Lifeboat Foundation

Consciousness is a heavy quest that has puzzled philosophers for over two thousand years. Because of its subjectivity and elusiveness, it was not a subject for scientific study until recent decades. With the unprecedented advances of artificial intelligence (AI), in particular, the remarkable performance of large language models (LLM), understanding consciousness becomes pragmatic and pressing beyond the philosophical and academic debates — how can we tell if ChatGPT has consciousness, and how can humankind be prepared if “artificial” consciousness arises in the foreseeable future?

For the last three decades, neuroscientists have made initial strides in theorizing the inner workings of consciousness in human brains based on vast experimental data, as triggered primarily by two factors.

First, the advances in scientific methods have empowered scientists to study the activities of neural cell assemblies in awake-behaving primates and humans. These techniques include brain imaging technologies, neurophysiological recording of hundreds of neurons simultaneously, and neural network modeling propelled by AI.

The ancient creature’s guts bring ancient history to life.

The ocean was discovered 430 miles deep into the Earth’s mantle, which was usually thought to be a hot rocky layer devoid of water.

The pulse of increased seismicity starting at around 10 a.m. Wednesday and another pulse starting at around 4 a.m. today. As of 8:45 a.m., Hawaiian Volcano Observatory officials reported the pulse was still ongoing.

According to Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, the seismicity and elevated ground deformation rates suggests magma may be slowly moving out of the summit storage region. Additional seismic pulses or swarms may occur with little or no warning and result in either continued intrusion of magma or eruption of lava.

The internet is going through a shift. There used to be a thing called a “follower.” It allowed publishers, creators, and anyone online to build a community around their work. But this piece of foundational architecture for human creativity and communication – the “follow” – has been threatened. In this talk, I put this internet-wide shift in historical context from the perspective of a creator, outline where the web will go in the future, and offer thoughts on what to do about it all as a modern creator on the internet.

New data confirms that variation in our Universe’s expansion rate (or the Hubble ‘tension’) is not an error in measurement.

The trunk of an elephant is among the versatile appendages in the animal kingdom. Now a research team has shown that most of its dexterity can be reproduced with a model using just three “muscles.” And they built a physical model to do just that. The findings are published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The National Institute for Materials Science has successfully synthesized a new SmFe-based magnetic compound, SmFe8.8N1.1, which possesses superior intrinsic magnetic properties when compared to those of NdFeB compound used in neodymium magnets. The study is published in the journal Acta Materialia.

According to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research team led by Professor Xu Ning from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has found that active matter and shear flows share similar thinning behaviors in self-propulsion and shear forces.