Lifeboat Foundation

Ray Kurzweil is a futurist, a director of engineering at Google and a co-founder of the Singularity University think tank at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. He is a nonfiction author and creator of several inventions.

Kurzweil met with the Silicon Valley Business Journal to discuss how technology’s exponential progress is rapidly reshaping our future through seismic shifts in information technology and computing power, energy, nanotechnology, robotics, health and longevity.

Biohacking, nootropics, and the notion of optimizing one’s human performance are on a rapid rise. Nootrobox founders Geoffrey Woo and Michael Brandt are some of the foremost thinkers in this space, and they are here to have intellectual conversations that will make you THINK.

Episode 9 features Aubrey de Grey, the Chief Scientist Officer of the SENS Research Foundation. In this episode, Geoff, Michael, and Aubrey discuss the nuances of aging and health and their differing opinions and tactics of how to fully optimize these notions.

Continue reading “THINKING Podcast” »

Dwarf galaxies are enigmas wrapped in riddles. Although they are the smallest galaxies, they represent some of the biggest mysteries about our universe. While many dwarf galaxies surround our own Milky Way, there seem to be far too few of them compared with standard cosmological models, which raises a lot of questions about the nature of dark matter and its role in galaxy formation.

New theoretical modeling work from Andrew Wetzel, who holds a joint fellowship between Carnegie and Caltech, offers the most accurate predictions to date about the dwarf galaxies in the Milky Way’s neighborhood. Wetzel achieved this by running the highest-resolution and most-detailed simulation ever of a galaxy like our Milky Way. His findings, published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, help to resolve longstanding debates about how these dwarf galaxies formed.

One of the biggest mysteries of dwarf galaxies has to do with dark matter, which is why scientists are so fascinated by them.

I cannot wait to see how we can use VR for obtaining additional insights on other central nervous system diseases and disorders such as MS, Dystonia, GBM, etc.

Medical applications for VR continue to spread. Just a few weeks ago I wrote about how Paraplegics can learn to walk again with help from Virtual Reality. Scientists from Tomsk Polytechnic University and the Siberian State Medical University, in Russia, believe that it could be the future of diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.

Methods to diagnosis many of these conditions is accomplished by visual assessment in most parts of Russia. The brain scanning technology such as a CAT scan or MRI to confirm the diagnosis is only available in a handful of cities. The VR system being developed would be cheap and easy to roll out across the country.

Continue reading “Parkinson’s Disease Diagnosed with help from Virtual Reality” »

By Sveta McShane: Organizations as diverse as the United Nations and Monsanto are in agreement that we need to double our food production globally by 2050 to feed the world’s population…

But our current agricultural process is one of the biggest contributors to global warming. It emits more greenhouses gases than all the world’s cars combined and is a major consumer and polluter of our precious water resources.

Continue reading “Surprisingly, Plant Microbes May Be An Answer To Our Growing Food Needs” »

We are at the cusp of an energy revolution.

This post is a look at how three technologies — solar, batteries, and electric vehicles (EVs) — are poised to disrupt a $6 trillion energy industry over the next two decades.

I had the chance to sit down with Ramez Naam, chair of Energy and Environmental Systems at Singularity University and acclaimed author of the Nexus series, to discuss these major forces and their implications.

Continue reading “3 Big Trends Shaking Up the Energy Industry” »

NICE.

Scientists at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute, the University of Basel, and the University Hospital Basel have developed and have been testing a device that can screen people with malignant melanoma for a spcific genetic mutation. About half of malignant melanoma cases involve the BRAF gene that results in rapid cell division and drugs targeting this type of cancer are available. The problem is that without knowing if a patient exhibits the mutation, it is dangerous to prescribe the medications since they will not work and will only cause additional problems.

The new device was used to analyze malignant melanoma tissue samples and to find whether the relevant genetic sequence is present. It relies on microscopic cantilevers, some of which have a coating to which the particular genetic sequence sticks to. Other cantilevers have a coating without the sequence. RNA isolated from the biopsy samples was then introduced into the device and the molecules that stuck to the cantilevers made them bend. This bending can be detected, pointing to the presence of the searched for mutation.

Continue reading “Device Detects Malignant Melanoma Type to Prescribe Proper Medication” »

Wish the US FDA would hurry up.

University of Waterloo grads develop nano ink to help consumers identify counterfeit goods.

CBC News Posted: Sep 07, 2016 3:11 PM ET Last Updated: Sep 07, 2016 3:11 PM ET

Continue reading “University of Waterloo grads develop nano ink to help identify counterfeit goods” »

A group of researchers at the University of Tokyo and their collaborators showed that using a virtual reality system to treat phantom limb pain by creating the illusion that patients are moving their absent limbs by will and having them repeat this exercise helped ease their perceived pain.