Lifeboat Foundation

This year has witnessed a breakout for India’s startups. Companies going public in 2021 have raised record cash. But they also face unique challenges to grow even bigger.

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While the nature of the object can only be speculated until Yutu-2 gets closer, it is unlikely to be a bunker left behind by an interplanetary species.

It is more likely to be a boulder or a piece of debris, like several others in that region of the moon.

The Yutu-2 rover was launched in 2018 by China as part of the Chang’e-4 lunar lander mission. It entered lunar orbit on December 12, 2019, before scripting history on January 3, 2020, by becoming the first mission to accomplish a soft landing on the lunar surface.

Critics argue that the company violates privacy.

Clearview AI, the company known for its facial recognition technology that fills its database with images it scrapes from the web, is a step closer to obtaining a US patent for its controversial tech. The company has received a “notice of allowance” from the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Rapid advances in large-scale connectomics are beginning to spotlight the importance of individual variations in the neural circuitry. They also highlight the limitations of “wiring diagrams” alone.

After unseasonably warm temperatures, a series of winter storms will bring snowy and frigid conditions to Reno and Tahoe.

An international team of astronomers led by researchers from the Netherlands has found no trace of dark matter in the galaxy AGC 114,905, despite taking detailed measurements over a course of forty hours with state-of-the-art telescopes. They will present their findings in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

When Pavel Mancera Piña (University of Groningen and ASTRON, the Netherlands) and his colleagues discovered six galaxies with little to no dark matter, they were told “measure again, you’ll see that there will be dark matter around your galaxy.” However, after forty hours of detailed observations using the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico (United States), the evidence for a dark matter-free galaxy only became stronger.

The galaxy in question, AGC 114,905, is about 250 million light-years away. It is classified as an ultra-diffuse dwarf galaxy, with the name ‘dwarf galaxy’ referring to its luminosity and not to its size. The galaxy is about the size of our own Milky Way but contains a thousand times fewer stars. The prevailing idea is that all galaxies, and certainly ultra-diffuse dwarf galaxies, can only exist if they are held together by dark matter.

If someone told you that the world’s biggest laser was in California that has something to do with space and national defence, you might imagine it was a super-weapon designed to blast enemy satellites out of the sky. But the reality is quite different. The new laser is a unique research tool for scientists, capable of creating the extreme conditions that exist inside stars and nuclear explosions.

The giant laser is located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, and it goes by the rather cryptic name of the National Ignition Facility (NIF). That’s because, in the context of nuclear science, “ignition” has a very specific meaning according to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It refers to the point at which a fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining – a condition that is found inside the sun and other stars, but is extremely difficult to achieve in an earthbound laboratory. Triggering nuclear fusion requires enormously high temperatures and pressures, and that’s where NIF’s giant laser comes in.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk launched his red Tesla Roadster electric car on a tour of the Solar System. But did it really orbit Mars?

Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll joins us to discuss whether it make sense to think of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, and whether contemporary physics points in this direction.

We discussed Sean’s essay responding to Philip’s book ‘Galileo’s Error,’ and Philip’s counter-response essay. Both are available here: https://conscienceandconsciousness.com/2021/08/01/19-essays-on-galileos-error/

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