Lifeboat Foundation

The 2021 Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award has been given to Martine Rothblatt who has devoted her life to moving humanity towards a positive future.

Martine was the 500th person to join our Advisory Board, has contributed to our blog, and has generously supported the Lifeboat Foundation’s goal of “Safeguarding Humanity”.

Martine is cofounder of the Terasem Movement Foundation. Their mission is to promote the geoethical (world ethical) use of nanotechnology for human life extension. They conduct educational programs and support scientific research and development in the areas of cryonics, biotechnology, and cyber consciousness. This foundation is related to the Lifeboat Foundation programs LifePreserver and PersonalityPreserver (which Martine contributed text to).

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The credit card-sized devices will allow school pupil to programme code for the astronauts.

A box full of $50 and $100 bills, totaling $180,000, was sent to the physics department at City College of New York. An enclosed note from the mysterious donor asked the school to use the cash to fund scholarships for needy students.

When a City College physics professor opened an ordinary box that had been sitting in the mailroom, he was startled by its contents.

Continue reading “A Box of Cash, a Secret Donor and a Big Lift for Some N.Y.C. Students” »

The empirical fact of short winter days and long winter nights has been known essentially forever, and has driven enormous amounts of human activity including the construction of monuments like the passage tomb at Newgrange that I keep banging on about in previous posts about timekeeping. The correct explanation of the phenomenon has only been understood for around 400 years, dating back to Johannes Kepler’s description of the orbits of the planets.

The change in the relative length of days and nights is due to a combination of the motion of the Earth about the Sun, and the rotation of the Earth on its axis. Specifically, it happens because the Earth’s axis is tilted by about 23 degrees relative to the axis of its orbit. And because angular momentum is conserved, that axis stays pointing in the same direction through the whole orbit, in the same way that a gyroscope on a gimbal mount will remain pointed in the same direction in space as it’s moved around.

Continue reading “Why Is December 21 The Shortest Day Of The Year?” »

Advancing Veterinary Care With Predictive Diagnostics, AI & One Health Principles — Dr. Jennifer Ogeer, DVM, Antech Diagnostics, Mars Petcare, Mars Inc.

Dr. Jennifer Ogeer, DVM, MSC, MBA is Vice President of Medical Science & Innovation at Antech Diagnostics (https://www.antechdiagnostics.com/), one of the world’s largest reference laboratory networks, and a unit of Mars Veterinary Health (https://www.marsveterinary.com/).

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MIT Media Lab researchers offer positive use cases of AI-generated synthetic characters for education and well-being. A new paper provides an open-source, easy-to-use pipeline that combines AI-generated models to create synthetic characters with facial gestures, voice, and motion.

Scientists have successfully taught a collection of human brain cells in a petri dish how to play the video game “Pong” — kind of.

Researchers at the biotechnology startup Cortical Labs have created “ mini-brains ” consisting of 800,000 to one million living human brain cells in a petri dish, New Scientist reports. The cells are placed on top of a microelectrode array that analyzes the neural activity.

We think it’s fair to call them cyborg brains, Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs and research lead of the project, told New Scientist.

Chinese officials spent days burning documents after government information leaked to global media exposed conditions in the camps.

A documentary exploring how artificial intelligence is changing life as we know it — from jobs to privacy to a growing rivalry between the U.S. and China.

FRONTLINE investigates the promise and perils of AI and automation, tracing a new industrial revolution that will reshape and disrupt our world, and allow the emergence of a surveillance society.

Continue reading “In the Age of AI (full film) | FRONTLINE” »