Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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On 10 February 2017, the London-based charity Cancer Research UK announced that a team of molecular biologists, astronomers and game designers would receive up to £20 million (US$25 million) over the next five years to develop its interactive virtual-reality map of breast cancers. Currently there are animations for tumor that allow virtual flew throughs. However, they are mock-up. The real models will include data on the expression of thousands of genes and dozens of proteins in each cell of a tumor. The hope is that this spatial and functional detail could reveal more about the factors that influence a tumor’s response to treatment.

The project is just one of a string that aims to build a new generation of cell atlases: maps of organs or tumors that describe location and make-up of each cell in painstaking detail.

Cancer Research UK awarded another team up to £16 million to make a similar tumor map that will focus on metabolites and proteins. Later this year, the US National Institute of Mental Health will announce the winners of grants to map mouse brains in extraordinary molecular detail. And on 23–24 February, researchers will gather at Stanford University in California to continue planning the Human Cell Atlas, an as-yet-unfunded effort to map every cell in the human body.

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In Brief

  • Through the hive mind, everyone would be connected to everyone else telepathically, and we could all share our thoughts, memories, and even dreams with one another.
  • Though a global hive mind would be susceptible to things like hacking or thought control, it could also lead to almost unimaginable levels of innovation.

Communication technology tends to develop in a particular direction: more people communicating across larger distances using less effort to do so. Taken to its logical extreme, perfect communication would be anyone being able to talk to anyone, anywhere, using no effort at all.

The closest concept we have to this form of communication is something called the hive mind. Everyone would be connected to everyone telepathically, and we could all share our thoughts, memories, and even dreams with one another. Such a system of communication would not only have far-reaching consequences, it would also be hugely controversial.

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Today’s extraordinary rate of exponential growth may do much more than just disrupt industries. It may actually give birth to a new species, reinventing humanity over the next 30 years.

I believe we’re rapidly heading towards a human-scale transformation, the next evolutionary step into what I call a “Meta-Intelligence,” a future in which we are all highly connected—brain to brain via the cloud—sharing thoughts, knowledge and actions. In this post, I’m investigating the driving forces behind such an evolutionary step, the historical pattern we are about to repeat, and the implications thereof. Again, I acknowledge that this topic seems far-out, but the forces at play are huge and the implications are vast. Let’s dive in…

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Hibernation used in conjunction with radiotherapy could be the key to fighting cancer in the future, according to new research.

Putting cancer patients into a hibernation-like ‘deep sleep’ state could hypothetically slow down their bodily functions and halt the spread of tumours inside their tissues, while also increasing the body’s resistance to radiation, scientists suggest.

The experimental treatment – which is still many years away from being attempted in humans – might sound like science fiction, but does have some grounding in reality.

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(Phys.org)—A quartet of researchers has boldly proposed the addition of six new particles to the standard model to explain five enduring problems. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Guillermo Ballesteros with Université Paris Saclay, Javier Redondo with Universidad de Zaragoza, Andreas Ringwald with Max-Planck-Institut für Physik and Carlos Tamarit with Durham University describe the six particles they would like to add and why.

The standard theory is, of course, a model that has been developed over the past half-century by physicists to describe how the universe works, and includes such things as the electromagnetic, strong and weak interactions, and also describes what are believed to be the particles that play a role in it all. To date, the theory lists 17 and has stood up against rigorous testing, but it still does not include explanations for what are considered to be some fundamental things.

The researchers are quick to point out that they are not proposing any new physics. Instead, they have assembled what they believe are the most promising theories regarding several problems with the and their possible solutions, and have put them together as an outline of sorts for research moving forward.

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Gets too advanced for me, but still interesting.

As the world transitions to a low-carbon energy future, near-term, large-scale deployment of solar power will be critical to mitigating climate change by midcentury. Climate scientists estimate that the world will need 10 terawatts (TW) or more of solar power by 2030—at least 50 times the level deployed today. At the MIT Photovoltaics Research Laboratory (PVLab), teams are working both to define what’s needed to get there and to help make it happen. “Our job is to figure out how to reach a minimum of 10 TW in an economically and environmentally sustainable way through technology innovation,” says Tonio Buonassisi, associate professor of mechanical engineering and lab director.

Their analyses outline a daunting challenge. First they calculated the growth rate of solar required to achieve 10 TW by 2030 and the minimum sustainable price that would elicit that growth without help from subsidies. Current technology is clearly not up to the task. “It would take between $1 trillion and $4 trillion of additional debt to just push current technology into the marketplace to do the job, and that’d be hard,” says Buonassisi. So what needs to change?

Using models that combine technological and economic variables, the researchers determined that three changes are required: reduce the cost of modules by 50 percent, increase the conversion efficiency of modules (the fraction of solar energy they convert into electricity) by 50 percent, and decrease the cost of building new factories by 70 percent. Getting all of that to happen quickly enough—within five years—will require near-term policies to incentivize deployment plus a major push on technological innovation to reduce costs so that government support can decrease over time.

Continue reading “Mechanical engineers leading effort to detect defects that reduce efficiency” | >

OMG? Are we going to have super cheap electric vehicles in a few years that charge in a few seconds/minutes?

I hope so! This is very exciting.

Australia has supercapacitors made from graphene oxide. They can can store as much energy per kilogram as a lithium battery, but charges in minutes, or even seconds, and uses carbon instead of expensive lithium.

Large-scale production of the graphene that would be needed to produce these high-performance supercapacitors was once unachievable.

Continue reading “Graphene oxide supercapacitor commercial prototype targeted within 2 years” | >

For those scientists that know creativity is important.

Seemingly countless self-help books and seminars tell you to tap into the right side of your brain to stimulate creativity. But forget the “right-brain” myth — a new study suggests it’s how well the two brain hemispheres communicate that sets highly creative people apart.

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