Lifeboat Foundation

One Overall Winning Submission Receives: Story turned into visualization | Invitation to present story at Mad Scientist Conference in Washington DC |

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Google and others think software that learns to learn could take over some work done by AI experts.

The future of nuclear power might look very different than we thought, with a US-based company presenting plans for miniature, modular nuclear power plants that are so small, they can fit on the back of a truck.

NuScale Power, the company behind the power plants, says each modular device is completely self-contained, and capable of producing 50-megawatts of electricity — enough to power thousands of homes.

The power plants stand 29.7 metres tall, so aren’t really that ‘miniature’, except relative to an acutal nuclear power plant. They also haven’t been tested as yet, so we need to reserve our excitment for when we can actually see these things in action.

Continue reading “‘Miniature’, Modular Nuclear Power Plants Could Be Rolled Out in the US” »

Aging fosters sickness and disability, increases human suffering, and makes us more likely to die. Previously, I argued that curing aging must be a top priority for society, yet there are also a number of possible objections to this endeavor. Most of these are unfounded myths that can be disproved while others raise relevant social, philosophical and ethical issues. This essay draws on my own lectures, and publications (Sethe and de Magalhaes, 2013), on this subject and attempts to answer the most commonly raised questions and concerns about the work of gerontologists and a possible cure for aging.

There 7.68 billion acres of arable land. if everyone did this and lived one one tenth of an acre then that’s room for 76 billion people just on the arable land where there is actually 36 billion acres of land on the planet.

If farming were turned into vertical farming building with ten floors a piece at 1/10th and acre per level that’s 760 billion. At 100 floors that’d be 7.6 trillion. I would need to review an Isaac Arthur video about the maximum occupancy of the planet, there may be heat problems with trillions of people on the planet.

Continue reading “Learn How This Family Grows 6,000 Lbs Of Food on Just 1/10th Acre – Urban Homestead” »

Here’s why you’ll be seeing that word a lot in the future.

Already renowned for its potential to revolutionize everything from light bulbs and dental fillings through to semiconductors and motorcycle helmets, graphene can now add innate superconductivity to its repertoire. Scientists at the University of Cambridge claim to have discovered a method to trigger the superconducting properties of graphene without actually altering its chemical structure.

Light, flexible, and super-strong, the single layer of carbon atoms that makes up graphene has only been rendered superconductive previously by doping it with impurities, or by affixing it to other superconducting materials, both of which may undermine some of its other unique properties.

However, in the latest research conducted at the University of Cambridge, scientists claim to have found a way to activate superconduction in graphene by coupling it with a material known as praseodymium cerium copper oxide (Pr2− xCe xCuO4) or PCCO. PCCO is from a wider class of superconducting materials known as cuprates (derived from the Latin word for copper), known for their use in high-temperature superconductivity.

This color-changing thread has endless possibilities.