Lifeboat Foundation

Like many people, Barbara Greenberg wasn’t looking to unlock any deep, dark family secrets when she spit into a tube a few years ago and sent her DNA off to be analyzed. “I was just curious to see if I would find anything a bit interesting,” Greenberg says.

And at first, there were no real surprises; she was, as expected, 100 percent Eastern European Jewish. But she’d check back into her account now and then, looking for new matches to distant cousins, and eventually someone else popped up—an unknown female relative with a DNA match significant enough to indicate it was likely a half-sister.

As Greenberg and the other woman began communicating, their shared story took shape. Although the other woman had very little information about who her biological father might have been, Greenberg says the timing, location, and certain clues the woman’s mother had given over the years indicated that they did, indeed, share the same father.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=E96EPhqT-ds

Martha Teichner on the CBS News veteran’s coverage of an epochal human event: Man landing on the moon.

We’ve come a long, long way since the U.S. first launched fruit flies into space in 1947. Since then, we’ve sent astronauts to the moon, installed an International Space Station in orbit and landed spacecraft on Mars. In the past couple of decades, private corporations such as SpaceX and Blue Origin have joined the fray and will likely play instrumental roles in aerospace engineering and space exploration. Here’s a look at some major advancements we’ve made in spacecraft technology and space exploration milestones over the past seven decades.

A camera on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted the Curiosity rover on May 31, 2019.

Here is another economics/policy question that I was asked to address at Quora. It provides great fodder for a quick Lifeboat economics review.

The US used quantitative easing to deal with one monetary crisis, and a bailout of the automotive and banking industry to deal with another. If nations, economies or individuals begin to embrace a decentralized currency, they will inevitably shift away from government issued money. Won’t this hinder a nation’s ability to intervene in a crisis?

Answering this question goes to the very heart of the ethics and politics of cryptocurrency.

Yes. Without centralized control over monetary policy, government options for intervention in a money crisis would be severely limited. But this fact may lead to a false impression…

Continue reading “Does decentralized currency thwart crisis intervention?” »

Facial recognition comes to pets — using their nose prints as unique identifiers.

Tesla’s new Roadster is going to come with an optional ‘SpaceX package’ that will include cold air thrusters to improve performance.

Now CEO Elon Musk says that the thruster will be hidden behind the license plate.

Continue reading “Tesla Roadster’s SpaceX thruster will be hidden behind the license plate, says Elon Musk” »

Early this morning, I was asked this question at Quora. It’s a pretty basic request of network administrators, including parents, schools and anyone who administers a public, sensitive or legally exposed WiFi hot spot.

Is there a quick and easy way to view, log, or otherwise monitor the web sites visited by people on your home or office network?

Yes. It’s free and and it is pretty easy to do.

It gets a bit trickier, if the individual on your network is using a VPN service that they have configured on their device.[1] A VPN does not stop you from logging their browsing, but all of their activity will point to the VPN address instead of the site that they are actually visiting. In that case, there is another way to monitor their activity. See note #1, below.

Continue reading “Can I Check Web Sites Visited by my Kids/Staff?” »

The small, fast-moving New Horizons spacecraft is likely to be the only Pluto mission in the lifetimes of many of us. It changed forever the way we on Earth perceive this outermost world and its moons.