Lifeboat Foundation

One of the greatest fears of the world’s space is a real-life Andromeda Strain, the chilling movie about a US research satellite carrying a deadly extraterrestrial microscopic organism that crashes into a small town in Arizona. A group of top scientists are hurriedly assembled in a bid to identify and contain the lethal stowaway.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Uc99zH0GqfE

Ray Kurzweil, one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions and called “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes magazine, spoke at the Nobel Week Dialogue in Gothenburg, Sweden.

In this talk, Kurzweil explores the history and trajectory of exponential advances in computing and Information Technology to project how he believes Artificial Intelligence (AI) may enhance our natural biological intelligence in the future.

Continue reading “Exponential Artificial Intelligence Can Immortalize Human” »

New research pinpoints the a-ha moment when information enters the human consciousness.

The interdisciplinary nexus of biology and engineering, known as synthetic biology, is growing at a rapid pace, opening new vistas that could scarcely be imagined a short time ago.

Three scientists who have studied extinctions of thousands of species of vertebrates believe so, though others are skeptical of the doomsday-like findings.

“This is the case of a biological annihilation occurring globally, even if the species these populations belong to are still present somewhere on Earth,” Rodolfo Dirzo, the study’s co-author and a Stanford University biology professor, said in a news release.

The researchers analyzed 27,600 species of birds, amphibians, mammals and reptiles — about half of all known vertebrate species — and found that 8,851 (about 32 percent) have seen declining populations and shrinking areas of habitat. A more detailed analysis on 177 mammal species found that more than 40 percent have experienced significant drops in population. The findings, the study says, mean that billions of animal populations that once roamed the Earth are now gone.

Continue reading “Earth is on its way to the biggest mass extinction since the dinosaurs, scientists warn” »

Technology can be wonderful. But how do you keep track of yourself when technology allows you to be everywhere at once?

In this film Prof. Yair Amichai-Hamburger (director of the Research Center for Internet Psychology at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications) argues that even though technology allows us to reach out and connect more easily than ever before, if we don’t ever take a step back, we can lose track of our humanity in the process.

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It should be possible to build a silicon version of the human cerebral cortex with the transistor technology that was in production in 2013. The resulting machine would take up less than a cubic meter of space and consume less than 100 watts, not too far from the human brain. This article is summarizing the work of Jennifer Hasler and Bo Marr writing in Frontiers of Neuroscience – Finding a roadmap to achieve large neuromorphic hardware systems.

Computational power efficiency for biological systems is 8–9 orders of magnitude higher (better) than the power efficiency wall for digital computation. Analog techniques at a 10 nm node can potentially reach this same level of biological computational efficiency. Figure 1 show huge potential for neuromorphic systems, showing the community has a lot of room left for improvement, as well as potential directions on how to achieve these approaches with technology already being developed; new technologies only improve the probability of this potential being reached.

Continue reading “Roadmap to human cortex scale neuromorphic hardware” »

The year is 2030. In a high-security containment lab, scientists gathered around a towering machine, eagerly awaiting the first look at a newly discovered bacterium on Mars.

With a series of beeps, the machine—a digital-to-biological converter, or DBC—signaled that it had successfully received the bacterium’s digitized genomic file. Using a chemical cocktail comprised of the building blocks of DNA, it whirled into action, automatically reconstructing the alien organism’s genes letter-by-letter.

Within a day, scientists had an exact replica of the Martian bacterium.

Continue reading “‘Biological Teleportation’ Edges Closer With Craig Venter’s Digital-to-Biological Converter” »

June 22 (UPI) — In a series of experiments, neuroscientists were able to selectively delete different types of memories stored a single neuron belonging to a marine snail.

The feat, detailed in the journal Current Biology, suggests problematic memories — like those responsible for PSTD and anxiety — in the human brain could be excised without harming other memories.

When the brain stores a traumatic experience in its memory bank, the memory is actually stored in multiple forms. Each memory can include bits of incidental information from the experience. Years later, these incidental, or neutral, memories can trigger panic attacks and severe anxiety.

Continue reading “New research suggests problematic memories could be deleted” »