Lifeboat Foundation

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As we continue to scan the heavens for signs of intelligent life, we must contemplate what it might mean if we are the first civilization to ever arise.

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Continue reading “Humanity: Firstborn Space Civilization” »

After a long-running probe into TikTok, individual states have started to take action against the social media company over security concerns. CNBC’s Kayla Tausche joins ‘Squawk Box’ with the details.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently provided a teaser on what will be happening during the company’s AI Day 2 event this Friday. Considering Musk’s recent comments, it appears that AI Day 2 will be filled to the brim with exciting discussions and demos of next-generation tech.

This is not Tesla’s first AI Day. Last year, the electric vehicle maker held a similar event, outlining the company’s work in artificial intelligence. During the event, Tesla held an extensive discussion on its neural networks, Dojo supercomputer, and humanoid robot, the Tesla Bot (Optimus). Interestingly enough, mainstream coverage of the event later suggested that AI Day was underwhelming or disappointing.

How do you teach a new robot old tricks?

Here’s an interesting thought. What if you were told that everything in your life has already been planned out?

Even stranger, what if your past, present, and future are all happening right at this moment?

An astonishing new theory known as the “block universe” theory claims that time does not actually “flow like a river”, but rather, everything is ever-present.

Amino acids have been found in meteorites, and now an experiment shows how they might have been created by chemical reactions in these space rocks.

This type of gamma ray burst (GRB) is thought to occur when a massive star explodes in a supernova, leaving behind a black hole. The explosion creates an extraordinary jet of light which makes up the GRB itself, and then the supernova causes a dimmer afterglow. This particular GRB appears so bright partially because it is about 2.4 billion light years away from Earth, making it one of the closest GRBs ever spotted in addition to being the brightest.

“If we look at all of the gamma ray bursts that have been detected, this one stands apart,” says Jillian Rastinejad at Northwestern University in Illinois. “Informally, we’ve been calling it the BOAT – the brightest of all time.” She and her colleagues calculated that a GRB this bright is expected to occur only once every thousand years or so.

Astronomers have spotted a strange blast of gamma radiation from space that defies categorisation, and it may mean a gap in our understanding of how black holes form.

CRISPR, the Nobel Prize-winning gene editing technology, is poised to have a profound impact on the fields of microbiology and medicine yet again.

A team led by CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna and her longtime collaborator Jill Banfield has developed a clever tool to edit the genomes of bacteria-infecting viruses called bacteriophages using a rare form of CRISPR. The ability to easily engineer custom-designed phages —which has long eluded the research community —could help researchers control microbiomes without antibiotics or harsh chemicals, and treat dangerous drug-resistant infections. A paper describing the work was recently published in Nature Microbiology.

“Bacteriophages are some of the most abundant and diverse biological entities on Earth. Unlike prior approaches, this editing strategy works against the tremendous genetic diversity of bacteriophages,” said first author Benjamin Adler, a postdoctoral fellow in Doudna’s lab. “There are so many exciting directions here—discovery is literally at our fingertips.”