Lifeboat Foundation

According to a paper posted to the arXiv pre-print server last week, the difference between an everyday supermassive black hole and a space-time tunneling wormhole may be a lacing of dark matter. While it sounds like crank fodder of the sort that not infrequently winds up on arXiv, the idea may hold actual water.

The theory pertains to one particular proposed form of dark matter known as axionic dark matter. Axions, a hypothesized fundamental particle of matter relating to the strong nuclear force, aren’t the only proposed candidate for dark matter, but as searches for WIMPs (weakly-interacting massive particles)—far and away the favored proposed particle comprising dark matter—come up empty, axionic dark matter has become a more and more plausible scenario. As theorized, dark matter axions would permeate the universe as an energetic condensate, interacting only very weakly via the electromagnetic force and existing as a kind of ghostly cosmic foam.

Crucially, while individual axions would be very light, they would together make up enough mass to account for the dark matter halos that form the gravitational scaffolding of galaxies. Axions are currently being hunted for via experiments involving giant Earth-based mirrors.

A powerful new Naval railgun can fire a round that could travel from Washington, DC to Philadelphia in under two minutes. Pentagon officials believe the high-tech cannon could pave the way for a military advantage defending assets on sea and on land. Photo: U.S. Department of Defense.

Anyone who has heard of Bitcoin knows that it is built on a mechanism called The Blockchain. Most of us who follow the topic are also aware that Bitcoin and the blockchain were unveiled—together—in a whitepaper by a mysterious developer, under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.

That was eight years ago. Bitcoin is still the granddaddy of all blockchain-based networks, and most of the others deal with alternate payment coins of one type or another. Since Bitcoin is king, the others are collectively referred to as ‘Altcoins’.

But the blockchain can power so much more than coins and payments. And so—as you might expect—investors are paying lots of attention to blockchain startups or blockchain integration into existing services. Not just for payments, but for everything under the sun.

Think of Bitcoin as a product and the blockchain as a clever network architecture that enables Bitcoin and a great many future products and institutions to do more things—or to do these things better, cheaper, more robust and more secure than products and institutions built upon legacy architectures.

Continue reading “Is a Blockchain a Blockchain if it Isn’t?” »

The researchers hope their findings will help make quantum computers a reality.

A family of compounds known as perovskites, which can be made into thin films with many promising electronic and optical properties, has been a hot research topic in recent years. But although these materials could potentially be highly useful in applications such as solar cells, some limitations still hamper their efficiency and consistency.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere say they have made significant inroads toward understanding a process for improving perovskites’ performance, by modifying the material using intense light. The new findings are being reported in the journal Nature Communications, in a paper by Samuel Stranks, a researcher at MIT; Vladimir Bulovic, the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technology and associate dean for innovation; and eight colleagues at other institutions in the U.S. and the U.K. The work is part of a major research effort on perovskite materials being led by Stranks, within MIT’s Organic and Nanostructured Electronics Laboratory.

Tiny defects in perovskite’s crystalline structure can hamper the conversion of light into electricity in a solar cell, but “what we’re finding is that there are some defects that can be healed under light,” says Stranks, who is a Marie Curie Fellow jointly at MIT and Cambridge University in the U.K. The tiny defects, called traps, can cause electrons to recombine with atoms before the electrons can reach a place in the crystal where their motion can be harnessed.

London black cabs are going to go electric. https://www.facebook.com/HuffPostUKTech/videos/1230444406965677/

London black cabs are becoming London green cabs and going ele…

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Let’s formulate the task of life extension slightly differently. Something like this…How can we extend sex appeal?

Gyms and beauty salons are in charge of this question now. There is some success, but it’s mostly superficial. Plastic surgery only masks, but doesn’t delay the processes of aging.

Expanding sex appeal is a complex task. Its aspects include both beauty and the activity of the brain. To be sexually attractive we have to be smart and fun. One cannot solve the problem of dementia with makeup.

Continue reading “31 responses to ‘Neverending Sex’” »

By ransdell pierson and bill berkrot.

(Reuters) — U.S. health officials on Thursday reported the first case in the country of a patient with an infection resistant to a last-resort antibiotic, and expressed grave concern that the superbug could pose serious danger for routine infections if it spreads.

“We risk being in a post-antibiotic world,” said Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, referring to the urinary tract infection of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman who had not traveled within the prior five months.

Continue reading “Corrected: U.S. sees first case of bacteria resistant to last-resort antibiotic” »

The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman uses evolutionary game theory to show that our perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions.