Lifeboat Foundation

“There is still significant interest and potential in industrial uses of hemp,” said Dr. Jeffrey Steiner.

How can hemp production help boost local Native American economies? This is what a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture hopes to achieve as they recently awarded this grant to the Global Hemp Innovation Center at Oregon State University (OSU) to foster collaboration with 13 Native American Tribes across the western United States, including California, Montana, Nevada, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon with the goal of creating economic stimuli for those communities while improving hemp production.

The grant comes with four primary objectives in achieving collaboration with the 13 Tribal nations, including educational opportunities, technology development, building trade networks, and ensuring product quality. This grant comes as the 2018 Farm Bill helped legalize hemp, leading to hemp production reaching $824 million across the United States in 2021.

Continue reading “Harnessing Hemp: Empowering Native American Economies” »

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is rolling out an AI-powered educational tool that it says will provide students with personalized learning plans and resources.

The tool, dubbed Ed, can translate personalized learning plans into over 100 languages, a much-needed resource. LAUSD is nation’s second-largest district, with 565,479 students, of which 86,081 (15%) are still “learning to speak English proficiently,” according to a district fact sheet.

It also assists students with complex administrative tasks such as submitting applications. Parents are expected to use the chatbot to ask questions, as well as get updates on their child’s progress and reminders about upcoming assignments and programs.

NASA ’s CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI) is sending four CubeSats to the International Space Station to advance space-based technologies in solar power, gamma-ray burst detection, and water monitoring. Developed in collaboration with universities and NASA, these satellites aim to enhance our understanding of cosmic phenomena and Earth’s environmental dynamics.

NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative is sending a group of four small satellites, called CubeSats, to the International Space Station (ISS) as ELaNa 51 (Educational Launch of Nanosatellites). These small payloads have been developed by NASA and universities and will be deployed from low Earth orbit.

Once circling Earth, the satellites will help demonstrate and mature technologies meant to improve solar power generation, detect gamma-ray bursts, determine crop water usage, and measure root-zone soil and snowpack moisture levels.

What causes Delusion? The prevailing view is that people adopt false beliefs because they’re too stupid or ignorant to grasp the truth. But just as often, the opposite is true: many delusions prey not on dim minds but on bright ones. And this has serious implications for education, society, and you personally. In this video in collaboration with Gurwinder, we explore the reasons why intelligent people believe irrational things and what can be done to avoid the allure of delusion.

Using algae to solve humanity’s most pressing problems — that’s the ambitious aim of a team of researchers from Germany. After all, algae are posessed of staggering superpowers: for example, the ability to bind CO₂. Algae can also be used to make plastic substitutes and even medication.

For a research project called \.

Through Broad’s Scientists in the Classroom program, Broad researchers visit every 8th grade classroom in Cambridge each year to talk about genetics and evolution.

Every summer, 18 high school students spend six weeks at Broad working side-by-side with mentors on cutting-edge research.

In November 2022, Broad’s Genomics Platform sequenced its 500,000th whole human genome, a mere four years after sequencing its 100,000th.

Google Research releases the Skin Condition Image Network (SCIN) dataset in collaboration with physicians at Stanford Med.

Designed to reflect the broad range of conditions searched for online, it’s freely available as a resource for researchers, educators, & devs → https://goo.gle/4amfMwW

#AI #medicine

Continue reading “SCIN: A new resource for representative dermatology images” »

Summary: Adolescents engaging in “transcendent thinking”—the practice of looking beyond the immediate context to understand deeper meanings and implications—can significantly influence their brain development. The study highlights how this complex form of thinking fosters coordination between the brain’s executive control and default mode networks, crucial for psychological functioning.

Analyzing high school students’ responses to global teen stories, researchers found that transcendent thinking not only enhances brain network coordination over time but also predicts key psychosocial outcomes in young adulthood. These groundbreaking findings underline the potential of civically minded education in supporting adolescents’ cognitive and emotional development.

Cellulose is the primary component of the cell walls of plants, making it the most common polymer on Earth. It’s responsible for the properties of materials like wood and cotton and is the primary component of dietary fiber, so it’s hard to overstate its importance to humanity.

Given its ubiquity and the fact that it’s composed of a bunch of sugar molecules linked together, its toughness makes it very difficult to use as a food source. The animals that manage to extract significant calories from cellulose typically do so via specialized digestive tracts that provide a home for symbiotic bacteria—think of the extra stomachs of cows and other ruminants.

Amazingly, humans also play host to bacteria that can break down cellulose—something that wasn’t confirmed until 2003 (long after I’d wrapped up my education). Now, a new study indicates that we’re host to a mix of cellulose-eating bacteria, some via our primate ancestry, and others through our domestication of herbivores such as cows. But urban living has caused the number of these bacteria to shrink dramatically.