Lifeboat Foundation

Hugh Herr is building the next generation of bionic limbs, robotic prosthetics inspired by nature’s own designs. Herr lost both legs in a climbing accident 30 years ago; now, as the head of the MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics group, he shows his incredible technology in a talk that’s both technical and deeply personal — with the help of ballroom dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost her left leg in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and performs again for the first time on the TED stage.

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In 1989, an 18-year-old South African named Elon Musk approached a girl at a party in Canada, where he was attending college, and said, “I think a lot about electric cars. Do you think about electric cars?”

That anecdote, one of scores that make up Ashlee Vance’s biography of the 44-year-old entrepreneur, is telling. Long before Musk parlayed the $US165 million he made for his part in developing the internet-banking giant PayPal into the more than $US11 billion that underwrite Musk Industries today, he was thinking ahead, envisioning a world that merged science with science fiction, a real world that he, the hero of this story, would bring to fruition.

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See the detailed, innovative, and impressive architectural concept for a floating ocean city – Artisanopolis — created by Gabriel Scheare, Luke & Lourdes Crowley, and Patrick White of Roark 3D and Fortgalt as a gift to The Seasteading Institute, in conjunction with the Institute’s Architectural Design Contest. The images and animated video for this amazing concept are all available under a Creative Commons Attribution License and are an excellent contribution to future human progress, available for others to build upon.

August 9, 2015 by Gennady Stolyarov II Artisanopolis – Seasteading City Concept by Gabriel Scheare, Luke Crowley, Lourdes Crowley, and Patrick WhiteNo comments yet Categories: Art, Politics, Technology, Tags: aquaponics, architecture, Artisanopolis, Brighton, city, competition, England, Floating Cit…

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Wyss Institute scientists believe that synthetic gene drives, if researched responsibly, might be used in the future to render mosquito populations unable to transmit malaria (credit: CDC)

An international group of 26 experts, including prominent genetic engineers and fruit fly geneticists, has unanimously recommended a series of preemptive measures to safeguard gene drive research from accidental (or intentional) release from laboratories.

RNA-guided gene drives are genetic elements — found naturally in the genomes of most of the world’s organisms — that increase the chance of the gene they carry being passed on to all offspring. So they can quickly spread through populations if not controlled.

Continue reading “Move over, autonomous AI weapons, there’s a new risk in town: ‘gene drives’” »

Leukocyte (white blood cell) telomere length in study participants up to 115 years of age. Statistical regression lines belonging to these groups are indicated by the same color as the data. (credit: Yasumichi Arai et al./EBioMedicine)

Scientists say they have cracked the secret of why some people live a healthy and physically independent life over the age of 100: keeping inflammation down and telomeres long.

Newcastle University’s Institute for Ageing in the U.K. and Keio University School of Medicine note that severe inflammation is part of many diseases in the old, such as diabetes or diseases attacking the bones or the body’s joints, and chronic inflammation can develop from any of them.

Continue reading “Scientists reveal secrets for reaching age 100 (or more)” »

A 20-node BlueDBM Cluster (credit: Sang-Woo Jun et al./ISCA 2015)

There’s a big problem with big data: the huge RAM memory required. Now MIT researchers have developed a new system called “BlueDBM” that should make servers using flash memory as efficient as those using conventional RAM for several common big-data applications, while preserving their power and cost savings.

Here’s the context: Data sets in areas such as genomics, geological data, and daily twitter feeds can be as large as 5TB to 20 TB. Complex data queries in such data sets require high-speed random-access memory (RAM). But that would require a huge cluster with up to 100 servers, each with 128GB to 256GBs of DRAM (dynamic random access memory).

Continue reading “Cheap, power-efficient flash memory for big data without sacrificing speed” »

Eating a group of specific foods — known as the MIND diet — may slow cognitive decline among aging adults, even when the person is not at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, according to researchers at Rush University Medical Center.

This finding supplements a previous study by the research team, reported by KurzweiliAI in March, that found that the MIND diet may reduce a person’s risk in developing Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers’ new study shows that older adults who followed the MIND diet more rigorously showed an equivalent of being 7.5 years younger cognitively than those who followed the diet least. Results of the study were recently published online in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.

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The video for Two Minds, the latest single from British electronic trio NERO looks just like it’s a lost cyberpunk film from the 1980s. It’s got that early digital look to it, and the story that plays out wouldn’t be out of place on a stack of forgotten VHS tapes.

The video single, which is on the band’s upcoming album, Between II Worlds, follows a being made of static who can jump into televisions. Like any good ‘80s movie, its pursued by a bunch of grim looking men in trench coats who are deadset on taking it down, for … reasons. Throw in a hapless hero who gets caught in the middle, and you’ve got the perfect science fiction adventure.

The song is pretty catchy, too. Between II Worlds is due out on August 28th.

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The neuroscientist and engineer Greg Gage is trying to change that and make neuroscience more accessible to all.

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