Lifeboat Foundation

#13 in our top science stories of 2019.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Tnr4EyTegcs

In his new book, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Our Conscious Brains, neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux assigns himself the simple tasks of explaining how consciousness developed and redefining how we create and experience emotions.

Obviously, I’m being facetious. There’s nothing simple about these tasks, yet in Ledoux’s capable hands the reader is led, step by step, through the past four billion years of life on this planet. Consciousness, a phenomenon responsible for your ability to read and understand these words (as well as much, much more), often feels like a given, yet that’s only because human life is short and evolution is so very long.

Continue reading “5 Important Features of Your Brain, According to a Top Neuroscientist” »

An international joint research team led by National Institute for Materials Science in Japan is currently developing a brain-like memory device using the neuromorphic network material.

A Russian State-owned TV channel recently aired a segment which may give the first glimpse of a new Russian submarine design. In the corner of one scene (@ 2.48 minutes into the recording) it showed an official model of a new submarine together with previously known types. The Laika Class sub has until now been shrouded in secrecy. It is generally analogous to the Virginia Class attack submarine in service with the U.S. Navy.

Such a ‘leak’ was probably deliberate, something that Russia has been suspected of before. On November 9, 2015, Russian TV station NTV revealed the Poseidon Intercontinental Nuclear-Powered Nuclear-Armed Autonomous Torpedo to the world. Then called ‘Status-6,’ it was seen over the shoulder of an officer in a partially televised meeting with President Putin.

The new sub will primarily be a hunter-killer, meaning that it is designed to counter western nuclear-powered submarines. But it will also carry a range of cruise missiles, including the hypersonic Zircon.

The image, and resulting data, has helped astronomers learn more about black holes in general, and this one in particular, making that two-year wait more than worthwhile. Part of the reason for the delay was simply the logistics of gathering so many observations. Each observatory collects data over a narrow range of wavelengths, resulting in massive amounts of information — the equivalent of up to 5,000 years of mp3 music files. That’s too much to just email someone. Researchers instead had to find ways to physically move that data around. For instance, to transport the information out of the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica, scientists had to wait until spring, when planes finally started flying out again.

Only then could researchers begin the complicated process of stitching together data from the eight observatories, a technique known as interferometry. The team had their work cut out for them: Raw files from each of the observing sites came in with different angles on the sky, in different wavelengths and at different observation times.

“The calibrating and working with it took many months,” Özel says. “And at the end we synthesize it into a single image.” But that’s still not the end of the work, she says. “[You] spend another six months worrying about all the things you might have done wrong, and ask yourself more and more questions, until finally you can be certain that what you have is real.”

Australian Research opens up new possibilities for hydrogen fuelled future.

Scientists show how using only water, iron, nickel and electricity can create hydrogen energy much more cheaply than before.

Hydrogen-powered cars may soon become more than just a novelty after a UNSW-led team of scientists demonstrated a much cheaper and sustainable way to create the hydrogen required to power them.

Continue reading “New Way to Make Hydrogen Energy Out of Water Much More Cheaply” »

When researchers gave mice drugs that fight brain inflammation, senile rodents showed fewer signs of cognitive decline and could better learn new things.

Summary: Researchers shed light on the neural networks that appear to govern human consciousness. Source: The Conversation. Humans have learned to travel through space, eradicate diseases and.

During one of these phase transitions (which happened when the universe was less than a second old), the axions of string theory didn’t appear as particles. Instead, they looked like loops and lines — a network of lightweight, nearly invisible strings crisscrossing the cosmos.

This hypothetical axiverse, filled with a variety of lightweight axion strings, is predicted by no other theory of physics but string theory. So, if we determine that we live in an axiverse, it would be a major boon for string theory.

How can we search for these axion strings? Models predict that axion strings have very low mass, so light won’t bump into an axion and bend, or axions likely wouldn’t mingle with other particles. There could be millions of axion strings floating through the Milky Way right now, and we wouldn’t see them.