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Lifeboat News #176

#176

Lifeboat News

This issue published on 03/01/17. Copyright 2017 Lifeboat Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

$5,000 for Your Dream Project!

Get a $5,000 grant to one project. No strings attached.
 
Learn more at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/5000-...-project
 
Deadline to apply is June 1, 2017.

Lifespan Heroes

Learn about the Lifespan Heroes campaign at https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/join-...pan-hero

Books

Read "Identification of Potential Terrorists and Adversary Planning" at http://www.iospress.nl/book/identificat...planning
 
Read "The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!" at http://amzn.to/2nl130U

Papers

Read "Microbes and Alzheimer's Disease" at http://content.iospress.com/articles/jo...ad160152

TriboTEX

Our Grantee TriboTEX raised over $150K on Kickstarter on preorder of anisotropic nanomaterial for self-forming coatings. Lifeboat Foundation provided funds and information support for the company.
 
Learn more at https://www.facebook.com/LifeboatFounda...14777961

The International Longevity & Cryopreservation Summit

The International Longevity & Cryopreservation Summit will be held May 26-28 in Madrid, Spain.
 
Our Didier Coeurnelle, José Luis Cordeiro, Rodolfo Goya, Aubrey de Grey, Joâo Pedro de Magalhâes, Maria Entraigues-Abramson, Noel García Medel, Felipe R. Debasa Navalpotro, Anders Sandberg, and Natasha Vita-More will be speaking.
 
Learn more at http://internationalcryonicssummit.com

Bitcoin Endowment Fund

Our bitcoin endowment fund is nearing one million dollars. The five-year-old bet that the futuristic Lifeboat Foundation made on this futuristic currency is paying off. Thanks to the many donors to our fund, especially Chris Haley and Brian Cartmell.
 
We are now working to leverage the fact that we are well funded to get a few more big donations (of any currency!) and then we will significantly increase our spending. As many small organizations have found — it is always easier to raise money when you don't need money.
 
For now, Lifeboat is just doing baby steps in increasing its spending. For example, we just upgraded our main instance in the cloud from a $40/month configuration to a $80/month configuration. Of the three main computers at Lifeboat headquarters, the newest machine is over 6 years old. (Thanks to Jeff Bone for paying for it!) We would like to upgrade two of them (especially the 12-year-old laptop which is still used for one key program), but may wait another year to do so.

Surge in Traffic

If technical stuff bores you, you may wish to skip this section. TL;DR: We are getting a lot of people reading our news!
 
Lifeboat has been experiencing a surge in traffic. Whether it is our social media where our Twitter feed is averaging 20 million impressions/year, or our blog at http://lifeboat.com/blog with over 16,000 posts, everything is getting more active. Particularly due to our blog, we have had to significantly improve the technology supporting lifeboat.com. We now have a main cloud instance of 12 GB RAM / 6 CPU cores / 192 GB SSD and a smaller cloud instance of 2 GB RAM / 1 CPU core / 30 GB SSD that is used to run some newer programs that our main cloud operating system can't run (because we are too busy to upgrade its operating system). We also pay for regular backups to be made of both instances in addition to the regular backups that we do on our own. We also have a Cloudflare Pro account that provides a massive firewall and caches everything but the HTML at lifeboat.com. Cloudflare currently supports lifeboat.com via 111 data centers around the world that you can see at https://www.cloudflare.com/network. They also now provide all our SSL certificates so we can secure everything from lifeboat.com to press.lifeboat.com to even russian.lifeboat.com. (An SSL certificate encrypts all your communications and enables you to change your URL from http:// to https://)
 
Unfortunately, that long list of services and hardware that we just mentioned isn't nearly enough to handle our current traffic. So we have layer about layer of caches setup on our instances. So for example, if you are a robot visiting our blog we send you to a special cache of prebuilt blog pages that is currently 3.9 GB. If you are a regular person, you are sent to a smaller cache of blog pages that is currently 2.7 GB. These caches are created by the plugin WP Super Cache that we run in WordPress. We modified this plugin so it also caches feeds and also used the plugin interface within this program to get it to cache in more situations.
 
If the blog cache can't handle your request, then our Zend OpCache attempts to provide a precompiled version of our PHP program (WordPress) to create the page. How effective is Zend Opcache? At the moment it is 99.911% effective. Also WordPress does a lot of database calls so we use the cache Redis to help with them. Redis is 76.474% effective at the moment. Also, parts of our blog pages (such as the right side) are created by programs outside of WordPress once every 15 minutes so WordPress can just cut and paste those parts instead of using database calls.
 
Our server has many more caches than those just listed plus we have special programs that work in the background to update the info in the caches so they don't get out-of-date. But all of the above •still• isn't enough to handle our traffic as there are some crazy robots out there that don't identify themselves as robots and will hit the same page five times in a second. We finally added some code to our WordPress configuration file that basically says to those robots: uh, you just visited us a second ago, wait five seconds, and then try again. (We simply have the configuration file sleep for 5 seconds before it redirects them to the same page that they were initially trying. WordPress can build pretty much any page in under a second so 5 seconds later the page will definitely be built and now be in the blog cache.)
 
For those who are wondering, an instance is a virtual server, i.e., it looks like we have a server on our end but our provider divides the resources of one machine over more than one customer. So if, for example, a machine has 48 GB of memory they could spread it over a 24 GB instance, 12 GB instance, and 3 4 GB instances.

Surge of Support

The Lifeboat Foundation has received a growing surge of support during the past year and now has 1,167 donors. You can support us by joining as a member at https://lifeboat.com/ex/join.us or by donating at https://lifeboat.com/ex/donate.
 
We actually have so many donors that in addition to all the caches that were described in the last section, we were also forced to come up with a way to compress the images used in listing all our donors. Our compression program uses many techniques including often converting .png files to .jpg files. The same was done to all the images on our blog.

Blog

Joseph Anoop George joins our blog team with the post "Artificial intelligence enters the nutraceutical industry" at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/04/artif...industry
 
Yurii Rashkovskii joins our blog team with the post "$5,000 for your dream project" at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/5000-...-project
 
Recent interesting blog posts include:
 
"Astronomers Capture the First 'Image' of the Dark Matter That Holds the Universe Together" by Andreas Matt at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/astro...together
 
"Bottlenecks to the Development of Rejuvenation Biotechnology" by Steve Hill at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/bottl...chnology
 
"Cern has SUPERCHARGED the Large Hadron Collider" by Dan Kummer at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/cern-...collider
 
"Could Artificial Intelligence Really Be Used to Attain Human Immortality?" by Steve Hill at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/could...ortality
 
"DARPA Funds Brain-Stimulation Research to Speed Learning" by Dan Kummer at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/04/darpa...learning
 
"Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to send the first of its 4,425 super-fast internet satellites into space in 2019" by Simon Waslander at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/elon-...-in-2019
 
"Exploring Titan With Aerial Platforms" by Klaus Baldauf at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/explo...latforms
 
"Food substitute Soylent raises $50 million amid recalls" by Shane Hinshaw at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/food-...-recalls
 
"A gym, spa, and restaurant... on a plane" by Joseph Anoop George at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/a-gym...-a-plane
 
"Holographic Air Traffic Control" by Shailesh Prasad at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/holog...-control
 
"The Humans to Mars Summit" by Brett Gallie II at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/the-h...s-summit
 
"The Immortalists" by Montie Adkins at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/the-immortalists
 
"In Case You Missed It: The themes that echoed through TED2017" by Derick Lee at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/in-ca...-ted2017
 
"Kurzweil: By 2030, Nanobots Will Flow Throughout Our Bodies" by Simon Waslander at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/kurzw...r-bodies
 
"NASA Tests Robotic Ice Tools" by Klaus Baldauf at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/nasa-...ce-tools
 
"Physicists design 2-D materials that conduct electricity at almost the speed of light" by Shailesh Prasad at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/physi...of-light
 
"Rep: #TheRaceforSpace" by Brett Gallie II at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/rep-t...forspace
 
"Rejuvenation would be too expensive to create" by Nicola Bagala at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/rejuv...o-create
 
"Scientists are waging a war against human aging. But what happens next?" by Steve Hill at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/scien...ens-next
 
"Should you take statins? Everything you need to know including who benefits most" by Shane Hinshaw at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/shoul...its-most
 
"This Artificial Womb Just Successfully Grew a Sheep, Humans Could Be Next" by Shailesh Prasad at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/this-...-be-next
 
"This Frog Oozes Mucus That Causes Flu Virus Particles to Explode" by Shane Hinshaw at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/this-...-explode
 
"This object appears to have moved faster than the speed of light" by Sean Brazell at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/this-...of-light
 
"Time travel is 'possible' — mathematically anyway" by Andreas Matt at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/04/time-...y-anyway
 
"The True Scale Multiplication Grid" by Amnon H. Eden at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/the-t...ion-grid
 
"The UK Just Switched on an Ambitious Fusion Reactor" by Montie Adkins at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/the-u...-reactor
 
"Visions for a World Transformed: 99 Ideas for Making the World a Better Place" by Zoltan Istvan at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/visio...er-place
 
"Watch an easy guide to everything AI on 'Explanimators,' a new video series from Microsoft Story Labs" by Klaus Baldauf at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/watch...ory-labs
 
"Waymo has 'no smoking gun' in Uber self driving car case: U.S. judge" by Dan Kummer at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/waymo...-s-judge
 
"When energy drinks contained real (radioactive) energy" by Sean Brazell at https://lifeboat.com/blog/2017/05/when-...e-energy

Growing Membership

Recent donations/pledges we have received since our last newsletter:
 
Donald Maclean: $3,000, Michael Dickey: $85, Philippe Van Nedervelde: $85, Sergio M.L. Tarrero: $85, Kenneth P. Weiss: $85, Joel Ticknor: $60, Aaron Mayzes: $30, Venita Davis: $25, Nicholas MacDonald: $25, Matthew L. McGuirl: $25, 3D Insider: $10, Rebecca R. Cooper: $10, Kansoly: $10, Taurus Londoño: $10, Alexander Macrae: $10, Placement Labs: $10, Patrik Sandin: $10, Roland Schiefer: $10, Peter Smafield: $10, Autotrader Prices: $5, Comparoid: $5, Diamond Shine Cleaning: $5, Funding Wizards: $5, Gaming Chair Pro: $5, Goedkope Autoverzekering Direct: $5, Headset Plus: $5, Inboedelverzekering Vergelijken: $5, Thomas G Johnston: $5, Joshua S LeRoy: $5, onlinecasinocode.co.uk: $5, Opstalverzekering Vergelijken: $5, Nathan Payne: $5, Verzelijk Verzekeringen: $5, Canadian Garage Door Repair: $3, Blue Jade Wedding Dresses: $2, Cheap Custom Boxes: $2, Fish Tank Adviser: $2, FragBet: $2, Jesus Pendants: $2, Juice Detox: $2, Kotton Grammer OMG Testimonial: $2, LaptopStudy.com: $2, Clifton G Lawson: $2, Make Friends Brisbane: $2, Oregon Ragdolls: $2, SerpHaus SEO Boca Raton: $2, Greg Stephens: $2, Swimming Pool Cleaning: $2, Clayton Thomas: $2, US Addresses: $2, VPNs 'R Us: $2, We Buy Ugly Houses in Oakland, CA: $2, Addiction Recovery Directory: $1, Advanced Home Inspections: $1, Always Guarding You: $1, American Roof Repairs: $1, Aristo Shop: $1, ASAP Sydney Painters: $1, Beach Soccer & Apostas Online: $1, Gabrielle Becking: $1, Bellmore Pest Control: $1, Best Viva: $1, Bestops Blog: $1, Blind Select: $1, Boone & Davis: $1, Bubley & Bubley, P.A.: $1, Considered Gifts: $1, Eco Fresh Cleaning: $1, Eiffel Curtains: $1, Fence Repair Baton Rouge: $1, Glowbiotics Probiotic Skin Care: $1, Green Web Marketing Agency Australia: $1, Michael F. Guilford: $1, The Home Gear: $1, ICC Denver Outplacement Services & Executive Coaching: $1, Island Park Pest Control: $1, Karunya University Alumni: $1, Clifton Lawson Media: $1, Local Digital: $1, Steve W. Marsee: $1, Massapequa Pest Control: $1, Merrick Pest Control: $1, Mesh Direct: $1, Mode Glass: $1, Mosquito Control Long Island: $1, Nassau County Mosquito Control: $1, Georgia T. Newman: $1, The Nurse Attorney: $1, Oceanside Pest Control: $1, Perth Airport Transferring: $1, Perth Mobile Mechanic: $1, Phoenix Marketing Agency: $1, Pro Web Design Sydney: $1, QuotesZilla: $1, REEF Bikes Australia: $1, Rockville Centre Pest Control: $1, SBHI Cleaning Services Sydney: $1, Southwestern Rugs Depot: $1, The Startup Years: $1, Survivalist Prep: $1, Tint Professionals: $1, Tow Truck Columbia SC: $1, UK Postcode Check: $1, Valet Parking Portland: $1, Michael Lawrence Varon: $1, Vijay: $1, Wedding Entertainer in Durham: $1, Wexler Law Firm: $1, and WP Hatch: $1.
 
Our Join Us page at https://lifeboat.com/ex/join.us now allows you to pay for your membership anywhere from monthly to every ten years.