Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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For nearly 100 years, scientists have dreamed of turning the lightest of all the elements, hydrogen, into a metal.

Now, in a stunning act of modern-day alchemy, scientists at Harvard University have finally succeeded in creating a tiny amount of what is the rarest, and possibly most valuable, material on the planet, they reported in the journal Science.

For metallic hydrogen could theoretically revolutionise technology, enabling the creation of super-fast computers, high-speed levitating trains and ultra-efficient vehicles and dramatically improving almost anything involving electricity.

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More than 80 years after it was first predicted, physicists have created metallic hydrogen — a mysterious form of hydrogen that could be capable of superconducting electricity without resistance at room temperature.

Scientists have long suspected that hydrogen could exist as a metal in certain parts of the Universe, but this is the first time metallic hydrogen has ever been created on Earth, and the material is even stranger and more fascinating than scientists imagined.

“This is the holy grail of high-pressure physics,” says lead researcher Isaac F. Silvera from Harvard University. “It’s the first-ever sample of metallic hydrogen on Earth, so when you’re looking at it, you’re looking at something that’s never existed before.”

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Too many people spend their whole life on a treadmill striving for financial success and/or fame.

People often take a job or start a company because they think it’s a quick way to get rich or get noticed, i.e. to be successful.

Throughout my career, whenever I’ve started a company just to make money, it’s been a mistake. Starting any successful company is always hard work, and if my heart isn’t in it, the effort becomes hard, unfulfilling work, and I give up before the job is done.

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Today scientists at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) present a study in Cell (“The in vivo architecture of the exocyst provides structural basis for exocytosis”) where they have been able to observe protein nanomachines (also called protein complexes)—the structures responsible for performing cell functions—for the first time in living cells and in 3D. This work has been done in collaboration with researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and the Centro Andaluz de Biología del Desarrollo in Seville.

3D observation of nanomachines in vivo

On the left, in vivo image of nanomachines using current microscopy techniques; on the right, the new method allows 3D observation of nanomachines in vivo and provides 25-fold improvement in precision (O. Gallego, IRB Barcelona)

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DURHAM, N.C. — Mechanical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a tiny whirlpool that can concentrate nanoparticles using nothing but sound. The innovation could gather proteins and other biological structures from blood, urine or saliva samples for future diagnostic devices.

Early diagnosis is key to successfully treating many diseases, but spotting early indicators of a problem is often challenging. To pick out the first warning signs, physicians usually must concentrate scarce proteins, antibodies or other biomarkers from small samples of a patient’s body fluid to provide enough of a signal for detection.

While there are many ways to accomplish this today, most are expensive, time-consuming or too cumbersome to take to the field, and they might require trained experts. Duke engineers are moving to develop a new device that addresses these obstacles.

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The brain is the fattiest organ in your body made up of 60% fat, the dry part that is. 75% of your brain is actually water which houses 100,000 miles of blood vessels that use up 20% of all your oxygen and blood. It’s an amazing piece of hardware. Of all the moonshot projects out there, the ones that relate to augmenting the brain are perhaps the most fascinating. Companies like Kernel have actually succeeded in writing long-term memories to a chip – well, at least 80% of them. When that number hits 100%, the sky is the limit to what we can do with the brain.

If you want a graphic image of what the future holds, imagine a robotic arm on top of your table (no wires) moving its fingers or trying to grab something powered only by someone’s thought. After all those Terminator movies, this could be a bit creepy. You may not get Terminator at your doorstep just yet, but someone with neuroprosthesis might just be ringing your doorbell a few years from now.

Neuroprosthetics or neuroprosthesis is a field of biomedical engineering and neuroscience concerned with the development of neural prostheses which are a series of devices that can substitute your brain’s motor, sensory or cognitive functionality that might have been damaged as a result of an injury or a disease.

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