Lifeboat Foundation

President Donald Trump has signed a bill authorizing $19.5 billion in funding for NASA, which includes an increased focus on deep space exploration and a new goal of a manned mission to Mars.

The NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, or S. 442, provides funding for fiscal year 2018, which begins October 1. It specifically appropriates money for NASA’s deep space exploration, including the Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft, as well as for the ongoing medical monitoring and treatment of astronauts. It builds on the current public-private partnership for space, with commercial companies transporting American astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) and NASA focusing on deep space and the mission to Mars.

Mar.21 — Arvind Krishna, IBM senior VP of hybrid cloud, sits down with Bloomberg’s Caroline Hyde at IBM InterConnect 2017 to discuss IBM’s new blockchain service.

by Tatiana Moroz

The most moving thing to me about music is it’s ability to change. It changes the mood, the atmosphere, and it fills us with emotion. It can unify mankind in the power of good and triumph over evil regimes. What most struck me was when we saw this in the 60’s and 70’s folk songs that became anthems for the civil rights, equality, and antiwar movements. Even as a little girl, I knew that this core drive and expression for freedom was critical to the success of humanity as we marched ever closer to the nightmarish visions painted in 1984 and Brave New World.

This is a heavy and serious purpose, but one I took to heart as I created songs of hope, sadness, life, beauty and love. I noticed that the music industry seemed averse to this type of meaning based songwriting, and the radio waves were filling with more vapid nonsense by the minute. However, I kept my head down and tried to educate myself on the ways we could organize society for the better.

Continue reading “Free The Art: Cryptocurrencies & communities unite with creators” »

In space, no one can hear you ask for more Sudafed.

These four billionaires are in a race to dominate the commercial space industry.

Of all the laws of physics, this is arguably one of the strangest — scientists have discovered that the forces controlling the behaviour of a black hole’s event horizon are also at play in superfluid helium, an extraordinary liquid that flows without friction.

This entanglement area law has now been observed at both the vast scale of black holes and the atomic scale of cold helium, and could be the key to finally establishing the long sought-after quantum theory of gravity — the solution to one of the deepest problems in theoretical physics today.

Continue reading “A Bizarre Physics Law Is Making Superfluid Helium Behave Like an Actual Black Hole” »

I can conceive that in saner circumstances, Tesla Model X might never have come to be. But the strongest blades are forged in the hottest fires, and for those that survive the heat, something very special is born.

Model X is special in a way that the automotive industry hasn’t been able to conceive in a very long time. It is an all-electric SUV that can seat up to seven people with bucketloads of cargo space to spare. It is a sporty all-wheel drive car that can throw instant and ungodly amounts of torque at the tarmac. It is a serene cruiser with its silent drive and breathtaking panoramic windshield. It is, in essence, an eight-eyed falcon with a supercomputer brain that dreams of a future of fully autonomous driving. And I had to have it.

As a Model S owner, I had already experienced and enjoyed more than a year of zero emissions Tesla driving. I knew what great things the car was capable of. I’d felt the thrill of instant torque, I’d fallen in love with the one-foot, regenerative braking driving experience, and I’d been chauffeured up and down the M1 by my very own Autopilot. Where the Model S presented itself as an all electric car — a subtle statement and proof of concept about a future of green but powerful motoring, Model X presented itself as a bold vision for what a car could be, if its only blueprint were imagination.

Continue reading “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads” »

Tweaking texture could give us healthy versions of our favorite junk foods—and that’s just the beginning.

A group of prominent researchers is calling for changes to scientific-research guidelines to address a range of new biological entities created in labs that may share similar characteristics to embryos.

These entities, created through a variety of techniques, have been studied at only the earliest stages of development. In some cases, scientists have taken cells from an embryo and manipulated them to generate another embryo-like…

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