Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: science – Page 38

Our homes are the places that define us; those warm private spaces that we depend on for work, respite, and haven from the harsh realities of the wider world. On Earth, the buildings and dwellings humans spend the majority of their lives in serve as reflections of our society’s culture, beliefs, and values. So if the shelters we make for ourselves truly mirror and influence our everyday lives, how might that sentiment be translated to living in space?

The kinds of structures future explorers might live in on other planets may be more critical to space exploration than sci-fi depictions of cities and homes in a galaxy far, far away suggest. As NASA’s desire for long-term human space colonization comes to fruition with planned crewed missions to Mars, establishing safe and well-made human settlements for life off-Earth is one of the agency’s most urgent tasks.

Putting down roots on Mars is an extremely ambitious goal to accomplish this century — but the reason why isn’t to do with rockets, necessarily. Rather, it is because any human settlement on the Red Planet will have to fight tooth and nail to experience even a modicum of ecological success.

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Forget about evolution, climate change or vaccines – what makes people really lose their mind, apparently, is cats.

“We’ve had posts that have affected people’s lives in a very substantial way, including posts that went beyond the virtual world. People really got threats or disrespectful comments,” says Yomiran Nissan.

“For example, when we wrote about the very, very viral topic of street cats and the ecological problems that they pose. It led to a lot of anger, both virtual and in the real world.”

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Why do some people live lawful lives, while others gravitate toward repeated criminal behavior? Do people choose to be moral or immoral, or is morality simply a genetically inherited function of the brain? Research suggests that psychopathy as a biological condition explained by defective neural circuits that mediate empathy, but what does that mean when neuroscience is used as evidence in criminal court? How can understanding neuroscience give us an insight into the actions and behaviors of our political leaders?

Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Octavio Choi https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/ochoi will explore how emerging neuroscience challenges long-held assumptions underlying the basis—and punishment—of criminal behavior.

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In a new study, scientists have observed long-lived excitons in a topological material, opening intriguing new research directions for optoelectronics and quantum computing.

Excitons are charge-neutral quasiparticles created when light is absorbed by a semiconductor. Consisting of an excited electron coupled to a lower-energy electron vacancy or hole, an exciton is typically short-lived, surviving only until the electron and hole recombine, which limits its usefulness in applications.

“If we want to make progress in quantum computing and create more sustainable electronics, we need longer exciton lifetimes and new ways of transferring information that don’t rely on the charge of electrons,” said Alessandra Lanzara, who led the study. Lanzara is a senior faculty scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and a UC Berkeley physics professor. “Here we’re leveraging topological material properties to make an exciton that is long lived and very robust to disorder.”

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