Lifeboat Foundation

Alzheimer’s may be contagious.

A protein might be capable of spreading Alzheimer’s through blood transfusions and surgical equipment, but we don’t know yet how much of a risk this is.

Take that, real bees.

If the processes powering the fusion reactor at the Sun’s core could be recreated on Earth, it would be one of the most important events in the history of our species. Nuclear fusion power plants could end our dependency on fossil fuels and provide a virtually limitless, highly efficient source of clean energy.

We went to two of the world’s leading nuclear fusion research centers—Sandia National Labs in New Mexico and General Fusion outside Vancouver—to see how close we are to bringing the power of the stars down to Earth.

Continue reading “The Race to Create a Star on Earth” »

Robots have become central to the cleaning-up operation at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant, six years after the tsunami that triggered the nuclear meltdown.

It is estimated that around 600 tonnes of toxic fuel may have leaked out of the reactor during the incident.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company is using a variety of robots to explore areas too dangerous for people to go near.

Continue reading “The robots helping to clear up Fukushima” »

‘It’s another tool in the toolbox’

Artificial intelligence is automating tasks in many domains. Do musicians have reason to worry?

For any AI people out there. I’d really like to see an AI get dropped into Ocarina of Time, and then Skyrim. The day an AI can be dropped into those, and complete the entire games, and go out and complete all the weird random tasks, it should be pretty close to human level.

AI just beat a top human professional in the game Dota 2, but the technology could help with much bigger strategic problems.

Continue reading “Why tech giants are investing millions in AI that can play video games” »

A long way to go but potentially well worth the R&D.

Transparent solar cells started to emerge in the last 5–6 years, but there are already some live installations of this tech with impressive performance.

I was thinking about this thing, and the one in Iceland. Maybe we could build giant blimps in the atmosphere of Venus, it would carry that machine on its belly, and on the back of the blimp super advanced solar panels. Then inside of the blimp the CO₂ could be mixed into liquid crystals or something like that and be dropped like rain down on the surface, to eventually terraform it.

Global Engineering — a phrase that describes steadying the world’s climate with technical solutions. A Swiss company has received EU funding to develop a machine that captures CO₂. Can it really make a difference?