Lifeboat Foundation

Why do many problems in life seem to stubbornly stick around, no matter how hard people work to fix them? It turns out that a quirk in the way human brains process information means that when something becomes rare, we sometimes see it in more places than ever.

Think of a “neighborhood watch” made up of volunteers who call the police when they see anything suspicious. Imagine a new volunteer who joins the watch to help lower crime in the area. When they first start volunteering, they raise the alarm when they see signs of serious crimes, like assault or burglary.

Let’s assume these efforts help and, over time, assaults and burglaries become rarer in the neighborhood. What would the volunteer do next? One possibility is that they would relax and stop calling the police. After all, the serious crimes they used to worry about are a thing of the past.

Continue reading “Your Brain Is Constantly Searching for Problems to Fix” »

The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nkyql8ZyPL4

From groundbreaking moon missions to growth in the legal-cannabis market, 2019 will be year of new highs. Here’s what to watch out for in the year ahead.

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Continue reading “2019: the year of moon missions, marijuana and mega-hub airports | The Economist” »

Muscle cars. Film cameras. Bell-bottoms. 8-tracks. It’s 1968. Astronauts Borman, Lovell and Anders get a call to cancel their holiday plans. By December, the three were suddenly farther away than any human had ever been from our home planet. Start your flashback here: https://go.nasa.gov/2Ey19dY

We can barely believe our eyes – this solar power plant floats in a man-made lake… over what was once a filthy coal mine. (via World Economic Forum)

24M is reducing manufacturing costs by stripping out extraneous materials—and just got $22 million to begin building its first commercial factory.

Join us for the LEAF Festive Fireside chat where we are talking about this years coolest science, our favourite moments and looking to our future goals.

Smartphone cameras have gotten so good that we struggle to find a reason to invest in a point-and-shoot, but there are still major advancements being made in camera tech that are light years ahead of anything you can fit in your pocket. A new panorama shot by China’s Jingkun Technology (calling themselves “Big Pixel”) is a great example of that, and its size is so jaw-dropping you could spend days staring at it.

The photo, taken from high on the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai, shows the surrounding landscape in stunning detail. From your virtual perch many stories above the ground, you can zoom in so far that you can read the license plates on cars and spot smiling faces greeting each other on the sidewalk.

Long live these genes!