Lifeboat Foundation

Humans have failed to understand, we can’t make a new wilderness in a factory once the natural world is gone.

At the current rate, our future generations will only be able to experience what the wilderness was in historical documents.

Not surprised by these findings.

A UC Santa Barbara researcher studying how the brain uses perception of the environment to guide action has a new understanding of the neural circuits responsible for transforming sensation into movement.

“Mapping perception to a future action seems simple,” UCSB neuroscientist Michael Goard. “We do it all the time when we see a traffic light and use that information to guide our later motor action. However, how these associations are mapped across time in the brain is not well understood.”

In a new paper, published in the journal eLife, Goard and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology make progress in mapping brain activity in mice during simple but fundamental cognitive tasks. Although a mouse’s brain is much smaller than a human’s, remarkable structural similarities exist. The mouse brain is composed of about 75 million nerve cells or neurons, which are wired together in complex networks that unerlie sophisticated behaviors.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3Qf_nYeYHk8

Nice.

Xerox has just demoed its latest printer—the Direct to Object Inkjet Printer—that is capable of printing on any 3D object there is.

Continue reading “There’s a New Xerox Machine in Town, And It Can 3D Print on Any Object” »

Forget what you learned about humans having five senses. That goes double for non-human animals.

Wish the US FDA would hurry up.

University of Waterloo grads develop nano ink to help consumers identify counterfeit goods.

CBC News Posted: Sep 07, 2016 3:11 PM ET Last Updated: Sep 07, 2016 3:11 PM ET

Continue reading “University of Waterloo grads develop nano ink to help identify counterfeit goods” »

China has unveiled plans for a futuristic $1.5-billion theme park with links to its high-altitude balloon project that could one day take tourists on leisurely rides to near-space.

Nice.

In light of new observations, the traditional dusty-torus picture of active galactic nuclei may need revision.

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Predicting an economic “singularity” approaching, Kevin Carson from the Center for a Stateless Society writes in The Homebrew Industrial Revolution (2010) we can look forward to a vibrant “alternative economy” driven less and less by corporate and state leviathans.

According to Carson, “the more technical advances lower the capital outlays and overhead for production in the informal economy, the more the economic calculus is shifted” (p. 357). While this sums up the message of the book and its relevance to advocates of open existing and emerging technologies, the analysis Carson offers to reach his conclusions is extensive and sophisticated.

With the technology of individual creativity expanding constantly, the analysis goes, “increasing competition, easy diffusion of new technology and technique, and increasing transparency of cost structure will – between them – arbitrage the rate of profit to virtually zero and squeeze artificial scarcity rents” (p. 346).

An unrivalled champion of arguments against “intellectual property”, the author believes IP to be nothing more than a last-ditch attempt by talentless corporations to continue making profit at the expensive of true creators and scientists (p. 114–129). The view has significant merit.

Continue reading “'Abolish artificial scarcity': @KevinCarson1” »