Lifeboat Foundation

Everything around us is made of atoms, but it turns out that the building blocks of the Universe are far stranger than that.

Cryonics pioneer Linda Chamberlain could become a virtually immortal superwoman, but she must choose how: There’s more than one way.

A company called Nectome is developing a technology designed to preserve the brain so the human mind can be uploaded to supercomputers in the future.

A study suggests problems with mental ability and memory with old age are not down to neuron loss, but rather a failure of cells to communicate with each other.

Scientists have made the most precise measurement of antimatter yet, and the results only deepen the mystery of why life, the universe, and everything in it exists.

The new measurements show that, to an incredibly high degree of precision, antimatter and matter behave identically.

Yet those new measurements can’t answer one of the biggest questions in physics: Why, if equal parts matter and antimatter were formed during the Big Bang, is our universe today made up of matter?

Continue reading “The Most Precise Measurement of Antimatter Yet Deepens the Mystery of Why We Exist” »

This week, NASA announced that it has updated its commercial crew contract with Boeing. Specifically, Boeing is one of two contractors that is building a crew vehicle that will eventually be able to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The change surrounds its first test flight — including the option to extend the flight (from two weeks up to six months) and potentially adding a third crewmember. In other words, the first test flight wouldn’t be a test anymore.

This isn’t a huge surprise. Back in January, the GAO released a report that said that human flight certification of Boeing and SpaceX rockets would likely be delayed until the end of 2019. NASA currently has seats for astronauts on Russian Soyuz spacecraft through the fall of 2019. After that, well… Houston, we have a problem.

Russia doesn’t have any more Soyuz seats to offer us for purchase, so that leaves a significant gap between when we will need operational human spaceflight capabilities and when we will have them. The only solution is to use SpaceX and Boeing’s test flights as actual flights, in which we carry humans to and from the ISS, rather than as the test flights they were originally designed to be.

Continue reading “Boeing’s first crewed space flight may be more than just a test” »

BOB is an AI entity who can be interacted with in an art exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

George Soros called cryptocurrencies a bubble in January. Now his $26 billion family office is planning to trade digital assets.

Quirky knitters teamed up with a neural-network creator to generate new types of tentacled, cozy shapes.

An algorithm tailored to individual brain activity shows it can boost memory with electrical zaps.