Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: Cognitive immobility is a form of mental entrapment that leads to conscious or unconscious efforts to recreate past instances in familiar locations.

Source: The Conversation.

If you have moved from one country to another, you may have left something behind – be it a relationship, a home, a feeling of safety or a sense of belonging. Because of this, you will continually reconstruct mental simulations of scenes, smells, sounds and sights from those places – sometimes causing stressful feelings and anxiety.

IKEA, the world’s largest furniture retailer, has announced plans to sell home solar panels in the US — a move that could democratize and demystify access to solar.

Solar hesitancy: The benefits of solar go beyond protecting the environment — solar panels are cheaper than ever, and between the lower energy bills and government subsidies, a home solar system could pay for itself before the panels need to be replaced.

Continue reading “IKEA will now sell solar panels” »

Traveling far distances in space is difficult, but advances in jet propulsion and genetics are making it possible. Trace is joined by Dr. Kiki Sanford to discuss how by altering the genes in our own bodies, we can make ourselves more fit to survive on other planets!

Follow Kiki on Twitter: https://twitter.com/drkiki.
Check out her website: http://www.about.me/drkiki/

Continue reading “Can We Genetically Engineer Humans for Space?” »

Mobile robots are now being introduced into a wide variety of real-world settings, including public spaces, home environments, health care facilities and offices. Many of these robots are specifically designed to interact and collaborate with humans, helping them to complete hands-on physical tasks.

To improve the performance of mobile robots on interactive and manual tasks, roboticists will need to ensure that they can effectively sense stimuli in their environment. In recent years, many engineers and material scientists have thus been trying to develop systems that can artificially replicate biological sensory processes.

Researchers at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Sapienza University of Rome and other institutes in Italy have recently used an artificial skin and a deep learning technique that could be used to improve the tactile capabilities of both existing and newly developed robots to replicate the function of the so-called Ruffini receptors. Their approach, introduced in a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, replicates the function of a class of cells located on the human superficial dermis (i.e., subcutaneous skin tissue), known as Ruffini receptors.

Ever considered the notion that everything around you was cooked up by aliens in a lab? Theoretical physicist and former chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, Abraham ‘Avi’ Loeb, has proposed a wild – if unsettling – theory that our universe was intentionally created by a more advanced class of lifeform.

In an op-ed for Scientific American, “Was Our Universe Created In A Laboratory?”, Loeb suggested that aliens could have created a ‘baby universe’ using ‘quantum tunneling’, which would explain our universe’s ‘flat geometry’ with zero net energy. If this discovery were proven true, then the universe humans live in would be shown to be “like a biological system that maintains the longevity of its genetic material through multiple generations,” Loeb wrote.

Loeb put forward the idea of a scale of developed civilisations (A, B, etc.) and, due to that fact that on Earth we currently don’t have the ability to reproduce the astrophysical conditions that led to our existence, “we are a low-level technological civilisation, graded class C on the cosmic scale” (essentially: dumb). We would be higher up, he added, if we possessed the ability to recreate the habitable conditions on our planet for when the sun will die. But, due to our tendency to “carelessly destroy the natural habitat” on Earth through climate change, we should really be downgraded to class D.

A 30-year-old Kenyan engineer named Nzambi Matee has come up with a promising way to upcycle plastic trash that would’ve otherwise landed in landfills — by pressing it, with the addition of sand, into sturdy bricks and paving stones.

Her Nairobi-based company, Gjenge Makers, produces a variety of different paving stones, which are already being put to use to line sidewalks, driveways, and roads.

Continue reading “Kenyan Engineer Invents Method to Turn Waste Plastic Into Sturdy Construction Bricks” »

The USB contained the home addresses and bank account details of every one of the 460,000 residents of Amagasaki, officials in the small industrial city in Japan’s Hyogo prefecture said in a statement Thursday. It also identified households receiving public assistance, they said.

Speaking at a news conference Friday, Takeuchi said the man “was in possession of his bag when he left the restaurant,” but then he “fell asleep on the street.” He woke up at 3 a.m. and went home before calling work six hours later to inform them he was taking the day off, Takeuchi added.

Capable of runway landings & maximum reuse, the Dream Chaser® spaceplane enables resupply and space travel to and from space habitats.

The human middle ear—which houses three tiny, vibrating bones—is key to transporting sound vibrations into the inner ear, where they become nerve impulses that allow us to hear.

Embryonic and fossil evidence proves that the human middle ear evolved from the spiracle of fishes. However, the origin of the vertebrate spiracle has long been an unsolved mystery in vertebrate evolution.

Some 20th century researchers, believing that early vertebrates must possess a complete spiracular gill, searched for one between the mandibular and hyoid arches of early vertebrates. Despite extensive research spanning more than a century, though, none were found in any vertebrate fossils.