Lifeboat Foundation

Always a good interview. Short answer, he doesn’t think the timeline is accurate.

Dr. Robert Zubrin, former engineer at Lockhead Martin and president and founder of the Mars Society joins us today for a groundbreaking conversation. We discuss the obstacles to sending humans to Mars and the moon, the emergence and role of private enterprise in leading the way to space exploration, as well as the likelihood of success of the US administration’s announcement of its goal to establish a permanent human presence on the moon in 4 years. Dr. Zubrin also recounts the details of his meetings with Elon Musk prior and during the foundation of SpaceX. Other subjects we touched on included the justification for space exploration in the face of mounting problems and priorities here on earth. We also discuss the role of space as a game-changer in the way military domination and conflicts will be done in the future.

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Watch the all-new official trailer and RAZE HELL when DOOM Eternal launches on 03.20.20.

Continue reading “DOOM Eternal — Official Trailer 2” »

Ladies Monday with ReallyGraceful.

This is a video about the philanthropic billionaire, Bill Gates. We go into his family history, his early childhood, education, extracurriculars, and time at Harvard to answer the question “Who was Bill Gates before Microsoft?” Support my channel on Patreon: http://patreon.com/reallygraceful

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The rapidly spreading COVID-19 epidemic has created an unusual situation: in each population that is infected by the virus, large parts of the population will be infected within a well-defined short time period, with near certainty. A major question is thus: Can the unusual predictability of the infections’ timing be utilized to mitigate the imminent infection’s length, severity, and probability of complications?

We suggest that priming the immune system for attack shortly before it is expected to occur, e.g. via a vaccine that elicits a broad anti-viral immune response, may have this desired effect. Early activation of the immune system would allow it to clear the infection faster and with less complications than otherwise. This would alleviate adverse clinical outcomes at the individual level, and mitigate population-level risk by reducing need for hospitalizations and decreasing the infectious period of individuals, thus slowing the epidemic’s spread and reducing its impact.

It’s hard to piece together the full history of human evolution from piles of old bones. But now, scientists have made use of a new method to study proteins in dental enamel of an 800,000-year-old human species, helping place it in the family tree.

Although Homo sapiens is the only human species still alive today, the road to get here is paved with extinct relatives. And untangling how they’re all related to each other is a task that scientists continue to wrestle with. The timeline is usually determined through various dating processes, both on the bones themselves and the sediment layers they’re found in. Relationships between species are then determined from this timeline, and by examining the structures and features of the bones to track the progress of evolution.

For the new study, researchers at the University of Copenhagen have used a new tool called palaeoproteomics to get a more precise picture. This involves sequencing proteins from ancient remains, and it works on samples that are far too old to have intact DNA. In this case, the team applied it to the 800,000-year-old teeth of a mysterious, archaic human species called Homo antecessor.

Cygnus-X1.Net: A Tribute to Star Trek.

Social roboticist, Heather Knight, sees robots and entertainment a research-rich coupling. So she programmed a charming humanoid robot named DATA with jokes, and equipped it with sensors and algorithmic capabilities to help with timing and gauging a crowd. Then Knight and DATA hit the road on an international robot stand-up comedy tour. Their act landed stage time at a TED conference and Knight was profiled in Forbes 30 Under 30. Watching Data perform is much like watching an amateur stand-up comedian cutting her/his chops at an open mic night doing light comedy with a sweet but wooden delivery.

Knight’s goal is specific:

In satellite photos of the Earth, clouds of bright green bloom across the surface of lakes and oceans as algae populations explode in nutrient-rich water. From the air, the algae appear to be the primary players in the ecological drama unfolding below.

But those single-celled organisms we credit for influencing the aquatic environment at the base of the food chain may be under the influence of something else: viruses whose genes can reconfigure their hosts’ metabolism.

In a new study published in Nature Communications, a research team from Virginia Tech reported that they had found a substantial collection of genes for metabolic cycles—a defining characteristic of cellular life—in a wide range of “giant viruses.”

“It’s good to hear your voice, you know it’s been so long If I don’t get your calls, then everything goes wrong… Your voice across the line gives me a strange sensation” — Blondie, “Hanging on the Telephone”

In 1978, Debbie Harry propelled her new wave band Blondie to the top of the charts with a plaintive tale of yearning to hear her boyfriend’s voice from afar and insisting he not leave her “hanging on the telephone.”

But the questions arises: What if it were 2020 and she was speaking over VOIP with intermittent packet losses, audio jitter, network delays and out-of-sequence packet transmissions?