Lifeboat Foundation

Is the future really going to be so bad that you wouldn’t want to live longer? Hardly!

#aging

The future looks grim? That’s quite an interesting claim, and I wonder whether there is any evidence to support it. In fact, I think there’s plenty of evidence to believe the opposite, i.e. that the future will be bright indeed. However, I can’t promise the future will certainly be bright. I am no madame clearvoyant, but neither are doomsday prophets. We can all only speculate, no matter how ‘sure’ pessimists may say they are about the horrible dystopian future that allegedly awaits us. I’m soon going to present the evidence of the bright future I believe in, but before I do, I would like to point out a few problems in the reasoning of the professional catastrophists who say that life won’t be worth living and there’s thus no point in extending it anyway.

Continue reading “Why live longer when the future looks so grim?” »

Physicists engaged in the construction of a nuclotron-based ion collider (NICA) facility in Dubna, outside Moscow plan to combine efforts to create of a unique electron positron collider at Novosibirsk’s Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics. Promoters say the project would allow Russia to take the lead in a very promising niche of particle physics.

Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics Deputy Director Yevgeny Levichev discussed Russian physicists’ ambitious plans with Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency on Tuesday.

The Institute plans to create the Super Tau Charm Factory, a particle accelerator which would study the collision of beams of electrons (matter) and positrons (antimatter) in an effort to help to identify phenomena and processes beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.

Continue reading “Harnessing the Power of Siberia: Physicists Creating Matter-Antimatter Collider” »

Here is a possible timeline for the emergence of a true space age over the next 20 years.

In 2017 and 2018, we see SpaceX complete the development of the Raptor engine and the launch of the Falcon Heavy.

The Raptor has about four times the thrust of a Merlin 1D engine.

Continue reading “Possible timeline for the emergence of a true space age in the 2020s” »

Germany had so much renewable energy last week that customers were briefly being paid to consume electricity, it has been reported.

As spotted by Quartz, who cite data from German think tank Agora Energiewende, fair weather and high winds on Sunday 8 May saw wind, solar and hydroelectric power plants producing 54.6GW of power, roughly 80 per cent of the 68.4GW of power being consumed across the country at that time.

As a result, the price of power plummeted, and went negative from 7AM to 5PM, bottoming out at -€130 per MWh at 1PM. Energy providers were essentially being paid by producers to take the electricity off their hands.

Continue reading “Germany has so much renewable energy that people are being paid to consume electricity” »

Expect to see better language understanding and an AI boom in China, among other things.

In Brief Scientists from the Imperial College have discovered that light could possibly exist in a previously unknown form, as a mix with a single electron. This interaction creates light that has the properties of both particles.

For something that seems so integral to our lives, we are still discovering many things about light. Its most fundamental properties still astound us, and its interactions with other particles are full of surprises. Case in point, scientists from the Imperial College in London seem to have just discovered a new form of light, one made by combining light with a single electron particle.

Continue reading “Physicists May Have Just Discovered A New Form Of Light” »

In Brief DARPA has created self-steering bullets which use a real-time optical guidance system to hit both moving and accelerating targets with high accuracy.

You may have seen the movie Wanted. Sure, the movie was almost unrecognizable from the Mark Millar comic book series it was very loosely based on. But that didn’t stop anyone from pretending to be a bullet-curving, badass, supervillain-with-a-heart sniper like Angelina Jolie after seeing it.

Continue reading “Watch DARPA’s New Self-Guided Bullets Turn in Mid-Flight, Following Their Target” »

“By comparing clonal and sexual daughters from the same mothers, we found sexually produced offspring get less sick,” Auld said.

PARIS – From an evolutionary perspective, sexual reproduction could be seen as a nonstarter. Compared to cloning, which also exists in nature, it is a major waste of time and energy.

Think of the ungainly, preening peacock — an easy snack for tigers and wild dogs — strutting his stuff to impress the ladies.

Continue reading “Sex exists to avoid disease, study demonstrates” »

Last year – although a rather grim one by other measures – was a splendid one for research. From gravitational waves to cooing dinosaurs, we’ve uncovered a lot about the world around us, but as a remarkable new study has revealed, there’s a lot within us we’ve yet to discover too.

Writing in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology, scientists have officially announced the discovery of a new organ inside the human body. That’s right, there’s a brand new organ hiding in our abdomen and it’s only just been classified.

Known as the mesentery (meaning “in the middle of the intestines”), it can be found in our digestive systems. Leonardo da Vinci actually gave one of the first descriptions of it back in the day, but until around 2012 it was thought to be a series of separate structures keeping the intestines attached to the abdominal wall, like a series of support girders.

Continue reading “A Completely New Human Organ Has Just Been Officially Discovered” »