Lifeboat Foundation

The US government quietly resumed funding experiments on the deadly H5N1 avian flu — research that makes the virus more easily transmissible to mammals.

The researchers say making new strains of the H5N1 flu virus in a secure lab can help them see what might happen naturally in the real world. Sounds logical, but many scientists oppose it because the facts show most biosafety labs aren’t really secure at all, and experts say the risks of a mutated virus escaping outweigh whatever public health benefit comes from creating them.

Continue reading “Hey, let’s fight global pandemics by maybe starting one… Say WHAT?” »

Those who watched the full 51-minute version of Jeff Bezos’ May 9 Blue Moon announcement were treated to a tutorial on the work of Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill. In the 1970s Dr. O’Neill popularized the idea of space colonies that rotate in orbit allowing tens of thousands of inhabitants to live comfortable lives in Earth-like habitats. Bezos even commissioned updated renderings to excite the audience’s imagination.

Bezos articulated, as he has on many occasions that human civilization should and must expand out into the space to live and work in permanent space settlements. Doing so will allow the best planet in the Solar System, the Earth, to become a protected treasure in the vast harshness of space.

He understands that by creating the infrastructure to accelerate economic development in space his vision of space settlement will more rapidly come to fruition. But Bezos is sober about his space colony ambitions. He calls it a multigenerational endeavor. And so it may be.

Continue reading “Achieving Bezos’ bold vision of space settlement requires bold policy direction” »

GEDmatch’s revamped genetic privacy policy could set off legal battles that go all the way to the US Supreme Court.

By Peter Aldhous

The global rate of species extinction “is already tens to hundreds of times higher than it has been, on average, over the last 10 million years,” according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a UN committee, whose report was written by 145 experts from 50 countries.

One million of the planet’s eight million species are threatened with extinction by humans, scientists warned Monday in what is described as the most comprehensive assessment of global nature loss ever.

Their landmark report paints a bleak picture of a planet ravaged by an ever-growing human population, whose insatiable consumption is destroying the natural world.

Continue reading “We are in the midst of an extinction crisis, warn UN scientists” »

From the beginning of the year 2019, the sales of Boox eReaders slightly increase, and so do many other brands such as Kindle, Kobo and Sony. All of them suffered a rapid drop in sales in the previous year but now they are getting back. This may cause by the event that France prohibits students from using smartphones and tablets in schools.

Under the legislation passed in 2018, the French students as old as 15 were not allowed to bring their smartphones as well as tablets to schools from September. The law was originally noted in President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign. Now, one semester has gone, actually what do folks think to this policy? Earlier than that, France endorsed a blanket smartphone ban for drivers, even those who park at the side of the road, so the further action to school is not that surprising. It seems that the French government is getting realized that the control of electronics use is significant to beat back the encroachment of digital technology in everyday life.

Fake news is a threat to American democratic institutions and false information can have far-reaching effects. A new study provides a roadmap for dealing with fake news.

Research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides new evidence that people’s beliefs about the source of information affects how they take in that information, even at the level of their automatic responses. They also found that new information can modify or even undo existing impressions caused by fake news.

“We wanted to know whether offering information about the source of news matters for people’s gut-level, automatic reactions,” said Melissa Ferguson, co-author on the paper and psychology professor at Cornell University. “Does knowing that something is fake have lingering pernicious effects that can later shape and influence our thoughts and behavior toward the person? Our studies suggest that establishing credibility for news sources is the right policy to combat fake news.”

Continue reading “Source credibility is key to derailing fake news” »

We submitted the Longevity Peace Prize, worth $5 million dollars to be awarded to any longevity activist(s) in the next 5 years who can get a major world government or the UN to declare “aging a disease” as a policy and to help reverse regulatory hurdles on life extension research. Hopefully, this early version of a prize may one day become reality. https://xprize.org/

Just days after North Korea announced it was suspending its testing programme, scientists revealed that the country’s underground nuclear test site had partially collapsed. This assessment was based on data gathered from smaller earthquakes that followed North Korea’s biggest nuclear test in 2017. A new study published in Science has now confirmed the collapse using satellite radar imaging.

The collapse may have played a role in North Korea’s change in policy. If correct, and with the hindsight of this research, we might have speculated that the North Koreans would want to make such an offer of peace. This shows how scientific analysis normally reserved for studying natural earthquakes can be a powerful tool in deciphering political decisions and predicting future policy across the globe.

In fact, another unusual earthquake in South Korea in 2017 also has the potential to affect geopolitics, this time by changing energy policy. “Seismic shift” may be a cliche often used by journalists and policymakers to describe changing political landscapes, but these recent earthquakes along the Korean Peninsula remind us there can really be authentic links between seismic events and global affairs.

Continue reading “Earthquake science could have predicted North Korea’s nuclear climbdown” »

Chinese technology companies are increasingly important and dynamic international actors. They are making critical contributions in a range of areas, from cutting edge research to enabling connectivity for developing countries. Yet, their rapid expansion and growing influence also bring a range of strategic and policy challenges. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Centre has created a public database to map the global expansion of 12 key Chinese tech companies working across the telecommunications, internet & biotech sectors. It’s a tool for journalists, researchers, NGOs, policymakers and the interested public to better understand the enormous scale, complexity and increasing reach of some of China’s tech giants. On this website you’ll find: