Lifeboat Foundation

The human brain is the most complex and powerful computer in the world — and, as far as we know, the universe.

Today’s most sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are only just beginning to offer a partial simulation of a very limited number of the brain’s functions. AI is, however, much faster when it comes to certain operations like mathematics and language.

This means it comes as no surprise that a great deal of thought and research has gone into combining the two. The idea is to use AI to better understand the workings of the brain and eventually create more accurate simulations of it. One day, it may also help us to create systems with the complexity and diversity of… More.

Continue reading “AI’s Next Frontier: Are Brain-Computer Interfaces The Future Of Communication?” »

These waves can reach heights comparable to stacking three suns on top of each other.

Astronomers have discovered a strange star system with “monster” tidal waves breaking on one of its stars. Astrophysicists from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) developed new computer models to better understand the impact of huge surface waves.

The new models reveal “titanic waves” created by the tides of a smaller companion star to be repeatedly crashing on the colossal star in the system. This phenomenon has never been detected on a star, making it a significant discovery.

Continue reading “ESA’s Gaia satellite spots ‘retired stars’ passing through young star-forming area” »

Thoughts on the future of artificial intelligence, universal accelerating change, “inner space,” Google, the metaverse, the wearable web, technology evaluation and empowerment, and cybertwins, including “digital mom”. SIAI Interview, Oct 2007. Filmed by Doug Wolens, I-MagineMedia, author of the excellent new documentary The Singularity, 2012. This is one of my favorite short interviews. Hope you like it!

😗😁Year 2015

(12 Apr 1997) English/Nat.
British and Dutch scientists using a giant magnetic field have made a frog float in mid-air, and might even be able to do the same thing with a human being.
The team from Britain’s University of Nottingham and the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands has also succeeded in levitating plants, grasshoppers and fish.
Scientists at the University of Nijmegen in Holland have managed to make a frog float six feet (approximately two metres) in the air — and they say the trick could easily be repeated with a human.
The secret is not magic but a powerful magnetic field which overcomes the force of gravity.
The field makes the frog’s atoms generate a weak magnetic force in the opposite direction.
This causes it to be repelled in the same way as like poles of two magnets.
Plants, grasshoppers and fish have been levitated by the research team in the same way.
NASA, apparently, is extremely interested in the experiment in order to be able to test the effects of weightlessness on astronauts without having to put them into space.
Easy, says team leader Dr Andre Geim.
SOUNDBITE: (English)
There is no problem with putting a man by this magnetic levitation, to fly in the air. Technically we can do it with you without any problems.
SUPER CAPTION: Dr Andre Geim, Director of the High Field Magnetic Laboratory of the Catholic University of Nijmegen.
And for those worried about the effects on the frog — don’t worry.
He’s not hopping mad — quite the opposite, in fact.

Continue reading “Netherlands: British & Dutch Scientists Make Frog Float in Mid-Air” »

Last year, the Hubble Space Telescope made headlines by detecting the most distant star ever seen, a luminary from the universe’s first billion years named “Earendel.” Now, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered mesmerizing details about this intriguing star.

“The Hubble provided us a glimpse of Earendel, but the James Webb Space Telescope is now offering us a deep dive,” said NASA. “These observations not only enlighten us about the star’s nature but also about its host galaxy, the Sunrise Arc, and possibly about the early universe itself.”

Earendel is no ordinary star. Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument paints a portrait of a massive B-type star, sizzling at temperatures twice as scorching as our Sun and radiating with a luminosity a million times more intense.

You can keep saving up to buy a six-figure ticket to space, or try this new Citizen Astronaut Program to earn your spot through passion and commitment to positive change.

I am studying Noether’s theorem in field theory and I am not understanding what spacelike-surfaces mean. I will reproduce the bit of the argument below that contains the term “spacelike-sufaces” in the context I am not understanding.

There will be a conserved ccurrent for each group generator $a$. Each will result in a conserved charge (that is, an integral of motion). To see this, take in spacetime a volume unbounded in the space-like direction, but limited in time by two space-like surfaces $w_1$ and $w_2$. Integrating $\partial_{\mu} J^{\mu}_a=0$ over this volume, we get an integral over the boundary surface, composed of $w_1$, $w_2$ and the time-like boundaries supposed to be at infinity. If we now suppose the current to be zero at infinity on these boundaries, we remain with.

$$\int_{w_1}d\sigma_{\mu} J^{\mu}_a=\int_{w_2}d\sigma_{\mu} J^{

The hints pointing to two galaxies are found in the question mark’s strange shape. There are two brighter spots, one in the curve and the other in the dot, which could be the galactic nuclei, or the centers of the galaxies, Britt says. The curve of the question mark might be the “tails” being stripped off as the two galaxies spiral toward each other.

“It’s very cute. It’s a question mark … But you can find the colons and semicolons, and any other punctuation mark, because you have 10,000 little smudges of light in each image taken every half hour,” says David Helfand, an astronomer at Columbia University. The sheer number of shining objects we find are bound to create some serendipitous images, and our brains have evolved to find those patterns, he says.

Astronomers have seen similar objects closer to home. Two merging galaxies captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2008 also look like a question mark, just turned 90 degrees.

The universe is humming with gravitational radiation—a very low-frequency rumble that rhythmically stretches and compresses spacetime and the matter embedded in it.

That is the conclusion of several groups of researchers from around the world who simultaneously published a slew of journal articles in June describing more than 15 years of observations of millisecond pulsars within our corner of the Milky Way galaxy. At least one group—the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration—has found compelling evidence that the precise rhythms of these pulsars are affected by the stretching and squeezing of spacetime by these long-wavelength gravitational waves.

“This is key evidence for gravitational waves at very low frequencies,” says Vanderbilt University’s Stephen Taylor, who co-led the search and is the current chair of the collaboration. “After years of work, NANOGrav is opening an entirely new window on the gravitational-wave universe.”