Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: futurism

For years, astronomers have predicted a dramatic fate for our galaxy: a head-on collision with Andromeda, our nearest large galactic neighbor. This merger—expected in about 5 billion years—has become a staple of astronomy documentaries, textbooks and popular science writing.

But in our new study published in Nature Astronomy, led by Till Sawala from the University of Helsinki, we find the Milky Way’s future might not be as certain previously assumed.

By carefully accounting for uncertainties in existing measurements, and including the gravitational influence of other nearby galaxies, we found there is only about a 50% chance the Milky Way and Andromeda will merge in the next 10 billion years.

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Ant Simulator: https://evolvecode.io/turmites/index.html.
Source code: https://github.com/MaxRobinsonTheGreat/turmites.
This is a video about Langton’s ants, turmites, and turing machines. On and on and on it goes, will it halt? Nobody knows.

~ LINKS ~
Pezzza’s Ant Sim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTHpEF_jcu4
Discord (see langtons-ants channel) https://discord.com/invite/GZWd2qySce.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/emergentgarden.
Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/emergentgarden.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/max_romana.
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/emergentgarden.bsky.social.

~Timestamps~
(0:00) Langton’s Ants.
(3:32) Turmites.
(7:26) Emergent Patterns.
(10:13) Busy Beavers.
(11:56) Evolving Ants?

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A study led by Northeastern University professor Jonathan Peelle with researchers from across the globe has confirmed that people’s ability to detect background sounds varies from person to person, and is influenced by the noise that came before the sounds.

Peelle’s large-scale replication of a 10-year-old study involved 25 labs across 10 countries and included 149 participants. The findings are published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

About a decade ago, a suggested that some people are better at picking out background sounds than others, and that this ability depends on the surrounding noise. But the study’s findings were based on data from just five participants, each completing a five-hour task.

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Envision this possible future clinical scenario: a breast cancer patient and her physicians are deciding on the best possible treatment. Their decision is informed by a comprehensive molecular profile of the patient’s cancer samples that predicts the most likely response of the cancer to treatment.

If the profile predicts a high likelihood of a complete positive response and long-term freedom from relapse, then this treatment would be the preferred choice. But if the profile predicts that the tumor would likely be resistant to treatment, alternative treatments must be implemented.

Although this situation is not yet a reality, a team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard has taken significant steps in that direction. They report in Cell Reports Medicine that conducting an integrated proteogenomic profiling of cancer cells, which combines the analysis of DNA, RNA, protein and phosphoprotein data, revealed two novel indicators of tumor response to treatment and alternative therapeutic targets for treatment-resistant HER2+ .

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