Lifeboat Foundation

Made from piled-up blocks of sandstone, some of which weighed more than 500 kilograms, mustatils ranged from 20 metres to more than 600 metres in length, but their walls stood only 1.2 metres high. “It’s not designed to keep anything in, but to demarcate the space that is clearly an area that needs to be isolated,” says Thomas.

In a typical mustatil, long walls surround a central courtyard, with a distinctive rubble platform, or “head”, at one end and entryways at the opposite end. Some entrances were blocked by stones, suggesting they could have been decommissioned after use.

Excavations at one mustatil showed that the centre of the head contained a chamber within which there were fragments of cattle horns and skulls. The cattle fragments may have been presented as offerings, suggesting mustatils may have been used for rituals.

The head scientist of the US Space Force has an unusual idea for how to maintain military dominance: augmenting and upgrading human soldiers.

Speaking at an Air Force Research Laboratory event, Space Force chief scientist Joel Mozer suggested that we’re entering an era during which soldiers can become a “superhuman workforce,” according to Metro, thanks to new tech including augmented and virtual reality, sophisticated AI, and nerve stimulation.

“In the last century, Western civilization transformed from an industrial-based society to an information-based society,” Mozer said, “but today we’re on the brink of a new age: the age of human augmentation.”

Starburst galaxies, active galactic nuclei and tidal disruption events (from left) have emerged as top candidates for the dominant source of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays.

In the 1930s, the French physicist Pierre Auger placed Geiger counters along a ridge in the Alps and observed that they would sometimes spontaneously click at the same time, even when they were up to 300 meters apart. He knew that the coincident clicks came from cosmic rays, charged particles from space that bang into air molecules in the sky, triggering particle showers that rain down to the ground. But Auger realized that for cosmic rays to trigger the kind of enormous showers he was seeing, they must carry fantastical amounts of energy — so much that, he wrote in 1939, “it is actually impossible to imagine a single process able to give to a particle such an energy.”

Upon constructing larger arrays of Geiger counters and other kinds of detectors, physicists learned that cosmic rays reach energies at least 100000 times higher than Auger supposed.

Continue reading “Cosmic Map of Ultrahigh-Energy Particles Points to Long-Hidden Treasures” »

The powerful image sensors at the heart of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have just undergone successful testing. First light scheduled for 2022.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has taken another step towards first light, projected for some time in 2022. Its enormous 3200 megapixel camera just took its first picture during lab testing at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The camera is the largest ever built, and its unprecedented power is the driving force behind the Observatory’s ten year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

When paired with the 8.4 meter primary mirror, the camera is an impressive, data-producing monstrosity. Its focal plane contains 189 separate charge-coupled devices (CCDs) that each capture 16 megapixels. Each 3200 megapixel image would take 378 4K ultra-high-definition TV screens to display.

Continue reading “Vera Rubin’s Monster 3200-Megapixel Camera Takes its First Picture (in the Lab)” »

Apple announced that it could take a $3 billion to $4 billion hit due to the global chip shortage, but the iPhone will remain unscathed.

The findings are published around the 35th anniversary of the nuclear disaster.

But the biotech industry has argued that much of gene-editing simply accelerates processes that occur naturally, and that GMO-style regulation would shackle efforts to develop sustainable crops or advance research into human disease.

The European Commission launched a review of EU rules on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on Thursday, opening the door to a possible loosening of restrictions for plants resulting from gene-editing technology.

Prompted by a 2018 ruling from the European Union’s top court that techniques to alter the genome of an organism should be governed by existing EU rules on GMOs, the Commission concluded that its 2001 legislation was “not fit for purpose”.

Continue reading “EU calls for rethink of GMO rules for gene-edited crops” »

Novel bio-sensing technologies to reduce food waste and optimize supply chains — a US$1 trillion need — katherine sizov — founder, strella biotechnology.

An estimated 40% of all global produce is wasted due to spoilage that occurs before it ever reaches consumers’ grocery bags. And this loss, not only represents loss due to quality or ripeness standards that consumers desire, but also a significant impact on global emissions and fresh water supplies that it took to produce and transport that produce, representing a combined figure of US$1 Trillion annually.

Continue reading “Katherine Sizov — Strella Biotech — Bio-Sensing To Reduce Food Waste And Optimize Supply Chains” »

Between 19:39 and 24 minutes we have Aubrey giving a list of companies and stating that investing is now taking off. Project 21 seems to be on track to start next year, and therapies available in 10–15 years will add 30 years to life and really be indefinite beyond that.

Rejuvenation Biotechnology: why age may soon cease to mean aging.
People are living longer — no longer because of reduced child mortality, but because we are postponing the ill-health of old age. But we’ve seen nothing yet: regenerative medicine and other new medicines will eventually be so comprehensive that people will stay truly youthful however long they live, which means they may mostly live very long indeed.

Continue reading “GFS 2020 — Aubrey de Grey — Rejuvenation Biotechnology: why age may soon cease to mean aging” »