Lifeboat Foundation

NASA is committed to landing the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon in 2024—or thereabouts—as part of the Artemis-3 mission.

But first will come Artemis-1.

Spaceflight Now reports that NASA is now saying February 12 2022 is the soonest the un-crewed autonomous Artemis-1 mission could launch.… See more.

Last year, scientists inferentially detected the existence of 2D visual mental representations that fundamentally change vision science. “The question becomes, what are they exactly? Are they patterns of neurons firing? Are they some kind of phenomenon not necessarily reducible to any kind of physical substrate?” Asks Jessica M. Wilson, philosopher and author of the book Metaphysical Emergence.

Coming up, scientists and philosophers spanning three countries weigh in on an experiment to discover the material nature of consciousness and the content of our experiences.

Let’s start with a definition: Consciousness is awareness. It’s the qualitative experience of that awareness — what it’s like to be something.

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has lost a lawsuit against NASA it filed over the agency’s decision to award a $2.9 billion contract to Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX to build a lunar lander to transport astronauts to the Moon, according to a federal court ruling Thursday.

The lucrative contract was given to SpaceX in April as part of NASA’s Artemis program that aims to fly the first woman and first person of color on the Moon by 2024. SpaceX was selected to develop… See more.

Federal judge Richard A. Hertling ruled in favor of SpaceX, concluding a sealed complaint Blue Origin filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in August, and said a protective order to seal documents in the lawsuit would remain in effect.

Continue reading “Bezos’ Blue Origin Loses Lawsuit Against NASA Over Lucrative Lunar Lander Contract Awarded To Musk’s SpaceX” »

In a concept test for an advanced planetary defense solution.

We are vastly unprepared for the event of an impending, potentially civilization-ending asteroid impact. Knowing this, NASA is developing planetary defense solutions to add to its arsenal of space technologies.

One of these technologies, NASA’s DART spacecraft, is scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 10:20 Pacific time on November 23 a press statement reveals. … See more.

The only experiential time is NOW. Our phenomenal minds spring into existence at increments of conscious instants. The sequence of these Nows constitutes our “stream” of consciousness. D-Theory of Time, or Digital Presentism, is predicated on reversible quantum computing at large and gives us a coherent theoretical framework on the nature of time. In the absence of observers, the arrow of time doesn’t exist — there’s no cosmic flow of time. Instead, each conscious observer is a digital pattern flowing within a multidimensional matrix.

Based on the Cybernetic Theory of Mind by evolutionary cyberneticist Alex Vikoulov that he defends in his magnum opus The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution, comes a newly-released documentary Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind.

Continue reading “Consciousness & Time” »

Scientists have found a way to deactivate DDR1, a molecule that forms a barrier ‘like barbed wire’ in tumours. By removing this barrier, anti-tumour immune cells could target aggressive forms of breast cancer.

This initial iteration of the fast-food robot—or robotic kitchen assistant, as its creators called it—was so successful that a commercial version launched last year. Its maker Miso Robotics put Flippy on the market for $30,000, and the bot was no longer limited to just flipping burgers; the new and improved Flippy could cook 19 different foods, including chicken wings, onion rings, french fries, and the Impossible Burger. It got sleeker, too: rather than sitting on a wheeled cart, the new Flippy was a “robot on a rail,” with the rail located along the hood of restaurant stoves.

This week, Miso Robotics announced an even newer, more improved Flippy robot called Flippy 2 (hey, they’re consistent). Most of the updates and improvements on the new bot are based on feedback the company received from restaurant chain White Castle, the first big restaurant chain to go all-in on the original Flippy.

So how is Flippy 2 different? The new robot can do the work of an entire fry station without any human assistance, and can do more than double the number of food preparation tasks its older sibling could do, including filling, emptying, and returning fry baskets.

A new joint project between the U.S. and Romania will bring small modular reactors to Eastern Europe! In addition to SMR simulators to train students.

Spintronic devices, a class of architectures that can store or transfer information by leveraging the intrinsic spin of electrons, have been found to be highly promising, both in terms of speed and efficiency. So far, however, the development of these devices has been hindered by the poor compatibility between semiconducting materials and ferromagnetic sources of spin, which underpin their operation.

In fact, while some semiconductors can generate electrical currents from transverse spin currents and vice versa, reliably controlling this spin-charge conversion has so far proved to be highly challenging. In recent years, some material scientists and engineers have thus been investigating the potential of fabricating spintronic devices using ferroelectric Rashba semiconductors, a class of materials with several advantageous properties, such as semiconductivity, large spin-orbit coupling and non-volatility.

A team of researchers at Politecnico di Milano, University Grenoble Alpes and other institutes worldwide have recently demonstrated the non-volatile control of the spin-to-charge conversion in germanium telluride, a known Rashba semiconductor, at room temperature. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, could have important implications for the future development of spintronic devices.