Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Overpopulation is the most common objection people make to developing rejuvenation biotechnology and potentially increasing healthy human lifespan. We take a look at why that is and if the figures support this concern.

Any discussion of rejuvenation biotechnology almost certainly includes the subject of overpopulation and that objection medical advances that directly address the various processes of aging will lead to an overpopulated world. Such dire predictions are a common theme when advances in medicine that could increase human lifespans are concerned.

Overpopulation is a word that gives the simple fact of population growth a negative connotation. It implies that an increase in the number of people will harm our lives in different ways: it might be famine, scarcity of resources, excessive population density, increased risks of infectious diseases, or harm to the environment.

This concern, first raised by the work of 18th century Reverend and scholar Thomas Malthus, has been a constant theme in both popular fiction and early foresights related to population growth. But is it actually well-founded? Let’s take a look at the issues behind these concerns from a scientific point of view.

Continue reading “Will increased lifespans cause overpopulation?” | >

If we ever want future robots to do our bidding, they’ll have to understand the world around them in a complete way—if a robot hears a barking noise, what’s making it? What does a dog look like, and what do dogs need?

AI research has typically treated the ability to recognize images, identify noises, and understand text as three different problems, and built algorithms suited to each individual task. Imagine if you could only use one sense at a time, and couldn’t match anything you heard to anything you saw. That’s AI today, and part of the reason why we’re so far from creating an algorithm that can learn like a human. But two new papers from MIT and Google explain first steps for making AI see, hear, and read in a holistic way—an approach that could upend how we teach our machines about the world.

“It doesn’t matter if you see a car or hear an engine, you instantly recognize the same concept. The information in our brain is aligned naturally,” says Yusuf Aytar, a post-doctoral AI research at MIT who co-authored the paper.

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Can we live to 1,000? It was outrageous when he said it at ideacity in 2008… and again in 2015. Now he’s back to update us on the incredible progress that has been made toward life extension.

Michael Kramer of Zoomer Radio talks with Aubrey de Grey at ideacity 2017. Aubrey de Grey is an English author and biomedical gerontologist, currently the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation. Find out more about ideacity at http://www.ideacity.ca/ideacity-2017/

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An international team led by the University of Chicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering has discovered how to manipulate a weird quantum interface between light and matter in silicon carbide along wavelengths used in telecommunications.

The work advances the possibility of applying quantum mechanical principles to existing optical fiber networks for secure communications and geographically distributed quantum computation. Prof. David Awschalom and his 13 co-authors announced their discovery in the June 23 issue of Physical Review X.

“Silicon carbide is currently used to build a wide variety of classical electronic devices today,” said Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering at UChicago and a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. “All of the processing protocols are in place to fabricate small quantum devices out of this material. These results offer a pathway for bringing quantum physics into the technological world.”

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(Phys.org)—In the late 1800s when scientists were still trying to figure out what exactly atoms are, one of the leading theories, proposed by Lord Kelvin, was that atoms are knots of swirling vortices in the aether. Although this idea turned out to be completely wrong, it ushered in modern knot theory, which today is used in various areas of science such as fluid dynamics, the structure of DNA, and the concept of chirality.

Now in a new paper published in Physical Review Letters, mathematical physicist Paul Sutcliffe at Durham University in the UK has theoretically shown that nanoparticles called magnetic skyrmions can be tied into various types of knots with different magnetic properties. He explains that, in a sense, these nanoknots represent a “nanoscale resurrection of Kelvin’s dream of knotted fields.”

Skyrmions are the name of a general class of particles that are made by twisting a field. When this field is a magnetic field, the skyrmions are called magnetic skyrmions. Magnetic skyrmions have attracted a lot of attention recently due to their potential applications in spintronics, where electron spins (which are related to the electron’s magnetic properties) are exploited in the design of transistors, storage media, and related devices.

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