looking to see if they can stop people who are at high risk from getting sick in the first place.

It’s a proven strategy: preventive drugs have been used for decades to help people protect themselves against malaria. More recently, they were a breakthrough in the fight against HIV. There’s no effective vaccine against HIV, but people can take a daily medication that reduces their risk of contracting it through sexual activity by 99 percent. The medication is a pre-exposure prophylactic, or PrEP — a drug used to prevent disease in people who haven’t yet been exposed to it.

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In this brief, at times controversial— even radical—volume. Dr. Ian C. Hale guides us through likely scenarios and gives us life-saving recommendations for effectively dealing with the next waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a must read for public policy makers, medical professionals, and those mapping out their financial future in the post-corona world.

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SpaceX launched 60 Starlink satellites atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Oct. 6, 2020. The private spaceflight company has now launched well over 700 of these internet-providing satellites into orbit. [SpaceX launches 60 Starlink satellites and lands rocket at sea](https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-12-internet-satellites-launch)

Credit: SpaceX

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Circa 2015

First we kick them, then we give them the tools they need to destroy all of humanity. Good job, us.

Scientists in China have invented a liquid metal that can shape-shift and propel itself around a course all by itself.

Made from a metal alloy containing mostly gallium — a metal that melts down to liquid form at just below 30 degrees Celsius — the world’s “first self-fuelled liquid metal motor” can get about an hour’s worth of movement out of a single flake of aluminium.

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Ramping Up

Johnson announced that the U.K. would invest about £160 million ($207 million) that will go toward factories that would develop new turbines as well as floating offshore turbines themselves. In order to power every home in the U.K., those turbines would need to generate about 40 GW of power, Engadget reports. That’s four times the nation’s current wind energy output.

“Your kettle, your washing machine, your cooker, your heating, your plug-in electric vehicle, the whole lot of them will get their juice cleanly and without guilt from the breezes that blow around these islands,” Johnson announced at the U.K. Conservative party conference.

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