Lifeboat Foundation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ-6Q8pHQE0

Today I’m looking at Elon Musk’s must read science fiction books. Thanks for watching.

Intro — 0:00
The Foundation Saga — 1:09
Atlas Shrugged — 2:22
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — 3:38
The Dune Chronicles — 4:27
Stranger in a Strange Land — 5:38
The Culture series — 6:24
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress — 8:01
Daemon series — 8:43
The Machine Stops — 9:47

Continue reading “ELON MUSK’s must-read science fiction” »

When you donate someone else’s money.

Some charities have voluntarily agreed to return the funds, some have already spent the money, while others are awaiting legal clarity.

Humans are eternally curious about the night sky, but figuring out how to use a telescope is non-trivial. At CES in Las Vegas, Unistellar believes it has the perfect solution with its Equinox 2 Smart Telescope.

“When I was a young teenager, I had a telescope that I used during the long summer nights. Fast forward to being an adult – I didn’t have any more time to do astronomy. With a friend of mine, we started to think about what we can do to bring astronomy back to our busy daily lives,” says Laurent Marfisi, co-founder and CEO of Unistellar in an interview with TechCrunch. “We thought up a telescope that is easy to use, that is powerful enough to see through the light pollution, and that has the possibility to reveal galaxies and nebulae, all those things that we could not see even when we were teenagers. The aim is to bring a lot of the power that professionals have in astronomy into the daily lives of consumers who just want to have fun, spend good quality time with their children and their friends around astronomy.”

SpaceX makes 1,000 flights per year the goal for its next-generation Starship.

In 2022 SpaceX set a record for rocket launches achieving 61. But the company’s long-term goal is to get to 1,000 per year in a decade.

A chemistry collaboration has led to a creative way to put carbon dioxide to good—and even healthy—use: by incorporating it, via electrosynthesis, into a series of organic molecules that are vital to pharmaceutical development.

In the process, the research team made an innovative discovery. By changing the type of electrochemical reactor, they could produce two completely different products, both of which are useful in medicinal chemistry.

The team’s paper, “Electrochemical Reactor Dictates Site Selectivity in N-Heteroarene Carboxylations,” published Jan 5 in Nature. The paper’s co-lead authors are postdoctoral researchers Peng Yu and Wen Zhang, and Guo-Quan Sun of Sichuan University in China.

Heparin has long been used as a blood thinner, or anticoagulant, for patients with blood clotting disorders or after surgery to prevent complications. But the medication remains difficult to dose correctly, potentially leading to overdosing or underdosing.

A team of Penn State researchers combined heparin with a protein fragment, peptide, to slow down the release of the drug and convey the medication directly to the site of a clot. They published their findings in the journal Small.

“We wanted to develop a material that can gradually deliver heparin over time rather than the current iteration that gets cleared from the body in a couple of hours,” said corresponding author Scott Medina, Penn State associate professor of biomedical engineering. “We also wanted to deliver the drug through the skin instead of through an IV.”

Allowing the driver of an autonomous vehicle to watch a movie, a dealer to sell automobiles from a “virtual” car lot, or an engineer to simulate how a new part fits: the auto industry is getting a tantalizing taste of the metaverse at the huge CES technology show.

One gadget on display in Las Vegas is an in-car television system, developed by French parts maker Valeo, that needs no remote.

To change the channel, drivers or passengers wearing a headset make a simple swipe in the air with their hand, and sensors in the car detect the movement.

Tech companies showed off their latest products this week at CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show.

An annual report found that 2022 was a year of extremes for lightning, with more than 198 million lightning strokes observed in the US alone.