Lifeboat Foundation

China has unveiled illustrations of a Mars probe and rover it aims to send to the Red Planet at the end of the decade in a mission that faces “unprecedented” challenges, state media said on Wednesday.

China, which is pouring billions into its space programme and working to catch up with the US and Europe, announced in April it aims to send a spacecraft “around 2020” to orbit Mars, land and deploy the rover.

Zhang Rongqiao, chief architect of the project, said Tuesday they were targeting July or August of that year for the launch, the Xinhua news agency reported.

The U.S. Navy is bringing Iron Man’s helmet to life!

The new tool reads satellite images, identifies underserved areas and what they need most.

Beginning with a twitch in his fingers about six months ago, a Canadian man has successfully re-animated his paralyzed hand after undergoing a nerve transfer surgery.

Tim Raglin regularly dove, headfirst, into the water at his family’s lake house. The 45-year old Canadian man had done so thousands of times without incident. In 2007, though Raglin hit his head on a rock in the shallow water, shattering a vertebra in his cervical spine.

His family pulled him to safety, saving him from drowning. However, for nine years, both his hands and feet were left paralyzed.

Continue reading “Paralyzed Man Regains Hand Movement, Thanks to First-Ever Nerve-Transfer Surgery” »

Brace for impact —

Just how dangerous is it to travel at 20% the speed of light?

Breakthrough Starshot has examined the impact of stray atoms, cosmic dust.

Continue reading “Just how dangerous is it to travel at 20% the speed of light?” »

Rebirth of the 1960s cult classic “Fantastic Voyage”; however, this time its not a movie.

When asked what exactly a “nano submarine” was, University of California San Diego chair of nanoengineering professor Joseph Wang described it as like something taken from the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, where medical personnel board a submarine were shrunk to microscopic size to travel through the bloodstream of a wounded diplomat and save his life.

Professor Wang said his team was getting closer to the goal of using nano submarines in a variety of ways, minus the shrunken humans and sabotage of the 1966 film.

Continue reading “U of California: Nano submarines could change healthcare, says nanoengineer professor” »

Interesting perspective.

James Dyson is an evangelist for the creative process of change, quoting ‘People think of creativity as a mystical process. Creativity is something that has to be worked at, and it has specific characteristics. Unless we understand how it happens, we will not improve our creativity, as a society or as a world’. Creativity in corporates often defaults to ‘brainstorming’.

If brainstorming sessions are nothing more than an excuse for people to sit in a room, say they are not really sure what to do and then discuss last night’s television, then yes they are a waste of time. In fact, they are worse than that, they are a force for stagnation and serve only to reinforce the idea that there are no original thinkers in the team and that those present are incapable of coming up with any ideas that are interesting, innovative, exploratory or adventurous.

Continue reading “Brain dead brainstorming” »

I have share my own risks on BMI a while back especially that which is connected (net, cloud, etc.)

Short Bytes: For a moment, forget computer and smartphone malware. There’s even a bigger danger in town in the form of brain malware. By exploiting brain-computer interfaces (BCI) being used in medical and gaming applications, hackers can read your private and sensitive data. Recently, a team of researchers from the University of Washington shed more light on the subject, demanding a policy-oriented regulation on BCIs.

NORWELL, Mass.—(BUSINESS WIRE)— Last week, Nature Publishing Group sent the scientific areas of the Internet into a frenzy by publishing a groundbreaking study that proves the positive effects of long-term training with Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) on patients who have suffered a spinal cord injury (SCI).

The study titled “Long-Term Training with a Brain-Machine Interface-Based Gait Protocol Induces Partial Neurological Recovery in Paraplegic Patients” was conducted by an international group of scientists, led by the Duke University neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis and demonstrates that it’s never too late to start intensive therapy.