Lifeboat Foundation

““The School of Humanities and Sciences is systematically re-thinking how we teach entry-level courses in the sciences,” said Richard P. Saller, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, during opening remarks for the event. “Half of all freshman enrollments in Stanford are in beginning-level sciences and math. We have tremendous impact by raising the level of teaching in these areas.””

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A NASA engineers explains why the fake technology that inspired Elon Musk wouldn’t work.

Scientists have struggled for millennia to understand human consciousness — the awareness of one’s existence. Despite advances in neuroscience, we still don’t really know where it comes from, and how it arises.

But researchers think they might have finally figured out its physical origins, after pinpointing a network of three specific regions in the brain that appear to be crucial to consciousness.

It’s a pretty huge deal for our understanding of what it means to be human, and it could also help researchers find new treatments for patients in vegetative states.

Continue reading “Harvard Scientists Think They’ve Pinpointed the Physical Source of Consciousness” »

If you were to compare yourself to a neutron star, you probably wouldn’t find very many things in common. After all, neutron stars – celestial bodies with super strong magnetic fields – are made from collapsed star cores, lie light-years away from Earth, and don’t even watch Netflix.

But, according to new research, we share at least one similarity: the geometry of the matter that makes us.

Researchers have found that the ‘crust’ (or outer layers) of a neutron star has the same shape as our cellular membranes. This could mean that, despite being fundamentally different, both humans and neutron stars are constrained by the same geometry.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Found a Bizarre Similarity Between Human Cells and Neutron Stars” »

Great news if it turns out to be true!

Though scientists are still trying to figure out how it doesn’t violate the laws of physics.

Hey folks, great news! The Patrons Challenge is going really well and we have already passed the halfway mark for new Patrons which is superb. Thanks to Reason and Josh Triplett who are doubling all new pledges made this year. So if you are interested in being a Patron this is a great time to join us.

Our Winter fundraiser has also reached almost 25k and is going great guns. The more we can raise the more research we can do and as this year has shown, some truly great results are starting to arrive for the SENS approach to treating age-related diseases.

My new OpEd story on my campaign and transhumanist activism:

Author of The Transhumanist Wager, Zoltan Istvan explains how the social movement wants to change the future of humanity.

In Brief:

• A Type IV civilization is a society that has managed to harness the energy of the entire universe.
• To get here, we would need to tap into energy sources unknown to us using strange laws of physics (laws that may or may not exist).

To measure the level of a civilization’s advancement, the Kardashev scale focuses on the amount of energy that a civilization is able to harness. Obviously, the amount of power available to a civilization is linked to how widespread the civilization is (you can’t harness the power of a star if you are confined to your home planet, and you certainly can’t harness the power of a galaxy if you can’t even get out of your solar system).

What would happen if an electric current no longer flowed, but trickled instead? This was the question investigated by researchers working with Christian Ast at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. Their investigation involved cooling their scanning tunnelling microscope down to a fifteen thousandth of a degree above absolute zero. At these extremely low temperatures, the electrons reveal their quantum nature. The electric current is therefore a granular medium, consisting of individual particles. The electrons trickle through a conductor like grains of sand in an hourglass, a phenomenon that can be explained with the aid of quantum electrodynamics.

Flowing water from a tap feels like a homogeneous medium — it is impossible to distinguish between the individual water molecules. Exactly the same thing is true about electric current. So many electrons flow in a conventional cable that the current appears to be homogeneous. Although it is not possible to distinguish individual electrons, quantum mechanics says they should exist. So how do they behave? Under which conditions does the current not flow like water through a tap, but rather trickles like sand in an hourglass?

The hourglass analogy is very appropriate for the scanning tunnelling microscope, where a thin, pointed tip scans across the surface of a sample without actually touching it. A tiny current flows nevertheless, as there is a slight probability that electrons “tunnel” from the pointed tip into the sample. This tunnelling current is an exponential function of the separation, which is why the pointed tip is located only a few Ångström (a ten millionth of a millimetre) above the sample.