Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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TOKYO — Imagine electric cars that can travel 700km to 800km on a single charge, twice as far as they do today. Imagine batteries that are smaller, safer and pack more punch than the lithium-ion cells that power our gadgets now.

Such is the promise of solid-state batteries. Capable of holding more electricity and recharging more quickly than their lithium-ion counterparts, they could do to lithium-ion power cells what transistors did to vacuum tubes: render them obsolete.

As their name implies, solid-state batteries use solid rather than liquid materials as an electrolyte. That is the stuff through which ions pass as they move between the poles of a battery as it is charged and discharged. Because they do not leak or give off flammable vapor, as lithium-ion batteries are prone to, solid-state batteries are safer. They are also more energy-dense and thus more compact.

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I have a very important and scary story to share I wrote. Give it a read. It’s published the Napa Valley Register (the main paper of a community where my wine business is newly located). The article is about one of the most common and unexpected ways people around the world die. I almost did.

I recently completed a European speaking tour discussing transhumanism, a social movement whose primary goal is to live as long as possible through science.

Ironically, I’ll probably remember the month-long tour most for a specific 60 seconds—when I almost choked to death on thick, leathery bread in a German restaurant. This may be surprising, but the fourth-leading cause of unintentional death in America is asphyxiation from choking on food, according to the National Safety Council.

In fact, a few years ago, a high school friend of mine who was a talented athlete died when meat became lodged in his windpipe. In total, approximately 2,500 Americans perish every year from choking on food.

Continue reading “I almost died from a leading American killer: Choking on food” | >

For some reason, Google is rebranding Google Drive storage plans under the name Google One. Along with the rebranding, Google is also improving its pricing in ways that give customers more options and more storage at lower prices. It marks the service’s first price cut in four years.

Google One plans start at the same place as Google Drive plans — $1.99 per month for 100GB of additional storage — but the situation improves after that. Google is introducing a new $2.99-per-month tier, which includes 200GB of storage, and it’s upgrading the $9.99-per-month tier to include 2TB of storage instead of 1TB.

We signed up for a 2TB storage option to try out Google One. The process is simple, you just head into Google Drive and click on Storage, then Upgrade Storage, to bring up all the possible upgrades.

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