Lifeboat Foundation

The news we had finally found ripples in space-time reverberated around the world in 2015. Now it seems they might have been an illusion.

LIGO’s detectorsEnrico Sacchetti

THERE was never much doubt that we would observe gravitational waves sooner or later. This rhythmic squeezing and stretching of space and time is a natural consequence of one of science’s most well-established theories, Einstein’s general relativity. So when we built a machine capable of observing the waves, it seemed that it would be only a matter of time before a detection.

High-performance computing (HPC)—the use of supercomputers and parallel processing techniques to solve large computational problems—is of great use in the scientific community. For example, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory rely on HPC to analyze the data they collect at the large-scale experimental facilities on site and to model complex processes that would be too expensive or impossible to demonstrate experimentally.

Modern science applications, such as simulating particle interactions, often require a combination of aggregated computing power, high-speed networks for data transfer, large amounts of memory, and high-capacity storage capabilities. Advances in HPC hardware and software are needed to meet these requirements. Computer and computational scientists and mathematicians in Brookhaven Lab’s Computational Science Initiative (CSI) are collaborating with physicists, biologists, and other domain scientists to understand their data analysis needs and provide solutions to accelerate the scientific discovery process.

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Lançamento oficial do livro Danielle World na Newton Free Library.

Palestra Ray Kurzweil sobre o futuro da ciência e Danielle World, bem como uma leitura de livro, entrevista no palco, leitura de passagens do livro, e uma breve introdução da ilustradora, Amy Kurzweil Comix.

If it enters the brain, one species of gum-disease-causing bacteria might trigger chemical changes linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

Step aside, reindeer — robot dogs are hauling this load.

In an ominous video titled “Mush, Spot Mush!” posted on YouTube Tuesday, robot maker Boston Dynamics showed off the sheer strength of its SpotMini quadripedal robot dog. The clip shows 10 specialized Spotmini derivatives called Spotpower hauling a box truck across a parking lot — and at a one degree incline.

Continue reading “Watch a Pack of Boston Dynamics’ Creepy Robot Dogs Pull a Truck” »

In an era when untestable ideas such as the multiverse hold sway, Michela Massimi defends science from those who think it hopelessly unmoored from physical reality.

A drug that’s used to help control blood sugar in people with diabetes has now been shown to help prevent or slow kidney disease, which causes millions of deaths each year and requires hundreds of thousands of people to use dialysis to stay alive.

Doctors say it’s hard to overstate the importance of this study, and what it means for curbing this problem, which is growing because of the obesity epidemic.

The study tested Janssen Pharmaceuticals’ drug Invokana. Results were discussed Sunday at a medical meeting in Australia and published by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Continue reading “Study finds diabetes drug may prevent, slow kidney disease” »

Liquid democracy is a technologically enabled and scalable hybrid of direct and representative democracy.^[2] Liquid Democracy, a subset of Delegative Democracy, is a powerful voting model for collective decision making in large communities. Liquid Democracy combines the advantages of Direct Democracy and Representative Democracy and creates a truly democratic voting system that empowers voters to either vote on issues directly, or to delegate ones voting power to a trusted party.^[3]

“Superdemocracy upholds the concept of delegated voting, via systems such as “liquid democracy”. This enables citizens to delegate their votes in specified areas of debate to people whom they trust in these areas. In case someone changes their mind, delegations can be revoked or reassigned at any time.

Liquid democracy is a tech-enabled improvement to those parliamentary systems in which a single elected member of parliament is meant to represent the voter in all areas of debate. With liquid democracy, representation is no longer an all-or-nothing affair. Accordingly, liquid democracy moves away from the unhelpful fiction that politicians are supposed to have been elected to carry out every nook and cranny of their election manifesto. It enables a set of approvals and affirmations that is much more fine-grained — an ongoing dynamic conversation with nuance and inventiveness.”

Continue reading “Liquid Democracy” »

MIT researchers debuted a concept at TED 2019 that allows people to move massively heavy objects by hand.