Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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An entirely new type of computer that blends optical and electrical processing could get around this impending processing constraint and solve superlarge optimization problems. If it can be scaled up, this non-traditional computer could save costs by finding more optimal solutions to problems that have an incredibly high number of possible solutions.

There is a special type of problem – called a combinatorial optimization problem – that traditional computers find difficult to solve, even approximately. An example is what’s known as the “traveling salesman” problem, wherein a salesman has to visit a specific set of cities, each only once, and return to the first city, and the salesman wants to take the most efficient route possible. This problem may seem simple but the number of possible routes increases extremely rapidly as cities are added, and this underlies why the problem is difficult to solve.

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4DS has demonstrated Interface Switching ReRAM cells at a 40 nanometer geometry, representing significant progress in scalability and yield.

This 40nm geometry, demonstrated by 4DS, is smaller than the latest generation of 3D Flash — the most dominant non-volatile memory technology used in billions of mobile devices, cloud servers and data centers.

In 2016, 4DS has:

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Rebooting the immune system just got a bit easier. This could potentially be used to treat autoimmune diseases and just as exciting some of the aging processes.

A dietary approach to depleting blood stem cells may make it possible to conduct bone marrow transplantations without the use of chemotherapy or radiation therapy, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The discovery, made in collaboration with researchers at the University of Tokyo, may also become a new way to treat certain cancers without chemo or radiation, which can cause severe side effects.

The researchers showed that a diet deficient in the essential amino acid valine could effectively deplete the population of in mice and allow them to be successfully transplanted with blood stem cells from other mice. The researchers also showed that human blood stem cells in the laboratory were affected by a lack of access to valine, suggesting that the same therapeutic approach may work in humans.

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A London-based startup has combined some of today’s most disruptive technologies in a bid to change the way we’ll build the future. By retrofitting industrial robots with 3D printing guns and artificial intelligence algorithms, Ai Build has constructed machines that can see, create, and even learn from their mistakes.

When CEO and founder Daghan Cam was studying architecture, he noticed a disconnect between small-scale manufacturing and large-scale construction. “On one side we have a fully automated production pipeline,” Cam explained at a recent conference in London. “On the other side we’re completely dependent on human labor.” With the emergence of more efficient printing technologies, he thought there must be a better way.

“We wanted to push the boundaries of how intricate we could design things through computation and how we could create them through 3D printing,” Cam said.

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Earlier this year, former Braintree founder Bryan Johnson publicly announced his plans to forge Kernel, a company with the sole purpose of building hardware and software to augment human intelligence. Today, Johnson is investing $100 million of his own money into the concept, looking to rapidly double the size of his team, shore up a portfolio of intellectual property and prepare for animal and human testing trials for a forthcoming device aimed at reducing cognitive deficiencies for sufferers of conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Kernel is still very much in the planning stages, but the idea is rooted in the research of Theodore Berger, the company’s chief science officer. The futuristic device, which Johnson says might actually not need to be implanted beneath the skull at all, is designed to facilitate communication between brain cells by hacking the “neural code” that enables our brain to store and recall key information. With proper implementation, such a device could correct faulty signals to mend a cognitive impairment.

“We have done this before with biology and genomics,” said Johnson in an interview. “We can program yeast to do a specific function. We can expect the same path with neural code.”

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If you don’t like the thought of bugs crawling all over you, then you might not like one possible direction in which the field of wearable electronics is heading. Researchers from MIT and Stanford University recently showcased their new Rovables robots, which are tiny devices that roam up and down a person’s clothing – and yes, that’s as the clothing is being worn.

The centimeter-sized robots hang on by pinching the fabric between their wheels, with the physically-unconnected wheel on the underside of the material held against the others simply by magnetic attraction.

Each Rovable contains a battery, microcontroller, and a wireless communications module that lets it track the movements and locations of its fellow little robots. It also has an inertial measurement unit (IMU), which includes a gyroscope and accelerometer. By using that IMU and by counting its wheel revolutions, the robot is able to keep track of its own location, allowing for limited autonomous navigation on the wearer’s body.

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ESA’s Mars Test Lander likely exploded on impact after dropping from a height of four kilometers after its retrorockets prematurely switched off. Just another lesson in how difficult these missions actually are; a cautionary tale for new space entrepreneurs.

New NASA images of the Martian surface indicate that the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Schiaparelli ExoMars 2016 test lander likely crashed from a height of at least two to four kilometers as it made its way through the Red planet’s thin atmosphere.

Surface markings imaged by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and released via NASA JPL, identifies new markings believed to be related to ESA’s Schiaparelli Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module (EDM), which arrived at Mars on Oct. 19th. Schiaparelli may have exploded on impact after impacting at speeds greater than 300 kilometers per hour.

ESA’s ExoMars 2016 Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) released the lander for what was to have been a six minute descent to the touchdown site at Meridiani Planum, a plain near Mars’ equator.

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