Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: futurism

Amid growing international concern about China’s human rights record, an unofficial tribunal in London has ruled China has committed genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang.

Erbakit Otarbay is one of an estimated one million Kazakhs, Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities held in China’s detention camps as part of a mass incarceration programme. He gave evidence in the tribunal.

He was arrested in 2017, accused of downloading WhatsApp, which is blocked in China, and of watching videos about Islam.

Erbakit told the BBC how he was subjected to forced labour, indoctrination and violent beatings.

China denies the allegations and has condemned the hearings.

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It’s long been known that exposure to radiation damages DNA, but a new study has found an additional risk for astronauts: DNA replication is more prone to errors in microgravity.

Scientists tested whether enzymes accurately copy DNA in cells during microgravity — the weightlessness produced during the freefall of a jet on a parabolic flight pattern. When the so-called “vomit comet” descends more than 2 miles in 20 seconds, the near-weightlessness replicates conditions in space. Accurate DNA replication in space is crucial for astronauts and the future of space travel.

“So-called DNA polymerases are essential enzymes that copy and repair DNA. Inevitably, they aren’t perfect: even under optimal conditions, they sometimes make mistakes. Here, we show that DNA polymerases derived from the bacterium E. coli are considerably more prone to errors under microgravity, such as occurs in space,” said Aaron Rosenstein of the University of Toronto, corresponding author of the study published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology.

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If — or when — human civilization collapses, what will remain? Maybe parts of some cities. Or the Statue of Liberty, a la “Planet of the Apes.” Overall, though, there might not be a lot of evidence left behind about what humanity accomplished — or what resulted in its downfall.

One team of researchers wants to change that. Their solution? A massive, indestructible box that’ll record scientific data to give future civilizations insight on how exactly humanity fell.

The project, dubbed Earth’s Black Box, will be an immense steel monolith installed in a remote location in Tasmania. It’s akin to the black boxes that are designed to survive airplane crashes and provide investigators valuable data on what led to the disaster — except on a planetary scale.

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The future of computing may be analog.

The design of our everyday computers is good for reading email and gaming, but today’s problem-solving computers are working with vast amounts of data. The ability to both store and process this information can lead to performance bottlenecks due to the way computers are built.

The next computer revolution might be a new kind of hardware, called processing-in-memory (PIM), an emerging computing paradigm that merges the memory and processing unit and does its computations using the physical properties of the machine—no 1s or 0s needed to do the processing digitally.

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Earth’s Crust Elements

The crust is a rigid surface containing both the oceans and landmasses. Most elements are found in only trace amounts within the Earth’s crust, but several are abundant.

The Earth’s crust comprises about 95% igneous and metamorphic rocks, 4% shale, 0.75% sandstone, and 0.25% limestone.

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