Lifeboat Foundation

Creation of first practical silicon-based laser has the potential to transform communications, healthcare and energy systems.

“Americans spend more on gas in a week than the government does on clean energy research in a year. Bill Gates does some back-of-the-envelope math to show how he arrived at that conclusion.”

Breakthrough in next generation of storage batteries could transform the US electrical grid within five to 10 years, says research agency, Arpa-E.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=b28Pquo54ek

Dear readers,

My son Ethan Kurzweil — who is a partner at Bessemer Ventures Partners — tracks the future of web innovation, social and legal concerns about privacy, and start-ups who have an edge with their business or consumer applications, like team sourcing or software-as-a-service.

Continue reading “Ask Ray | Ethan Kurzweil debates the role of tech firms in personal privacy” »

Canadian scientists have apparently opened the door to the world of biological supercomputers: this week they unveiled a prototype of a potentially revolutionary unit — as small as a book, energy-efficient with extreme mathematical capabilities and which, importantly, does not overheat.

Driverless cars, like the one Google launched in 2012, are touted for their potential energy savings, but engineers say we should consider the possibility that the technology will intensify car use.

If people can work, relax, and even hold meetings in their cars, they may drive more.

In what appears at first to be a storyline ripped from a sci-fi thriller, a multi-national research team spread across two continents, four countries, and ten years in the making have created a model of a supercomputer that runs on the same substance that living things use as an energy source.

Humans and virtually all living things rely on Adenosine triphosphate ( ATP ) to provide the energy our cells need to perform daily functions. The biological computer created by the team led by Professor Dan Nicolau, Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at McGill, also relies on ATP for power.

The biological computer is able to process information very quickly and operates accurately using parallel networks like contemporary massive electronic super computers. In addition, the model is lot smaller in size, uses relatively less energy, and functions using proteins that are present in all living cells.

Continue reading “Scientists Create Functional Model of a Living and Breathing Supercomputer” »

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are a source of endless fascination. But despite a decade of observations, not all astronomers are sure that they’re real. A study out in Nature today, which reports the very first recurring FRB, is now causing lingering skepticism to evaporate.

“I think this is pretty huge,” Peter Williams, an astronomer at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics who was not involved with the study, told Gizmodo. “For awhile, I wasn’t sure these things were genuinely astrophysical. This paper settles the question.”

And Williams is not one to take splashy new claims about FRBs—high energy radio pulses of unknown origin, which flit across the sky for a fraction of a second—lightly. In fact, he’s spent the last week raising major doubts about another recent study, which, as Gizmodo and other outlets reported, claimed to have pinpointed the location of an FRB in space for the first time.

Continue reading “Mysterious Cosmic Radio Bursts Just Got Even More Interesting” »