Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: habitats

Artificial intelligence applications are popping up everywhere these days, from our Internet browsing to smart homes and self-driving cars. Now a group of researchers is launching a new AI-led study that will collect data from recently released prisoners. The ultimate goal of the project is to identify – and, ostensibly, one day eliminate – the psychological and physiological triggers that cause recidivism among parolees.

According to project-leads Marcus Rogers and Umit Karabiyik, the resulting data will assist them in conducting a forensic psychological analysis. While the monitoring will be gauged in intervals – not real-time – they believe it will help build a profile of the risky behaviors and stressful triggers that recent parolees face when returning to the outside world.

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Corrinne Graham (Economic financial analyst, Space Renaissance USA) interviewed Gregg Maryniak, about his history, motivation and aims to inspire young generations to find their way to the outer space. Gregg is the co-founder, together with Peter Diamandis, of the X-Prize Foundation. The X-Prize is recognized, by the space community, as the initiative that triggered the New Space revolution, by demonstrating that the low cost access to space was feasible and mature. He was the Executive Director of the Space Studies Institute, founded by Gerard O’Neill in Chicago, US. He’s on the Board of Directors of the Singularity University and keeps on restlessly working to inspire and motivate youngs, students and public opinion at large, explaining why human expansion into space is needed and very urgent, in order not to miss our “launch window”. During the conversation, we acknowledged that we agree on many points, all of them primary relevant to the survival and continued progress of civilization. Namely the common appreciation for the O’Neill’s model, that gives priority and preference to artificial rotating structures – the “space colonies” – since they assure 1G artificial gravity. Also, we are 100% in tune about the extreme urgency of kicking-off civilian expansion into outer space, and the subsequent need to make people to understand it. The big risk – said Gregg — is to miss our launch window, the period in which social and economic conditions are favorable to begin really moving into space. When I asked him whether he thinks that humanity is doing everything that is to be done, and if we are in time, on our evolutionary road to space, his answer was a clear “NO”. So we understood that we also agree on the most urgent technology advances to be raised as priority: the enabling technologies, necessary to bring untrained civilians to travel, live and work in space. Namely low acceleration vehicles, protection against cosmic radiations, artificial gravity, green environments and artificial ecosystems in space habitats. Gregg is a great achievement indeed, in our SR Academy Mentorship Programme. After this first meeting, we’ll try to hold other ones, properly announced on social networks, with the target to bring the above discussion to large public opinion. Stay in tune! https://spacerenaissance.space/gregg-maryniak-interviewed-by-corrinne-graham-for-space-renaissance-academy-mentorship-programme/

CHECK THE SPACE RENAISSANCE ACADEMY MENTORSHIP PROGRAM! https://spacerenaissance.space/the-space-renaissance-academy-mentorship-programme/ Students: choose some theme(s) for your graduation theses or Ph.D https://spacerenaissance.space/themes-for-graduate-works/ Mentors: choose your favorite disciplines on which you can provide mentorship https://spacerenaissance.space/mentorship-disciplines/

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In the first billion years, there was no oxygen on Earth. Life developed in an anoxic environment. Early bacteria probably obtained their energy by breaking down various substances by means of fermentation. However, there also seems to have been a kind of “oxygen-free respiration.” This was suggested by studies on primordial microbes that are still found in anoxic habitats today.

“We already saw ten years ago that there are genes in these microbes that perhaps encode for a primordial respiration . Since then, we—as well as other groups worldwide—have attempted to prove the existence of this respiratory enzyme and to isolate it. For a long time unsuccessfully because the complex was too fragile and fell apart at each attempt to isolate it from the membrane. We found the fragments, but were unable to piece them together again,” explains Professor Volker Müller from the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Bioenergetics at Goethe University.

Through hard work and perseverance, his doctoral researchers Martin Kuhns and Dragan Trifunovic then achieved a breakthrough in two successive doctoral theses. “In our desperation, we at some point took a heat-loving bacterium, Thermotoga maritima, which grows at temperatures between 60 and 90°C,” explains Trifunovic, who will shortly complete his doctorate. “Thermotoga also contains Rnf genes, and we hoped that the Rnf enzyme in this bacterium would be a bit more stable. Over the years, we then managed to develop a method for isolating the entire Rnf enzyme from the membrane of these bacteria.”

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“We need to go to space to help us here on Earth. Satellites have played an enormous role in improving the state of the world, and will do even more”.

I’m often asked: ‘Why are you building satellites for space when there are so many problems to fix here on Earth?’ It’s a perfectly rational question. The short answer is that we need to go to space to help us here on Earth. Satellites have played an enormous role in improving the state of the world, and will do even more as an explosion of technology innovation enables large new fleets of small satellites to be deployed with radical new capabilities.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, or Global Goals), unanimously adopted at the United Nations in 2015, are a great summary of the world’s current challenges. Space is one of many important tools that can be used to help us address them. In May, the UN held a meeting on Technology Innovation and the Global Goals, and I was asked to address the role of satellites in helping the world achieve the SDGs.

The global coverage of satellites offer a unique, fact-based perspective that can help us overcome our greatest challenges. Information from these spacecraft can help us improve agricultural yields and protect habitat loss and stop deforestation. They discovered the hole in the ozone layer and their data today remains key to fighting climate change; and they’ve helped us to connect the world through internet and communication, an intangible service for millions. Satellites in space have done much for us so far and, in the future, they will offer much more.

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Circa 2018 :3

If you don’t like mushrooms, it might be because you haven’t tried them yet in dress or jacket form. Believe it or not, mushrooms can now be fashioned into flexible leather-like clothing, purses, pants, and even durable furniture and building bricks for a cleaner, more sustainable planet. Phil Ross and his team at the San Francisco-based MycoWorks, a group of engineers, designers, and scientists, are developing products inspired by fungi’s lattice-like “roots,” called mycelium. According to the MycoWorks website, mycelium are carbon-negative and can also be naturally dyed any color, so your mushroom dress or house can be bright purple, fuchsia, or Cerulean blue if tan seems too subtle.

According to the website of Italy’s Mogu agency, which specializes in developing and scaling-up a range of mycelium-based technologies for the production of naturally-grown biomaterials and products, mushroom-based fabric can be tweaked to be as hard as enamel and shell-like or as soft and porous as a sponge, depending on the amount of light, humidity, exchange of gas, temperature, and types of “food” the mushroom is given (hemp, straw, etc.), rendering it as the ideal creative material for whatever you envision forging.

Mogu has proven that fabric created from mycelium is non-toxic, waterproof, and fire-resistant. It can be as thin as paper for dresses and lamp shades, or incredibly thick for heavy-duty items, and in both cases, the end result is remarkably flexible and strong.

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Crop yields for apples, cherries and blueberries across the United States are being reduced by a lack of pollinators, according to Rutgers-led research, the most comprehensive study of its kind to date.

Most of the world’s crops depend on honeybees and for , so declines in both managed and wild bee populations raise concerns about , notes the study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

“We found that many crops are pollination-limited, meaning would be higher if crop flowers received more pollination. We also found that honey bees and wild bees provided similar amounts of pollination overall,” said senior author Rachael Winfree, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “Managing habitat for and/or stocking more honey bees would boost pollination levels and could increase crop production.”

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