Lifeboat Foundation

What is life?

That fundamental question fascinated Babette Babich, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, when she was an undergraduate student, so she majored in biology.

But the answer she was looking for was not to be found in the natural sciences. Instead, she discovered it in the dense texts of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, philosophers whose ideas about life fueled her desire to explore that critical question.

Continue reading “Philosophy Professor Sees ‘Plato’s Cave’ in Today’s Technologies” »

Cryptocurrency millionaire Jeffrey Berns has revealed plans to develop a large parcel of Nevada’s desert into a smart city powered by blockchain technology.

Berns, who made a fortune selling cryptocurrency last year, plans to transform the 67,000-acre (27,113-hectare) plot in the north of the US state after paying reportedly paying $170 million (£130 million) for the land.

The site known as Innovation Park, which neighbours hubs of major tech giants including Google, Apple, Switch and Tesla, is already home to the headquarters of his company Blockchains – an incubator that supports ventures and businesses using blockchain technology.

Continue reading “Blockchain millionaire plans smart city in Nevada desert” »

After delivering more than five tons of supplies, water, spare parts and experiments, a Japanese cargo spacecraft bids farewell to our orbiting laboratory. Live coverage begins at 11:30 a.m. EST. Details: https://go.nasa.gov/2qz6rOs

We humans are intelligent, other living species are also intelligent but we build bridges and cars, we describe the universe and develop several languages while other species don’t. Well it seems the reason is that: we have a different hardware.

Neurons in human and rat brains carry electrical signals in different ways, scientists find.

Continue reading “Electrical properties of dendrites help explain our brain’s unique computing power” »

Are you outraged?

We talked to the author of a study about why people are deeply unchill about those who don’t want to ever spawn offspring.

Free drug cocktails for everyone, yay! 😏.

Sixty-nine pharmaceutical compounds have been detected in stream insects, some at concentrations that may threaten animals that feed on them, such as trout and platypus. When these insects emerge as flying adults, they can pass drugs to spiders, birds, bats, and other streamside foragers. These findings by an international team of researchers were published today in Nature Communications.

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For our space fans who are night owls, join us at 2:45 a.m. as NASA streams the launch of the ICON probe. The probe will study the zone where our terrestrial atmosphere meets space.

Real-time, autonomous decisions are only some of the techniques AI can bring to the table.

An international team of astronomers has detected a new luminous quasar at a redshift of 7.02. The newly found quasi-stellar object (QSO), designated DELS J003836.10–152723.6, is the most luminous quasar known at a redshift of over 7.0. The discovery is reported in a paper published October 29 on the arXiv pre-print repository.

Powered by the most massive black holes, bright quasars at high redshift are important for astronomers as they are perceived as the brightest beacons highlighting the chemical evolution of the universe most effectively. They are the most luminous and most distant, compact objects in the observable universe and their spectrum can be used, for instance, to estimate the mass of supermassive black holes (SMBHs).

However, high-redshift QSOs are extremely rare and difficult to find. So far, only two quasars with redshifts over 7.0 have been identified. This limits our understanding of SMBH growth mechanism and reionization history.

Continue reading “Astronomers discover new luminous high-redshift quasar” »