Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists in South Korea have developed a new technique for creating synthetic diamonds that works under ambient pressure.

Here is a panel between David Chalmers and Scott Aaronson at Mindfest 2024. This discussion covers the philosophical implications of the simulation hypothesis, exploring whether our reality might be a simulation and engaging with various perspectives on the topic. This presentation was recorded at MindFest, held at Florida Atlantic University, CENTER FOR THE FUTURE MIND, spearheaded by Susan Schneider. YouTube: https://youtu.be/7PlmOXQ18jk Please consider signing up for TOEmail at https://www.curtjaimungal.org.

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What’s old is new again.

The inactivation of one copy of the X chromosome in female mammals may start to fail as they get older, which may be why women have a higher risk of autoimmune conditions such as lupus.

By Michael Le Page

How will future generations come to be? There is no straightforward answer.

Some nuclei of certain elements decay radioactively into nuclei of different elements. These decays can be useful or annoying depending on the context. This is especially true for potassium-40. This isotope usually decays to calcium-40, but about 10% of the time it decays to argon-40.

A small team of political scientists, statisticians and data scientists from Harvard University, New York University, and Yale University, has found that by switching to a new method to better protect privacy, the U.S. Census Department has introduced factors that reduce accuracy in some cases.

UNSW Sydney engineers have utilised sound waves to cut the time it takes to make a cold brew coffee from many hours down to mere minutes.

Fans of cold brew coffee often rave about the smoother, less acidic and less bitter taste compared to a regular hot brew.

There’s just one major problem – it takes anywhere from 12 to 24 hours to fully steep the grounds and allow the flavours to slowly be extracted using only cold water.

Because I am often introduced as a “professional skeptic,” people feel compelled to challenge me with stories about highly improbable events. The implication is that if I cannot offer a satisfactory natural explanation for that particular event, the general principle of supernaturalism is preserved. A common story is the one about having a dream or thought about the death of a friend or relative and then receiving a phone call five minutes later about the unexpected death of that very person.

I cannot always explain such specific incidents, but a principle of probability called the Law of Large Numbers shows that an event with a low probability of occurrence in a small number of trials has a high probability of occurrence in a large number of trials. Events with million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America.

In their delightful book Debunked! (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), CERN physicist Georges Charpak and University of Nice physicist Henri Broch show how the application of probability theory to such events is enlightening. In the case of death premonitions, suppose that you know of 10 people a year who die and that you think about each of those people once a year. One year contains 105,120 five-minute intervals during which you might think about each of the 10 people, a probability of one out of 10,512 — certainly an improbable event. Yet there are 295 million Americans. Assume, for the sake of our calculation, that they think like you. That makes 1/10,512 × 295,000,000 = 28,063 people a year, or 77 people a day for whom this improbable premonition becomes probable.