Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

Cannabis Access Tied to Big Drop in Daily Opioid Use

Greater access to legal cannabis is associated with a significant drop in daily opioid use, suggesting that cannabis availability may reduce reliance on opioids for pain or other use.

How can cannabis legalization influence opioid use? This is what a recent study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated behavior connections between cannabis use and opioid use. This study has the potential to help scientists, medical professionals, legislators, and the public better understand the benefits of cannabis, including how it can help the opioid epidemic.

For the study, the researchers analyzed survey data collected from 28,069 individuals designated as people who inject drugs (PWID) during 2012, 2015, 2018, and 2022 across 13 states. The goal of the study was to compare medical cannabis and medical plus recreational cannabis use to opioid use. The respondents were asked to report their past 30-day use for both cannabis and opioids. In the end, the researchers found that users who subscribed to both medical plus recreational cannabis use compared to just medical cannabis use experienced a 9–11 percent decline in opioid use.

The study notes in its conclusions, “Cannabis legalization may shape daily opioid consumption among PWID, potentially reducing drug-related harms. Differences in cannabis use following legalization may reflect disparate impact by race, due to structural racism or other factors. Future research examining whether policy attributable changes in substance use manifest health benefits among PWID is critical to developing evidence-based cannabis reform.”

Scientists Discover a Brain Circuit That Enhances Physical Endurance In Mice

The effects of exercise would not be nearly as powerful without the input of the brain, according to new research.

A study on mice has found a critical signal in the central nervous system that helps build physical endurance in the wider body after repeated exercise.

Traditionally, scientists thought that our body’s extensive response to frequent exercise occurred mainly in the periphery, such as the bones and muscles, and the heart.

Brett Adcock: Humanoids Run on Neural Net, Autonomous Manufacturing, and $50 Trillion Market #229

Humanoid robots with full-body autonomy are rapidly advancing and are expected to create a $50 trillion market, transforming industries, economy, and daily life ## ## Questions to inspire discussion.

Neural Network Architecture & Control.

🤖 Q: How does Figure 3’s neural network control differ from traditional robotics? A: Figure 3 uses end-to-end neural networks for full-body control, manipulation, and room-scale planning, replacing the previous C++-based control stack entirely, with System Zero being a fully learned reinforcement learning controller running with no code on the robot.

🎯 Q: What enables Figure 3’s high-frequency motor control for complex tasks? A: Palm cameras and onboard inference enable high-frequency torque control of 40+ motors for complex bimanual tasks, replanning, and error recovery in dynamic environments, representing a significant improvement over previous models.

🔄 Q: How does Figure’s data-driven approach create competitive advantage? A: Data accumulation and neural net retraining provides competitive advantage over traditional C++ code, allowing rapid iteration and improvement, with positive transfer observed as diverse knowledge enables emergent generalization with larger pre-training datasets.

🧠 Q: Where is the robot’s compute located and why? A: The brain-like compute unit is in the head for sensors and heat dissipation, while the torso contains the majority of onboard computation, with potential for latex or silicone face for human-like interaction.

Continue reading “Brett Adcock: Humanoids Run on Neural Net, Autonomous Manufacturing, and Trillion Market #229” | >

Scientific Notation Explained | Large & Small Numbers + Practice Questions

Scientific notation is a system developed to represent extremely large and extremely small numbers in a way that is easy to read, write, and understand. In chemistry and physics, many values such as the mass of an electron are too large or too small to be written conveniently in standard notation.

In this video, you will learn:

What scientific notation is and why it is used.
How to write numbers in the form a × 10ⁿ, where a is between 1 and 10
How to convert large numbers into scientific notation.
How to convert small numbers into scientific notation.

The LARS rule:
Left → Add to the exponent.
Right → Subtract from the exponent.

We also discuss how the direction of decimal movement affects the exponent and why the same rules apply to both very large and very small numbers.

📌 At the end of the video, you’ll find practice multiple-choice questions (MCQs) to test your understanding, including a real-life chemistry example involving the mass of an electron.

Continue reading “Scientific Notation Explained | Large & Small Numbers + Practice Questions” | >

The TUB variant impairs leptin sensitivity and AgRP neuronal response, leading to obesity

What are the genetic origins of early-onset obesity?

Studying a cohort of young adults in China, researchers in Science TranslationalMedicine performed deep sequencing and identified a loss-of-function variant in the gene TUB that impairs sensitivity to leptin.

Rare human TUB variants impair leptin sensitivity through disruption of STAT3 activation, leading to hyperphagic obesity.

Why Gentry Lee Became the Most Important Figure in Space Exploration You’ve Never Heard Of: STARMAN

There are documentaries about history, and then there are documentaries about the people who were quietly in the room when history happened.

STARMAN, the new film from Academy Award–nominated director Robert Stone, belongs firmly in the latter category. It chronicles the life of Gentry Lee—NASA scientist, mission architect, science communicator, and one of those rare figures whose career seems to map directly onto the modern Space Age.

If the Space Age began in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik, then Gentry Lee—born in 1942—has lived his entire adult life shaped by humanity’s reach beyond Earth. More than a witness to that history, Lee has been in the room for many of its defining moments.

As a senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lee served as Director of Science Analysis and Mission Planning for the Viking mission to Mars and the Galileo probe to Jupiter, missions that transformed our understanding of the solar system. Alongside this work, he collaborated with Carl Sagan on PBS’s landmark series COSMOS, narrated Discovery Channel’s ARE WE ALONE?, and co-authored four novels with legendary science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.

A Zelig-like figure at the crossroads of interplanetary science and science fiction, Gentry Lee has been everywhere—and worked with everyone—who helped define how we imagine space.

Now the subject of STARMAN, Lee guides us through a lifetime of curiosity, wonder, and exploration. The film is both entertaining and illuminating—and our conversation with him reflects that same spirit.

Continue reading “Why Gentry Lee Became the Most Important Figure in Space Exploration You’ve Never Heard Of: STARMAN” | >

Rethinking Memory Mechanisms of Foundation Agents in the Second Half: A Survey

The research of artificial intelligence is undergoing a paradigm shift from prioritizing model innovations over benchmark scores towards emphasizing problem definition and rigorous real-world evaluation. As the field enters the “second half,” the central challenge becomes real utility in long-horizon, dynamic, and user-dependent environments, where agents face context explosion and must continuously accumulate, manage, and selectively reuse large volumes of information across extended interactions. Memory, with hundreds of papers released this year, therefore emerges as the critical solution to fill the utility gap. In this survey, we provide a unified view of foundation agent memory along three dimensions: memory substrate (internal and external), cognitive mechanism (episodic, semantic, sensory, working, and procedural), and memory subject (agent- and user-centric). We then analyze how memory is instantiated and operated under different agent topologies and highlight learning policies over memory operations. Finally, we review evaluation benchmarks and metrics for assessing memory utility, and outline various open challenges and future directions.

/* */