Lifeboat Foundation

In his fascinating new book, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century,” the historian Yuval Noah Harari creates a useful framework for confronting these fears. While his previous best sellers, “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus,” covered the past and future respectively, his new book is all about the present. The trick for putting an end to our anxieties, he suggests, is not to stop worrying. It’s to know which things to worry about, and how much to worry about them. As he writes in his introduction: “What are today’s greatest challenges and most important changes? What should we pay attention to? What should we teach our kids?”

In “21 Lessons for the 21st Century,” Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book, the historian takes on everything from terrorism to inequality.

The overarching goal of the talks, which open tomorrow at the United Nations in New York City, is crafting a new agreement to protect biodiversity in the high seas, which include two-thirds of the ocean. Much of discussions, which will run until 17 September, are expected to focus on long-standing proposals to establish protected zones where fishing and development would be limited or banned. But the negotiations also aim to replace today’s free-for-all scramble for marine genetic resources with a more orderly and perhaps fairer regime.

Nations open historic negotiations on marine biodiversity pact.

Created to honor the legacy of a beloved space industry pioneer and accomplished pilot, Dawn Brooke Owens (1980 – 2016), the Brooke Owens Fellowship is designed to serve both as an inspiration and as a career boost to capable young women who, like Brooke, aspire to explore our sky and stars, to shake up the aerospace industry, and to help their fellow men and women here on planet Earth. We do this by matching thirty-six extraordinary women per year with purpose-driven, paid internships at leading aviation and space companies and organizations and with senior and executive level mentors.

When two neutron stars collided in August of 2017, the resulting black hole emitted a jet of cosmic material at extremely high speed.

As reported by the Inquisitr in June 2018, the collision of two neutron stars in the cosmic event known as GW170817, perceived by humans in August of last year, appears to have created a black hole. It also appears to have created a jet of superfast material, detected and measured by a collection of National Science Foundation radio telescopes, and the results of those measurements seemed to show the jet moving at nearly four times the speed of light, an impossibility in our current understanding of the laws of physics.

In observations less than half a year apart, the jet seemed to cover a distance greater than two light years. Since a light year is defined as the distance light can travel through a vacuum in a year, that would indicate that the jet was hurtling toward Earth at nearly four times the speed of light, according to Space.com.

Continue reading “Jet Of Material From Neutron Star Collision Appears To Eclipse Light Speed” »

Los Angeles County officials launched a program Wednesday to help locate people with autism, Alzheimer’s disease or dementia who may wander off and go missing.

The program, called L.A. Found, will make use of bracelets that can be tracked through radio frequency by sheriff’s deputies. It will also create a new office, housed within the department of Workforce Development, Aging and Community Services, to coordinate a countywide response when somebody goes missing.

“If you get lost, we will help find you,” county Supervisor Janice Hahn, who championed the initiative, said at a news conference.

Continue reading “L.A. County Launches Tracking Program to Locate People With Dementia, Others Who Wander” »

While autonomous drones exist, they’re not usually what you’d call speedy when many skilled pilots could beat them in a race. Lockheed Martin and the Drone Racing League want to do better. They’re launching an AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge that will encourage the public to develop drone AI that can not only race at high speeds, but win. Competitors will have to build an NVIDIA Jetson-based AI system that can swiftly move through the League’s Artificial Intelligence Robot Racing circuit.

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Yale University researchers have demonstrated one of the key steps in building the architecture for modular quantum computers: the “teleportation” of a quantum gate between two qubits, on demand.

The findings appear online Sept. 5 in the journal Nature.

The key principle behind this new work is quantum teleportation, a unique feature of quantum mechanics that has previously been used to transmit unknown quantum states between two parties without physically sending the state itself. Using a theoretical protocol developed in the 1990s, Yale researchers experimentally demonstrated a quantum operation, or “gate,” without relying on any direct interaction. Such gates are necessary for quantum computation that relies on networks of separate quantum systems—an architecture that many researchers say can offset the errors that are inherent in quantum computing processors.

We are not alone in our concerns related to the current paywalling of science. Earlier this year, researchers at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York decided that this problem deserves the attention of decision makers and the general public, and they started producing a documentary in order to reveal the flaws of the existing system of scientific publications and to propose solutions. This documentary is Paywall: The Business of Scholarship.

The producer of the documentary, journalist and filmmaker Jason Schmitt, contacted university representatives, university and public libraries, open access publishing houses, and researchers around the globe to ask them if they have ever hit paywalls and how paywalls affected their professional activities.