Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 2,931

Three rockets will travel from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to where the Moon directly aligns with the Sun during the annular solar eclipse on October 14, 2023.

In order to gain a better understanding of the Earth’s atmospheric dynamics and the effects of solar phenomena on our planet, NASA is launching a sounding rocket mission called Atmospheric Perturbations around the Eclipse Path (APEP).

Three rockets will embark on a journey from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, flying to positions just outside the path of annularity, where the Moon directly aligns with the Sun during the annular solar eclipse on October 14, 2023.

NASA’’s mission plans to investigate sunlight’s effect on the ionosphere through instruments on the rockets that measure electric/magnetic fields, density, and temperature changes.

Read more | >

Lung cancer screening is crucial for decreasing the death count from the disease but the government can’t scan everyone’s lungs. Here is an AI that identifies people who actually need screening.

Lung cancer is the deadliest cancer type, killing over a million people annually across the globe. The disease is responsible for the highest number of cancer deaths in both men and women in the US.

In fact, the death toll from lung cancer among women and men is nearly triple that of breast cancer and prostate cancer, respectively.

Read more | >

A product designer spotted prompts in Spotify’s codes.

Users may soon be able to create artificial intelligence-generated Spotify playlists using prompts. Speculations are rife ever since hashtag creator and product designer Chris Messina posted pictures of code from Spotify’s backend on Threads.

It would be something like OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, but for creating a song playlist.

Spotify appears to be developing AI-powered playlists. References discovered in the app’s code indicate the company may be developing generative AI playlists users could create using prompts.

Read more | >

The race to develop AI chips continues as Samsung’s chip manufacturing department partnered with Canadian startup Tenstorrent to produce chips and intellectual property for data centers.

The Canadian startup Tenstorrent, which builds artificial intelligence (AI) processors, among other things, revealed a new partnership with Samsung’s chip manufacturing department.

On Oct. 2, the startup announced the partnership with Samsung, saying it will use it to bring the “next generation of AI chiplets to market.” Tenstorrent manufactures chips and intellectual property (IP) for data centers.

The development comes as dominance in the AI chip market is currently held by American tech manufacturer Nvidia.

Read more | >

Venture Investing To Catalyze The Next Generation Of Founder-Led, Longevity Biotech Companies — Dr. Alex Colville, Ph.D., Co-Founder and General Partner — age1.

Dr. Alex Colville, Ph.D. is Co-Founder and General Partner of age1 (https://age1.com/), a venture capital firm focused on catalyzing the next generation of founder-led, longevity biotech companies, with a strategy of building a community of visionaries advancing new therapeutics, tools, and technologies targeting aging and age-related diseases.

With a recent initial closing of US$35 million, age1 will be focusing on founders and companies at the earliest stages of first-money in, pre-seed and seed funding, and is resourced to continue to support companies through later rounds.

Dr. Colville previously established the biotech arm of Starbloom Capital and served as founding Chief of Staff of Amaranth Foundation, where he led: the foundation’s support of skilled researchers and ambitious moonshot projects in the longevity field, and helped to advance their lobbying efforts; the TIME Initiative (a group with mission to activate undergraduate students’ interest in aging biology); the Marine Biology Laboratory Biology of Aging Summer Course, among other programs.

Dr. Colville completed his Ph.D. in Genetics at Stanford University studying the biology of aging in Dr. Thomas Rando’s lab while consulting for several family offices, the R&D team of Rubedo Life Sciences, and the business development team of Maze Therapeutics. Prior to his Ph.D., while at Northeastern University completing his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Chemical Engineering with a Minor in Biochemical Engineering, he advised pharma companies as a management consultant at Putnam Associates, a boutique life sciences consulting firm.

Continue reading “Dr. Alex Colville, Ph.D. — Co-Founder and General Partner — age1” | >

Work has begun on the seventh and final primary mirror of the ground-based Giant Magellan Telescope, which is expected to provide four times the image resolution of previous observatories when completed.

Computer-generated image of the finished Giant Magellan Telescope.

Scientists in the United States have begun fabricating and polishing the seventh and final primary mirror of the Giant Magellan Telescope. This will eventually complete its 368 square metre light collecting surface – forming the largest, most technically challenging optical system in astronomical history. When combined, all seven mirrors will collect more light than any other telescope in existence, making it a truly next-generation observatory.

Read more | >

Archaeologists have unearthed the oldest known wooden structure, and it’s almost half a million years old.

The simple structure — found along a riverbank in Zambia — is made up of two interlocking logs, with a notch deliberately crafted into the upper piece to allow them to fit together at right angles, according to a new study of cut marks made by stone tools.

The earliest known wood artifact is a 780,000-year-old fragment of polished plank found at the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, while the oldest wooden tools for foraging and hunting on record — unearthed in Europe — date back about 400,000 years. It’s thought that Neanderthals made structures from bones or stalactites around 175,000 years ago.

Researchers have unearthed the oldest known wooden structure in Zambia, and it’s almost half a million years old, according to a new study.

Read more | >

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three physicists — Pierre Agostini at Ohio State University, US, Ferenc Krausz at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and Anne L’Huillier at Lund University, Sweden — for their research into attosecond pulses of light.

Attosecond physics allows scientists to look at the very smallest particles at the very shortest timescales (an attosecond is one-quintillionth of a second, or one-billionth of a nanosecond). The winners all developed experiments to be able to produce these ultrafast laser pulses, which can be used to probe our world at the smallest scales and have applications across chemistry, biology and physics.

The prize was announced this morning by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm, Sweden. The winners share a prize of 11 million Swedish kroner (US$1 million).

Read more | >

Congrats to Anne & Pierre.

Inside atoms and molecules, electrons zip around at extreme speeds. Their motions can only be captured with super short pulses of light — like camera flashes that last billionths of a billionth of a second. The 2023 Nobel Prize in physics goes to three physicists who have helped create such “attosecond” blasts of laser light.

By offering superfast snapshots of electrons, their research is changing our view of the inner workings of atoms and molecules.

One of the winners is Anne L’Huillier, of Lund University in Sweden. Another is Pierre Agostini at Ohio State University in Columbus. The third is Ferenc Krausz. He works at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. The trio will split 11 million Swedish kronor, or about $1 million in prize money. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the honor October 3.

Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier won the prize for creating light bursts that last billionths of a billionth of a second.

Read more | >

It wouldn’t shock me if all the buzz around searching for the ‘locus of consciousness’ merely fine-tunes our grasp of how the brain is linked to consciousness — without actually revealing where consciousness comes from, because it’s not generated in the brain. Similarly, your smartphone doesn’t create the Internet or a cellular network; it just processes them. Networks of minds are a common occurrence throughout the natural world. What sets humans apart is the impending advent of cybernetic connectivity explosion that could soon evolve into a form of synthetic telepathy, eventually leading to the rise of a unified, global consciousness — what could be termed the Syntellect Emergence.

#consciousness #phenomenology #cybernetics #cognition #neuroscience

In summary, the study of consciousness could be conceptualized through a variety of lenses: as a series of digital perceptual snapshots, as a cybernetic system with its feedback processes, as a grand theater; or perhaps even as a VIP section in a cosmological establishment of magnificent complexity. Today’s leading theories of consciousness are largely complementary, not mutually exclusive. These multiple perspectives not only contribute to philosophical discourse but also herald the dawn of new exploratory avenues, equally enthralling and challenging, in our understanding of consciousness.

In The Cybernetic Theory of Mind (2022), I expand on existing theories to propose certain conceptual models and concepts, such as Noocentrism, Digital Presentism (D-Theory of Time), Experiential Realism, Ontological Holism, Multi-Ego Pantheistic Solipsism, the Omega Singularity, deeming a non-local consciousness, or Universal Mind, as the substrate of objective reality. In search of God’s equation, we finally look upward for the source. What many religions call “God” is clearly an interdimensional being within the nested levels of complexity. Besides setting initial conditions for our universe, God speaks to us in the language of religion, spirituality, synchronicities and transcendental experiences.

Read more | >