Lifeboat Foundation

A slow-motion movie on sports television channels shows processes in hundredths of a second. By contrast, processes on the nanoscale take place in the so-called femtosecond range: For example, an electron needs only billionths of a second to orbit a hydrogen atom. Physicists around the world are using special instruments to capture such ultrafast nano-processes in films.

Researchers at Kiel University (CAU) have developed a new method for such films that is based on a different physical concept and thus allows further and more precise options for investigation. To do this, they combined an electron microscope with nanostructured metallic thin films that generate very short light pulses.

Continue reading “New analysis method developed for quantum and nanomaterials” »

The British Museum shared in a recent presentation that archaeologists have discovered the remnants of a 4,500-year-old Sumerian temple in Iraq. It is a temple dedicated to Ningirsu, the Mesopotamian deity of springtime thunder.

The finding is the outcome of the 2015 archaeological partnership led by the British Museum and supported by the Getty Museum called the Girsu Project.

In 1931, a 25-year-old Kurt Gödel published a paper in mathematical logic titled “On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems.” This paper contained the proofs of two remarkable “incompleteness theorems,” which state:

For any consistent axiomatic formal system that can express facts about basic arithmetic.

1. there are true statements that are unprovable within the system 2. the system’s consistency cannot be proven within the system.

Aging is a complex process, a river fed by several tributaries connected by countless interweaving streams. Its direction is set inexorably towards infirmity, or so it would first appear. Daunting as navigation may seem, their interrelatedness should inspire hope instead of fear.

Aging is undeniably the root of the most common and costly noncommunicable diseases in the developed world, as well as a predisposing factor to severe or fatal reactions to infectious ones. Whatever can be done to slow, halt, or reverse its course holds inestimable economic and humanitarian value (Lee, 2017).

The hallmarks of aging were assembled to broadly conceptualize what lies behind phenomena as seemingly unrelated as gray hair, wrinkles, heart disease, cognitive decline, and cancer. They serve as explanations for why everything from our joints to our eyesight steadily give out over time.

This time lapse of a neural network with the neurons slowly switching off is a haunting experiment in machine learning.

As chatbot responses begin to proliferate throughout the Internet, they will, in turn, impact future machine learning algorithms that mine the Internet for information, thus perpetuating and amplifying the impact of the current programming biases evident in ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is admittedly a work in progress, but how the issues of censorship and offense ultimately play out will be important. The last thing anyone should want in the future is a medical diagnostic chatbot that refrains from providing a true diagnosis that may cause pain or anxiety to the receiver. Providing information guaranteed not to disturb is a sure way to squash knowledge and progress. It is also a clear example of the fallacy of attempting to input “universal human values” into AI systems, because one can bet that the choice of which values to input will be subjective.

If the future of AI follows the current trend apparent in ChatGPT, a more dangerous, dystopic machine-based future might not be the one portrayed in the Terminator films but, rather, a future populated by AI versions of Fahrenheit 451 firemen.

Changesite-(Y), named for the mythological Chinese goddess of the moon, Chang’e, is a phosphate mineral and columnar crystal. It was found in lunar basalt particles being examined in laboratories in China.

The discovery was made by researchers at the Beijing Research Institute of Uranium Geology who found a single crystal of Changesite-(Y) using X-ray diffraction while studying particles collected on the moon.

The discovery means China is the third country to discover a new lunar mineral, following the United States and former Soviet Union.

For thousands of years, humanity has wrestled with the idea we may not be alone in our solar system.

Speculation that aliens might exist dates back to philosophers in ancient Greece, but it was the middle of the 20th century when people’s imaginations really began to run riot — suddenly ‘little green men’ were everywhere in popular culture.

The reality is that if extraterrestrial life does exist in our solar system it will be of a more simpler variety, perhaps hidden in Venus’ clouds, beneath Mars’ surface or in the vast underground oceans of one of Saturn’s icy moons.

Continue reading “MailOnline looks at where aliens could exist in our solar system” »

Nature has an extraordinary knack for producing composite materials that are simultaneously light and strong, porous and rigid — like mollusk shells or bone. But producing such materials in a lab or factory — particularly using environmentally friendly materials and processes — is extremely challenging.

Researchers in the Soft Materials Laboratory in the School of Engineering turned to nature for a solution. They have pioneered a 3D printable ink that contains Sporosarcina pasteurii: a bacterium which, when exposed to a urea-containing solution, triggers a mineralization process that produces calcium carbonate (CaCO3). The upshot is that the researchers can use their ink — dubbed BactoInk — to 3D-print virtually any shape, which will then gradually mineralize over the course of a few days.

-This would be good for coral reefs.

Continue reading “3D printing with bacteria-loaded ink produces bone-like composites” »