Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Researchers have made news in letting their AI ambitions play out a formidable game of hide and seek with formidable results. The agents’ environment had walls and movable boxes for a challenge where some were the hiders and others, seekers. Much happened along the way, with surprises.

Stating what was learned, the authors blogged: “We’ve observed discovering progressively more complex tool use while playing a simple game of hide-and-seek,” where the agents built “a series of six distinct strategies and counterstrategies, some of which we did not know our environment supported.”

In a new paper released earlier this week, the team revealed results. Their paper, “Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Autocurricula,” had seven authors, six of which had OpenAI representation listed, and one, Google Brain.

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How long the battery of your phone or computer lasts depends on how many lithium ions can be stored in the battery’s negative electrode material. If the battery runs out of these ions, it can’t generate an electrical current to run a device and ultimately fails.

Materials with a higher storage capacity are either too heavy or the wrong shape to replace graphite, the currently used in today’s batteries.

Purdue University scientists and engineers have introduced a potential way that these materials could be restructured into a new electrode design that would allow them to increase a battery’s lifespan, make it more stable and shorten its charging time.

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A team of scientists has developed a computational model that uses artificial intelligence to find sites for hydropower dams in order to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Hydropower dams can provide large quantities of energy with carbon footprints as low as sources like solar and wind. But because of how they’re formed, some dams emit dangerously high levels of greenhouse gases, threatening sustainability goals.

With hundreds of currently proposed for the Amazon basin—an ecologically sensitive area covering more than a third of South America—predicting their in advance could be critical for the region, and the planet.

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A Ph.D. student at the University of Alberta has discovered a new and curious mineral inside a diamond unearthed from a mine in South Africa.

The —named goldschmidtite in honor of Victor Moritz Goldschmidt, the founder of modern geochemistry—has an unusual chemical signature for a mineral from Earth’s mantle, explained Nicole Meyer, a in the Diamond Exploration Research and Training School.

“Goldschmidtite has high concentrations of niobium, potassium and the rare earth elements lanthanum and cerium, whereas the rest of the mantle is dominated by other elements, such as magnesium and iron,” said Meyer.

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The i-CoBat project, operating under the UK government’s Faraday Battery Challenge, aims to create an electric vehicle (EV) battery pack which is cooled through immersion using MIVOLT, a biodegradable cooling fluid developed by specialist manufacturer M&I Materials, the project’s leader. Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), the manufacturing research arm of the University of Warwick, along with engineering consultancy Ricardo plc, are partnering with M&I to optimise the EV battery cooling technology for a longer lasting, safer battery product.

A UK consortium is developing new EV battery cooling technology, with the aim of minimising range anxiety for electric vehicle users.

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Proteins are essential for every living cell and responsible for many fundamental processes. In particular, they are required as bio-catalysts in metabolism and for signaling inside the cell and between cells. Many diseases come about as a result of failures in this communication, and the origins of signaling in proteins have been a source of great scientific debate. Now, for the first time, a team of researchers at the University of Göttingen has actually observed the mobile protons that do this job in each and every living cell, thus providing new insights into the mechanisms. The results were published in Nature.

Researchers from the University of Göttingen led by Professors Kai Tittmann and Ricardo Mata found a way to grow high-quality protein crystals of a human protein. The DESY particle accelerator in Hamburg made it possible to observe protons ( with a positive charge) moving around within the protein. This surprising “dance of the protons” showed how distant sections of the protein were able to communicate instantaneously with each other—like electricity moving down a wire.

In addition, Tittmann’s group obtained high-resolution data for several other proteins, showing in unprecedented detail the structure of a kind of hydrogen bond where two heavier atoms effectively share a proton (known as “low-barrier hydrogen bonding”). This was the second surprise: the data proved that low-barrier hydrogen bonding indeed exists in proteins resolving a decades-long controversy, and in fact plays an essential role in the process.

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The electromagnetic field generator includes a shell, an electrostatic generator, a power plant, a thermoelectric generator, and an electric motor. The shell has embedded polycrystalline ferroelectric ceramic material which is polarized such that the ceramic material exhibits strong Piezoelectric Effect properties thus inducing high frequency vibrations. The shell may be further doped with radioactive elements which under high frequency vibrations induce gamma ray emission. The electrostatic generator is for charging up the shell and is disposed within the shell. The power plant is to generate thermal power, and is disposed within the sphere. The thermoelectric generator is to convert the thermal power generated by the power plant to electrical energy. The electric motor powered by the electrical energy generated by the thermoelectric generator, and supplies input voltage such that the shell spins at high angular speeds, vibrates at high frequencies, and generates an electromagnetic field.

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Where were you before you were conceived?

The question itself has no meaning: there was no “you” to be anywhere at all.

Asking questions like “what happened before the Big Bang?” is similarly meaningless.

Confused? You see, the birth of the Universe is not just the birth of subatomic particles and energy, it is also the beginning of time and space.

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