Lifeboat Foundation

A fringe group of scientists and tech moguls think they’re closing in on the fountain of youth. Here’s everything you need to know:

What is biohacking? Silicon Valley is built on the idea that technology can optimize, or “hack,” any aspect of our lives — so why not the human life span? Until recently, anyone hawking pills or treatments that promised to restore youthfulness was considered a quack, yet a growing number of “transhumanists” are convinced that, in time, human beings can be transformed through bioengineering, and that aging will be curable just like any other malady.

In light of rapid gains in gene editing, nanotechnology, and robotics, some futurists expect this generation’s biohackers to double their life spans. Aubrey de Grey, a regenerative medicine researcher backed by tech mogul Peter Thiel, insists that someone alive today will live to be 1,000. “It’s extraordinary to me that it’s such an incendiary claim,” de Grey says. Korean physician and financier Joon Yun has offered two $500,000 prizes to anyone who can restore a test animal’s youthful heart rate and extend its lifespan by 50 percent. For humans, the mortality rate at age 20 is 0.001 percent, Yun figures, “so if you could maintain the homeostatic capacity of that age throughout your life, your average life span would be 1,000.”

A team of researchers from Nanjing and Xiamen Universities in China has developed an alternative to using viruses to transport CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tools into a desired cell—and it involves two types of light. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their new type of carrier and how well it worked with test mice.

CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tools are a coming revolution in treating genetic conditions, and scientists continue to test their abilities in a variety of applications. One area of study has involved looking for a replacement carrier system—the current approach uses a virus to carry the gene editing tool into a particular cell. Early on, researchers knew that the virus approach was not viable because of possible responses from the immune system, or worse, the threat of initiating tumors. In this new effort, the team in China has come up with an entirely new way to deliver the gene editing tool using two kinds of light.

Their carrier system consists of nanoparticles that are sensitive to low-energy near–infrared radiation (NIR) and that emit UV light. When NIR is shone on the nanoparticles, the light is absorbed and converted to UV light, which is emitted. Inside of a cell, the package is activated by shining NIR onto the skin, where it penetrates into the body and makes its way to the gene editing tool. When the NIR is converted to UV light, it cuts molecules in the carrier package, releasing the gene editing tool to do its work.

Continue reading “A light-based carrier system for CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing” »

A University of California Irvine student may have stumbled upon an invention to end your phone-charging woes for good. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of where that could take us as a society. Forget about your phone; the world would be a different place without ever having to worry about replacing car batteries, and imagine the uses that it could have in space exploration. Technology is the ultimate wildcard.

A battery that lasts a whole lifetime is now one step closer to becoming a reality thanks to Mya Le Thai, a PhD student who’s been researching how to make better nanowire rechargeable batteries. In theory, her discovery could lead to a battery that lasts centuries—as long as 400 years.

Continue reading “UCI Student ‘Accidentally’ Invents a Rechargeable Battery That Lasts 400 Years” »

When a particle is completely isolated from its environment, the laws of quantum physics start to play a crucial role. One important requirement to see quantum effects is to remove all thermal energy from the particle motion, i.e. to cool it as close as possible to absolute zero temperature. Researchers at the University of Vienna, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are now one step closer to reaching this goal by demonstrating a new method for cooling levitated nanoparticles. They now publish their results in the renowned journal Physical Review Letters.

Tightly focused laser beams can act as optical “tweezers” to trap and manipulate tiny objects, from glass particles to living cells. The development of this method has earned Arthur Ashkin the last year’s Nobel prize in physics. While most experiments thus far have been carried out in air or liquid, there is an increasing interest for using optical tweezers to trap objects in ultra-high vacuum: such isolated particles not only exhibit unprecedented sensing performance, but can also be used to study fundamental processes of nanoscopic heat engines, or quantum phenomena involving large masses.

A key element in these research efforts is to obtain full control over the particle motion, ideally in a regime where the laws of quantum physics dominate its behavior. Previous attempts to achieve this, have either modulated the optical tweezer itself, or immersed the particle into additional light fields between highly reflecting mirror configurations, i.e. optical cavities.

Continue reading “Quantum optical cooling of nanoparticles” »

UC Berkeley chemists have proved that three carbon structures recently created by scientists in South Korea and Japan are in fact the long-sought schwarzites, which researchers predict will have unique electrical and storage properties like those now being discovered in buckminsterfullerenes (buckyballs or fullerenes for short), nanotubes and graphene.

The new structures were built inside the pores of zeolites, crystalline forms of silicon dioxide – sand – more commonly used as water softeners in laundry detergents and to catalytically crack petroleum into gasoline. Called zeolite-templated carbons (ZTC), the structures were being investigated for possible interesting properties, though the creators were unaware of their identity as schwarzites, which theoretical chemists have worked on for decades.

Continue reading “Schwarzites: Long-sought carbon structure joins graphene, fullerene family” »

E-mail address: [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3440-9774

Department of internal medicine, UT southwestern medical center, dallas, texas.

A new graphene-based brain implant could help provide information about the onset and progression of epileptic seizures and pave the way for next generation brain-computer interfaces.

The new implant, which records electrical activity in the brain over large areas and at frequencies below 0.1Hz, is said to overcome the limitations of electrode arrays that have only been able to detect activity over a certain frequency threshold.

The technology was developed by Graphene Flagship partners at the Barcelona Microelectronics Institute (IMB-CNM, CSIC), the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), and ICFO.

Hot off the press…

Barnes & Noble Press releases a new non-fiction book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution by Alex M. Vikoulov as Hardcover (Press Release, San Francisco, CA, USA, March 22, 2019 11.00 AM PST)

Named “The Book of the Year” by futurists and academics alike, “# 1 Hot New Release” in Amazon charts in Physics of Time, Phenomenology, and Phenomenological Philosophy, the book has now been released by Barnes & Noble Press as hardcover in addition to ebook and paperback released earlier this year. In one volume, the author covers it all: from quantum physics to your experiential reality, from the Big Bang to the Omega Point, from the ‘flow state’ to psychedelics, from ‘Lucy’ to the looming AI Singularity, from natural algorithms to the operating system of your mind, from geo-engineering to nanotechnology, from anti-aging to immortality technologies, from oligopoly capitalism to Star-Trekonomics, from the Matrix to Universal Mind, from Homo sapiens to Holo syntellectus.

Continue reading “A New Must-Read Book on the AI Singularity from Barnes & Noble” »

Turns out the key to making things lighter than air is…light!

California scientists think they’ve found a way to make objects levitate using concentrated light — a theory that could even propel spacecraft farther than they’ve ever traveled before, according to a report.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology believe that by covering the surfaces of objects with microscopic nanoscale patterns specially designed to interact with beams of light, they could be propelled without fuel — and potentially by light sources millions of miles away, according to Phys.org.

Continue reading “Scientists have found a way to levitate objects with light” »