Lifeboat Foundation

“Do we have a chance of ever understanding brain function without brain simulations?” So asked the Human Brain Project (HBP), the brainchild of Henry Markram, in a new paper in the prestigious journal Neuron.

The key, the team argued, is to consider brain simulators in the vein of calculus for Newton’s laws—not as specific ideas of how the brain works, but rather as a programming language that can execute many candidate neural models, or programs, now and in the future. When viewed not as a vanity project, but rather as the way forward to understand—and eventually imitate—higher brain functions, the response to brain simulation is a resounding yes.

Because of the brain’s complexity and chaotic nature, the authors argue, rather than reining in simulation efforts, we need to ramp up and develop multiple “brain-simulation engines” with varying levels of detail.

Continue reading “The Crucial Role of Brain Simulation in Future Neuroscience” »

A plastic water bottle can survive the rigors of an active lifestyle, but over time it will collect odd smells and flavors that eventually can’t be scrubbed out. A glass bottle is a better option, naturally eschewing mold and odors, but one wrong move and suddenly it’s a pile of shards. These Squeezable Glass bottles claim to offer the best of both worlds—but have a bit of a misleading claim to fame.

The bottles aren’t actually made from some indestructible self-repairing glass material discovered in a secret lab a decade ago; they’re plastic, which is why they can be squeezed without shattering. However, the insides of the bottles are coated with an incredibly thin layer of silicon dioxide—which is what glass is made from—that’s just 20 nanometers thick. It acts as barrier preventing smells, flavors, mold, and other bad stuff from sticking to the plastic, but it remains completely flexible.

Explore the next Destiny 2 chapter to earn new gear and slay the Nightmares that walk the surface of our moon.

Food is contaminated with plastic, which means it’s going directly into our bodies.

If you have resisted giving up bottled water for any reason, this should change your mind. A new study estimates that people who drink bottled water ingest 90,000 additional plastic microplastic particles annually, compared to those who drink tap water, which puts only an extra 4,000 particles into their bodies.

This finding is part of a study that has estimated the number of plastic particles that humans ingest every year. Conducted by researchers at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, it pulled together data from 26 previous studies that had measured plastic in salt, beer, sugar, fish, shellfish, water, and urban air. Pairing this data with the U.S. dietary guidelines, the scientists calculated how many particles people were likely to consume annually. Their discovery? 50,000 for adults, 40,000 for children. When inhalation is factored in, the estimate jumps to between 74,000 and 121,000 for adults.

Continue reading “Humans ingest at least 50,000 plastic particles a year” »

A new open-source, artificially intelligent prosthetic leg designed by researchers at the University of Michigan and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab is now available to the scientific community.

The leg’s free-to-copy design and programming are intended to improve the quality of life of patients and accelerate scientific advances by offering a unified platform to fragmented research efforts across the field of bionics.

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Faster than light travel may actually be possible using a warp drive to bend space around a starship. New calculations suggest such a vehicle would require less energy than once thought.

When he was considering white dwarfs and neutron stars in the context of what he called ‘gravitational machines,’ Freeman Dyson became intrigued by the fate of a neutron star binary. He calculated in his paper of the same name (citation below) that gradual loss of energy through gravitational radiation would bring the two neutron stars together, creating a gravitational wave event of the sort that has since been observed. Long before LIGO, Dyson was talking about gravitational wave detection instruments that could track the ‘gravitational flash.’

Image: Artist conception of the moment two neutron stars collide. Credit: LIGO / Caltech / MIT.

Continue reading “Black Hole Propulsion as Technosignature” »

The idea of traveling to another star system has been the dream of people long before the first rockets and astronauts were sent to space. But despite all the progress we have made since the beginning of the Space Age, interstellar travel remains just that – a dream. While theoretical concepts have been proposed, the issues of cost, travel time and fuel remain highly problematic.

A lot of hopes currently hinge on the use of directed energy and lightsails to push tiny spacecraft to relativistic speeds. But what if there was a way to make larger spacecraft fast enough to conduct interstellar voyages? According to Prof. David Kipping, the leader of Columbia University’s Cool Worlds lab, future spacecraft could rely on a halo drive, which uses the gravitational force of a black hole to reach incredible speeds.

Continue reading “Using black holes to conquer space: The halo drive” »

What would happen if humans could deliberately create a blackhole? Well, for starters we might just unlock the ultimate energy source to create the ultimate spacecraft engine — a potential “black hole-drive” — to propel ships to the stars.

It turns out black holes are not black at all; they give off “Hawking radiation” that causes them to lose energy (and therefore mass) over time. For large black holes, the amount of radiation produced is miniscule, but very small black holes rapidly turn their mass into a huge amount of energy.

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