Lifeboat Foundation

When talking about the economics of Tesla’s future fleet of robotaxis at the Tesla Autonomy Event, Tesla CEO Elon Musk emphasized that the vehicles need to be durable in order for the economics to work:

“The cars currently built are all designed for a million miles of operation. The drive unit is design, tested, and validated for 1 million miles of operation.”

But the CEO admitted that the battery packs are not built to last 1 million miles.

This assumes information transfer between humans is frictionless, which it is not. At least not currently. We could easily address this, but no one is listening:-) QED.

Italians are some of the fastest speakers on the planet, chattering at up to nine syllables per second. Many Germans, on the other hand, are slow enunciators, delivering five to six syllables in the same amount of time. Yet in any given minute, Italians and Germans convey roughly the same amount of information, according to a new study. Indeed, no matter how fast or slowly languages are spoken, they tend to transmit information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second, about twice the speed of Morse code.

“This is pretty solid stuff,” says Bart de Boer, an evolutionary linguist who studies speech production at the Free University of Brussels, but was not involved in the work. Language lovers have long suspected that information-heavy languages—those that pack more information about tense, gender, and speaker into smaller units, for example—move slowly to make up for their density of information, he says, whereas information-light languages such as Italian can gallop along at a much faster pace. But until now, no one had the data to prove it.

Continue reading “Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second” »

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, is most famous for its particle collider, but it also has facilities that can test for other high-energy environments similar to those found in space. Now those facilities are being used to test future spacecraft to see if they are radiation-proof.

The European Space Agency (ESA) will launch the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or JUICE, mission in 2022. Before then, ESA scientists wanted to know what kinds of environmental stresses the explorer will be subjected to when it braves Jupiter’s massive magnetic field. The magnetic field has a volume of a million times that of Earth’s magnetosphere, and trapped within the field are energetic charged particles. These particles form radiation belts which bombard visiting craft with high levels of radiation, which can be harmful to electronics.

To see how the JUICE hardware will handle this radiation, the ESA has borrowed the world’s most intense radiation beam — one located at a CERN facility called VESPER (Very energetic Electron facility for Space Planetary Exploration missions in harsh Radiative environments). Now it is working alongside CERN to develop the testing protocol for other future missions too, such as the proposed Ice Giants mission to Neptune and Uranus.

While trying to regenerate the thymus gland, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers might have found a solution to not only slowing down the ageing problem but actually reversing it, a new study claims.

Scientists volunteers in a California study were given a cocktail of three common drugs for one year- a growth hormone and two diabetes medications in order to stimulate the regeneration of thymus gland. However, according to a study published in Nature journal, researchers found that participants had lost an average of 2.5 years on their “epigenetic clock,” measured by analyzing marks on a person’s genomes.

“I’d expected to see slowing down of the clock, but not a reversal,” UCLA researcher Steve Horvath told Nature. “That felt kind of futuristic.”

Read the review article published in Frontiers in Pharmacology: https://fro.ntiers.in/BjeD

Prevention is better than cure. This simple rule applies to any disease and is especially valuable when symptoms are not properly acknowledged.

We will describe crucial symptoms that might occur one month (or even earlier) before a heart attack. You don’t need to become a total hypochondriac, but a bit of health awareness never hurt anybody. Pay close attention in case you are at risk. Several often-missed indicators are listed at the end of the article. health, medicine, science, health, medicine, science, health, science, health, science.

A web page pretending to offer an official application from PayPal is currently spreading a new variant of Nemty ransomware to unsuspecting users.

It appears that the operators of this file-encrypting malware are trying various distribution channels as it was recently observed as a payload from the RIG exploit kit (EK).

After what has been a summer of “crippling ransomware attacks,” there has now been some respite courtesy of the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, which has proven that the playing field can be levelled. The city was hit back in July, with its data held hostage, ransomed for more than $5 million in bitcoin. But as the attackers waited for their payment, the city’s law enforcement agencies and technology teams had other ideas.

No types of organisations are immune from these types of attacks these days,” Mayor Jon Mitchell told reporters. The city government, he said, had been taking steps to strengthen our defences—but any network is only one keyword click away from an attack. Thankfully, he acknowledged, “the attack could have been much worse.” It hit on the July 4 holiday when many systems were shut down.

“The attack was a variant of the RYUK virus,” Mitchell confirmed. “The victim needs to make a ransom payment to acquire the decryption key from the attacker.” The attack did not affect all systems or disrupt all services, and on the return to work on July 5, the city kept systems turned off as they isolated the attack.

As AI gets better at performing routine tasks traditionally done by humans, only stressful ones will be left. The work experience could suffer.