Lifeboat Foundation

The future of travel is speeding towards us.

The HybridHeart consortium is a European Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Open project. HybridHeart proposes to develop and bring to the clinic a soft biocompatible artificial heart, which can completely replace a patient’s heart in a procedure similar to a heart transplant.

DPRK’s letter to Trump.

Water-bearing minerals reveal that Earth’s mantle could hold more water than all its oceans. Researchers now ask: Where did it all come from?

It’s a fantastic comic that holds up well as a story for a number of reasons. It’s cyberpunk without the genre’s trademark dinge: Robertson, Ramos, and colorist Nathan Eyring deserve a lot of credit for making a future packed with information overload, but not obscured by smog or gloom or perpetual rain. It’s also genuinely funny. Angry Warren Ellis is gifted at turning the combination of rage, foul language, and body parts into something beautiful. It’s also appropriately cynical, and I think this is where a lot of the comparisons to the present day come from.

Holy mother of God, Transmet is over 20 years old. But is it still sharp commentary, or a relic of its time?

Continue reading “Transmetropolitan: Relevant or Rose-Colored Glasses?” »

It’s not just your car’s wheel that’s getting an upgrade. From bikes to NASA rovers, there’s a wheel of the future for everyone.

The LumiWatch projects images onto your arm that respond to touch.

If the sun stopped working for 24 hours, what would happen to Earth?

Is life extension at… odds with probability?

Does probability ensure that you will die, no matter what, once you are old enough? Does it throw the ultimate spanner in the works of life extension? The answer is not as clear-cut as you might think.

Recently, a study from Sapienza University in Italy has revived the idea of the so-called “mortality plateaus”—the apparent flattening of mortality rates in people aged above 100, suggesting that the maximum mortality rate of such people is 50% at age 105 [1]. However, even if this mortality rate remained constant for as long as you lived, you’d still be overwhelmingly likely to die relatively soon.

Continue reading “Surviving the odds” »