Lifeboat Foundation

In this week’s Mr Futurist Podcast, I will discuss, Is a Universal Basic Income (UBI) a good idea for the US?

Why the Southern United States is headed for a deep economic crash? What US industries will be the most impacted by business automation? Why will automation affect white collar jobs first? Is the US Becoming a Third World Country? How would a Universal Basic Income (UBI) impact large US companies? Illiteracy in the US. Could we have a Great Technological World-Wide Depression? All this and more in this podcast!

Mr Futurist Podcast – Should We Have a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the US? Get my weekly podcast/article on business automation, AI and advancing technology and how it can and will affect your company, your job and career. The Right Knowledge is a Powerful thing! This weeks podcast transcript: This week’s article will be on the dark side. I promise by the end, I will flip this around and offer solutions, and make what appears to be something gloom and doom, have a possible happy ending. Having studied artificial intelligence and business automation for the last couple of years. I believe the unemployment numbersRead More →

Continue reading “Should We Have a Universal Basic Income UBI in the US?” »

“Space has been expanding since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago,” said Harold “Sunny” White, head of NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories: Advanced Propulsion. “And we know that when you look at some of the cosmology models, there were early periods of the universe where there was explosive inflation, where two points would’ve went receding away from each other at very rapid speeds. Nature can do it. So the question is, can we do it?”

There have been hints the past few years that NASA may be on the path to discovering warp bubbles that could make the local universe accessible for human exploration. NASA scientists may be close announcing they may have broken the speed of light. According to state-of-the art theory, a warp drive could cut the travel time between stars from tens of thousands of years to weeks or months. They say they have found a way to configure the hypothetical negative energy matter so that the warping could be accomplished with a mass equivalent to the Voyager spacecraft.

Continue reading “‘Warp Bubbles’ --NASA Manipulating Spacetime to Achieve Faster than Light Travel (Weekend Feature)” »

What happens in our brain when we listen to the rhythmic pace of a song or when, at the traffic light, the light is red and we are trembling awaiting the green? How do we perceive such an abstract feature of the world? For the first time in humans, an imaging study shows that in a specific area of the brain, the so-called “supplementary motor area (SMA)”, a time map exists. The study, conducted by the team led by SISSA Professor Domenica Bueti and published in PLOS Biology, shows that distinct portions of the SMA, a region of the cerebral cortex important for both motor preparation and time perception—respond preferentially to different durations. The portions of the SMA responding to similar durations are in close spatial proximity on the cortical surface according to an anterior-to-posterior spatial gradient. The most anterior portions of SMA are greatly active for the shortest duration (200 ms), while the most posterior bits are active for the longest duration (3 sec), the intermediate durations led to the activation of the cortex between those extremes. These novel findings, which are the result of a collaborative effort between SISSA and research institutions in Japan, Switzerland and the Netherlands, are important to gain insights on the computational architecture underlying time perception and they also open up new perspectives to the study of temporal cognition.

The representation of time

“Topography i.e., the fact that neurons processing similar stimulus properties occupy neighbouring positions on the nervous system, is an encoding mechanism widely used in the brain to represent sensory and motor information. For example, there is a body map in our primary somatosensory cortex. In this map, the portions of the cortex receiving tactile information from the hand and the wrist are neighbours compared to those receiving information from the toe” says Domenica Bueti, coordinator of the research whose leading author is the Greek researcher Foteini Protopapa: “our findings show that a topographic representation exists also for something immaterial like time”. Previous studies conducted in humans and other animals have shown the involvement of SMA in time perception. However none of those previous works clarified how temporal information is represented in this area.

Physicists at EPFL propose a new “quantum simulator”: a laser-based device that can be used to study a wide range of quantum systems. Studying it, the researchers have found that photons can behave like magnetic dipoles at temperatures close to absolute zero, following the laws of quantum mechanics. The simple simulator can be used to better understand the properties of complex materials under such extreme conditions.

When subject to the laws of quantum mechanics, systems made of many interacting particles can display behaviour so complex that its quantitative description defies the capabilities of the most powerful computers in the world. In 1981, the visionary physicist Richard Feynman argued we can simulate such complex behavior using an artificial apparatus governed by the very same quantum laws – what has come to be known as a “quantum simulator.”

One example of a complex quantum system is that of magnets placed at really low temperatures. Close to absolute zero (−273.15 degrees Celsius), magnetic materials may undergo what is known as a “quantum phase transition.” Like a conventional phase transition (e.g. ice melting into water, or water evaporating into steam), the system still switches between two states, except that close to the transition point the system manifests quantum entanglement – the most profound feature predicted by quantum mechanics. Studying this phenomenon in real materials is an astoundingly challenging task for experimental physicists.

NASA on Friday published satellite photos of a powerful meteor which appeared just above the Bering Sea on December 18 but went unnoticed until months later.

The explosion unleashed around 173 kilotons of energy, more than 10 times that of the atomic bomb blast over Hiroshima in World War II.

A team led by Lida Kanari now reports a new system for distinguishing cell types in the brain, an algorithmic classification method that the researchers say will benefit the entire field of neuroscience. Blue Brain founder Professor Henry Markram says, “For nearly 100 years, scientists have been trying to name cells. They have been describing them in the same way that Darwin described animals and trees. Now, the Blue Brain Project has developed a mathematical algorithm to objectively classify the shapes of the neurons in the brain. This will allow the development of a standardized taxonomy [classification of cells into distinct groups] of all cells in the brain, which will help researchers compare their data in a more reliable manner.”

The team developed an algorithm to distinguish the shapes of the most common type of neuron in the neocortex, the pyramidal cells. Pyramidal cells are distinctively tree-like cells that make up 80 percent of the neurons in the neocortex, and like antennas, collect information from other neurons in the brain. Basically, they are the redwoods of the brain forest. They are excitatory, sending waves of electrical activity through the network, as people perceive, act, and feel.

The father of modern neuroscience, Ramón y Cajal, first drew pyramidal cells over 100 years ago, observing them under a microscope. Yet up until now, scientists have not reached a consensus on the types of pyramidal neurons. Anatomists have been assigning names and debating the different types for the past century, while neuroscience has been unable to tell for sure which types of neurons are subjectively characterized. Even for visibly distinguishable neurons, there is no common ground to consistently define morphological types.

Continue reading “Blue Brain solves a century-old neuroscience problem” »

The new study offers hope for men who face infertility as a side effect of childhood cancer treatments.

There’s an energy revolution happening in villages and towns across Africa — off-grid solar energy is becoming a viable alternative to traditional electricity systems. In a bold talk about a true leapfrog moment, Amar Inamdar introduces us to proud owners of off-grid solar kits — and explains how this technology has the opportunity to meet two extraordinary goals: energy access for all and a low-carbon future. “Every household a proud producer as well as consumer of energy,” Inamdar says. “That’s the democracy of energy.” (Followed by a brief Q&A with TED Curator Chris Anderson)

We are not calling for a ban on P values. Nor are we saying they cannot be used as a decision criterion in certain specialized applications (such as determining whether a manufacturing process meets some quality-control standard). And we are also not advocating for an anything-goes situation, in which weak evidence suddenly becomes credible. Rather, and in line with many others over the decades, we are calling for a stop to the use of P values in the conventional, dichotomous way — to decide whether a result refutes or supports a scientific hypothesis5.

Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland, Blake McShane and more than 800 signatories call for an end to hyped claims and the dismissal of possibly crucial effects.