Lifeboat Foundation

With much of the world planning to pivot away from oil and gas in the near future, the country’s government is looking ahead to a more diversified energy sector. The international ‘green’ trend is a significant threat to the Russian economy, which is at present largely dependent on the export of oil, gas, and coal. Starting from 2021, the government intends to build on the country’s reputation as a hydrogen supplier, aiming to make exports of the world’s most abundant gas a large part of its energy sector.

The current world population of 7.6 billion is expected to reach 8.6 billion in 2030, 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, according to a new United Nations report being launched today. With roughly 83 million people being added to the world’s population every year, the upward trend in population size is expected to continue, even assuming that fertility levels will continue to decline.

The World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision, published by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, provides a comprehensive review of global demographic trends and prospects for the future. The information is essential to guide policies aimed at achieving the new Sustainable Development Goals.

AstraZeneca shares fell on Monday even after the publication of positive results from a trial of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine developed in partnership with Oxford University.

The study, published in The Lancet on Monday, said healthy volunteers who received the experimental vaccine, called AZD1222, showed immune responses.

Read more:A $47 billion fund manager shares 3 trades she’s making for huge upside as the economy recovers — including a play on the Tesla-led boom of electric vehicles

Continue reading “AstraZeneca slides even as the company’s coronavirus vaccine trial results show ‘promise’” »

Corporate boards have been debating the need to invest in innovation as a driver of future growth for the better part of a decade.

And while many enterprises have demonstrated an organizational commitment to innovation through standing up dedicated teams, allocating budget, and developing bets for the future, innovation leaders now face a sizable challenge. As the world grapples with the current public health crisis and its long-tail impacts on society and the economy, many CEOs and their boards of directors are looking for reasons not to invest in innovation.

A new study, published this week in The Lancet, concludes that the global population is likely to peak in 2064 at 9.7 billion and fall to 8.8 billion by century’s end. The report foresees major shifts in geopolitical power – producing a more multi-polar world – with 23 countries seeing their populations shrink by more than half as a result of declining fertility rates. Liberal immigration policies could help to maintain population sizes and economic growth, the authors suggest.

Theoretical Physicist Lawrence Krauss writes in the Wall Street Journal.

WSJ: In the 1980s, when I was a young professor of physics and astronomy at Yale, deconstructionism was in vogue in the English Department. We in the science departments would scoff at the lack of objective intellectual standards in the humanities, epitomized by a movement that argued against the existence of objective truth itself, arguing that all such claims to knowledge were tainted by ideological biases due to race, sex or economic dominance.

It could never happen in the hard sciences, except perhaps under dictatorships, such as the Nazi condemnation of “Jewish” science, or the Stalinist campaign against genetics led by Trofim Lysenko, in which literally thousands of mainstream geneticists were dismissed in the effort to suppress any opposition to the prevailing political view of the state.

In the coronavirus economy, companies are adopting more automation, as they seek to cut costs and increase efficiency. There is debate about which jobs are most at risk and how soon. But climbing up the skills ladder is the best way to stay ahead of the automation wave.

Even groups that regularly disagree on labor issues said there should be significant public investment in programs that can upgrade the skills of American workers.

The current market is expected to balloon to $1.0-$1.5 trillion in the next 20 years. Not even the anti-aging industry is worth that much!

The next decade is going to be an important one, with declining costs & advanced technology propelling the space economy to new highs. We have never been closer to the final frontier.

Continue reading “The Booming Space Economy” »

Imagine a manufacturing plant in which all the production equipment is continually changing in response to market needs. Robots churning out widgets, for instance, would reconfigure themselves based on data coming in from all points of the widget supply chain, as well as sensors monitoring the factory itself. The result is a smart factory that’s more agile and autonomous than previous generations of automation.

Also known as Industry 4.0, the smart factory runs on data and artificial intelligence, but connectivity forms the backbone of operations. The new fifth generation of mobile networks (5G) is a catalyst for this new industrial revolution because it offers much greater speed and bandwidth than previous networks, as well as low latency, or time required for data to travel between two points. 5G will work with and in some cases replace existing fixed, wired connections, making manufacturing more flexible and ready to implement innovations.

Continue reading “5G is accelerating factory automation that could add trillions to the global economy” »