Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 5050

In an illuminating study, Rentschler et al. leverage data to analyze populations at risk of flood exposure. They explore the overlap between poverty, geography, and flood risk while taking into account pluvial, fluvial, and coastal flooding. Their work reveals that hundreds of millions of people in low-income regions are directly exposed to flood risk. The authors emphasize that efforts towards global flood mitigation should take socioeconomic factors into account since many low-income regions have both high flood risk and poor existing flood mitigation measures in place.

#geography #global #asia #africa #datascience

Floods are most devastating for those who can least afford to be hit. Globally, 1.8 billion people face high flood risks; 89% of them live in developing countries; 170 million of them live in extreme poverty making them most vulnerable.

Read more | >

The motion of a tiny number of charged particles may solve a longstanding mystery about thin gas disks rotating around young stars, according to a new study from Caltech.

These features, called , last tens of millions of years and are an early phase of solar system evolution. They contain a small fraction of the mass of the star around which they swirl; imagine a Saturn-like ring as big as the solar system. They are called accretion disks because the gas in these disks spirals slowly inward toward the star.

Scientists realized long ago that when this inward spiraling occurs, it should cause the radially inner part of the disk to spin faster, according to the law of the conservation of angular momentum. To understand conservation of angular momentum, think of spinning figure skaters: when their arms are outstretched, they spin slowly, but as they draw their arms in, they spin faster.

Read more | >

Graphcore and Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) have entered a multi-year partnership to develop new software approaches for high-efficiency AI compute.

Running from 2022 through 2025 and funded by the Korean government, the partnership will combine the world-leading capabilities of ETRI—Korea’s largest public research institute by R&D expenditure and license income—with Graphcore’s proven leadership in developing and commercialising efficient, high-performance compute systems for machine intelligence.

Read more | >

“We just open-sourced an AI model we built that can translate across 200 different languages — many which aren’t supported by current translation systems,” he said. “We call this project No Language Left Behind, and the AI modeling techniques we used from NLLB are helping us make high quality translations on Facebook and Instagram for languages spoken by billions of people around the world.”

Meta invests heavily in AI research, with hubs of scientists across the globe building realistic avatars for use in virtual worlds and tools to reduce hate speech across its platforms 0, among many other weird and wonderful things. This investment allows the company to ensure it stays at the cutting edge of innovation by working with the top AI researchers, while also maintaining a link with the wider research community by open-sourcing projects such as No Languages Left Behind.

The major challenge in creating a translation model that will work across rarer languages is that the researchers have a much smaller pool of data — in this case examples of sentences — to train the model versus, say, English. In many cases, they had to find people who spoke those languages to help them provide the data, and then check that the translations were correct.

Read more | >

MAUI, Hawaii—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Extended Longevity, a Hawaii-based longevity company focused on reversing the biomarkers of aging, announces that new test results show the regrowth of telomeres in a 75 year old man to the equivalent of a 10 year old (a 65 year reversal), using the SpectraCell Laboratories Telomere test. Thus, this demonstrates that his aging process, as represented by telomere biomarker tests, has significantly regenerated.

Continuously updated results from third-party testing labs demonstrating how well our products work in the real world.

Read more | >

Researchers want to know more about the Red Planet’s enigmatic geology and thin atmosphere.

An early-stage Martian sailplane soared aloft, tethered to a balloon, as engineers ponder the possibilities to expand Red Planet flight.

The University of Arizona released a progress update on its sailplane project June 30 in conjunction with a recent journal publication exploring Mars exploration using motorless sailplanes.

Read more | >