Lifeboat Foundation

Archaeologists have dug up mysteriously black and fertile patches of ancient soils in hundreds of sites across the Amazon. 🌎⁠ https://www.freethink.com/science/carbon-dark-earth-ancient-technique

The team’s study appears in Science Advances. Other authors include former MIT postdoc and lead author Morgan Schmidt, anthropologist Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida, and collaborators from multiple institutions across Brazil.

In their current study, the team synthesized observations and data that Schmidt, Heckenberger, and others had previously gathered, while working with Indigenous communities in the Amazon since the early 2000s, with new data collected in 2018–19. The scientists focused their fieldwork in the Kuikuro Indigenous Territory in the Upper Xingu River basin in the southeastern Amazon. This region is home to modern Kuikuro villages as well as archaeological sites where the ancestors of the Kuikuro are thought to have lived. Over multiple visits to the region, Schmidt, then a graduate student at the University of Florida, was struck by the darker soil around some archaeological sites.

Continue reading “Study: ancient technique holds thousands of tons of carbon, sequestered over centuries” »

A team of physicists, including University of Massachusetts assistant professor Tigran Sedrakyan, recently announced in the journal Nature that they have discovered a new phase of matter. Called the “chiral Bose-liquid state,” the discovery opens a new path in the age-old effort to understand the nature of the physical world.

Under everyday conditions, matter can be a solid, liquid or gas. But once you venture beyond the everyday—into temperatures approaching absolute zero, things smaller than a fraction of an atom or which have extremely low states of energy—the world looks very different. “You find quantum states of matter way out on these fringes,” says Sedrakyan, “and they are much wilder than the three classical states we encounter in our everyday lives.”

Sedrakyan has spent years exploring these wild quantum states, and he is particularly interested in the possibility of what physicists call “band degeneracy,” “moat bands” or “kinetic frustration” in strongly interacting quantum matter.

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Study reveals that exposure to depression correlates with significant functional brain changes, varying by depression definition, without notable structural differences, emphasizing the need for precise diagnostic criteria to enhance treatment outcomes.

Stephen Wolfram unveils his new Observer Theory and explains the origins of the Second Law (Entropy) with Curt Jaimungal. This is Wolfram’s first podcast on his new views on consciousness, and the deepest dive into Wolfram’s mind.

TIMESTAMPS:
- 00:00:00 What is Observer Theory?
- 00:12:42 Different Observers (Who are \.

Science Fiction has long contemplated the idea that alien life not based on carbon chemistry such as silicon might exist on distant and strange worlds, or might be made to exist advanced biological engineering. What would such life be like?

Start listening with a 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook plus two Audible Originals are free. Visit http://www.audible.com/isaac or text \.

Packed with mass equal to millions or billions of suns, supermassive black holes lurk at the center of nearly every galaxy.

The astrophysicist Erin Kara measures time lags in black holes’ X-ray glows, which reveal the complexity of the objects’ closest surroundings.

Continue reading “To See Black Holes in Detail, She Uses ‘Echoes’ Like a Bat” »

New CDC data updated Friday shows 25 states are experiencing ‘high’ or ‘very high’ levels of respiratory illness activity.

Along with climbing homelessness and other societal woes globally this is the time for transhuman ideals to emerge to save lives. We could automate all work and get universal basic income with AI to work for us.

About 61% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, an issue that impacts both low-wage and high-income families alike, according to new research from LendingClub.

Low-wage earners are most likely to live paycheck to paycheck, with almost 8 in 10 consumers earning less than $50,000 a year unable to cover their future bills until their next paycheck arrives. Yet even 4 in 10 high-income Americans, or those earning more than $100,000, say they’re in the same position, the research found.

Continue reading “More than 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Here’s what researchers say is to blame” »