Listen to famed biogerontolgist Aubrey de Grey explain the OncoSENS approach to curing ALT-Cancer (https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/sens-control-alt-delete-cancer/) and how this is a vital part of overcoming the ill-effects of aging. This presentation is part of the Designing New Advances conference held by the Institute of Exponential Sciences in the Netherlands.
Posted in space
Reason number 9,000 not to colonize Jupiter’s moon Io: not only is it a frigid hellscape covered in eruptive ice volcanoes and lashed by the gas giant’s powerful radiation belts, but the atmosphere just collapsed.
In fact, it collapses all the time, according to observations by astronomers at the Southwest Research Institute that are published today in the Journal of Geophysical Research. It turns out that every time Io is eclipsed by mighty Jupiter (which happens for about 2 hours a day), the surface temperature plummets and the moon’s sulfur dioxide (SO2)-rich atmosphere begins to deflate.
By the time Io is in full shadow, the atmosphere is like a punctured balloon, blanketing the moon’s surface in a thin coating of SO2 frost. As Io migrates back into the sun, this frost layer re-sublimates, and a new atmosphere develops.
Last year, OpenBCI burst onto the scene with a Kickstarter campaign to fund development of an open source brain-computer interface for makers. The company more than doubled its goal of raising $100,000 for its EEG platform and, as I write this, OpenBCI is preparing to ship its first run of finished products. Conor does a demo of the technology in the link below:
OpenBCI Demo by Conor Russomano
Recently, I had a chance to talk with OpenBCI co-founder Conor Russomanno to get his thoughts on how open source has changed the brain-computer interface (BCI) landscape and opened new opportunities in the present, and how it might affect future development opportunities as well.
“The one thing that we’re hoping to achieve with OpenBCI is to really lower the barrier of entry – both in terms of educational materials but also cost,” Russomanno said. “I think one really awesome implication is that, in a classroom or laboratory, where one research grade EEG system was used by a number students, now the same amount of money could be used to outfit every student with their own device. And we’ve seen that in our customer base, as a huge proportion of our customers are students, graduate-level researchers and professors who want to use OpenBCI as a learning tool.”
Another exciting change that OpenBCI is creating is an open source community that allows users and makers to connect and share their knowledge to take the technology even further, Russomanno noted. In fact, OpenBCI is dedicating a fair chink of its resources to create that community.
“Probably the quickest people to jump on the preorders and the Kickstarters were students and researchers who were already working with existing EEG devices. We are trying to get more people interested by creating a community, putting out instructional guides and making it more approachable.
“I like to think what we’re doing with OpenBCI as Lego meets EEGs. I think of what we’re building as not a finished product, but as a narrow building block. And we want the world to use these blocks to build the cool stuff,” he said.
While the success and acclaim OpenBCI has received in mainstream media has been exciting, as he looks at the opportunities for further development of open source BCI, Russomanno is cautiously optimistic. In my mentioning of some of the farther-reaching future implications of BCI technologies, Conor brought the conversation back to the present, seeming less interested in far away “what ifs” than in how the next step forward in research might be taken:
“I think its important to be realistic about what the technology is capable of,” he said. “There are still a lot of challenges and they’re not all going to be solved by the same company or by a single field of research. It’s important that people collaborate together, specialize and improve upon a small facet of the problem by sharing that information with someone else who has solved another small facet.
“What we’re trying to do with OpenBCI is to expose all of the weaknesses of the full system and say ‘Hey guys! Jump in! What can you do to improve this other piece?’”
Another hurdle Russomanno hopes open source BCI can bridge in the future is the gap between the enthusiastic expectations of the general public and the realistic limits of the current technology. While an enthusiastic hope of BCI might involve telepathic control of technology or complete conscious “embodiment” in a robotic form, the current reality of BCI is less “far out.” The calibration of today’s external BCI devices still involves a relatively slow process of attuning to individual brain patterns, and isn’t nearly at “telepathic” levels, although some researchers have been able to develop significant control of devices and games with EEG headsets.
“I think many people would agree that the ‘Holy Grail’ of practical, wearable EEG is a sensor. Right now, it’s very difficult to acquire a strong EEG signal from outside the scalp because you’ve got a lot of things that produce ‘noise,’” he continued. “I’m not sure if it will ever happen, but the one problem that needs to be optimized is the electrode problem. We’ve broken out the header pins so you can attach any electrode on, so if that Holy Grail does get found in the next one or two years, hopefully you’ll just be able to plug it right into the OpenBCI board.
“On the other end of the spectrum,” Russomanno continued. “Once you’ve got good spatial resolution, a high number of channels and a good quality of signal, what do you do with this data now that you’re collecting it? How do you classify this information to create a system that responds in a pre-determined way?
“That’s where software and research comes in. You’ve got electrical engineers that need to solve the electrode problem. But then you’ve got data analytics and programmers that need to work together to create algorithms that will classify massive amounts of data,” he noted.
Conor’s earlier comment about the interdisciplinary nature of BCI research starts to hit home, but he wasn’t done yet. After software challenges, there’s one more hurdle left for the full optimization of open source BCI, he added.
“Every brain is similar but every brain is unique. When it gets to that point where we’ve got enough systems producing enough data that it can be scaled cheaply from individual to individual, then it’s a matter of building an interface that’s user customizable that has enough flexibility to be able to refine its classification inputs to match the specific user.”
Ultimately, Russomanno says the mission for OpenBCI is to make the technology more accessible and that, wherever open source BCI goes in the future, a community based on cooperation and collaboration will take it there.
With so much to work on, he’s aiming to facilitate the global conversation necessary to bring BCI to the next level, without funding it all in his own proprietary lab. If all brains are unique, then we’ll learn more about calibrating devices by testing and tinkering with people all over the world. Conor’s aim, however, it not just to use their heads as experiments, but to generate new hypotheses to test and ideas to explore — expanding the field for everyone.
“Putting our heads together” takes on multiple literal interpretations here, and that’s how he intends it.
Conor ended our chat with come practical advice for researchers and makers who want to help the cause: “The best way for people to join that community is to acquire the technology, try to figure out how to make it work, be vocal on the forums and keep spreading the open source wildfire.”
“The White House has asked whether Zipline’s drones, pioneered in Rwanda, could fly much-needed drugs and blood to Americans.”
Thinking about Eugen Sänger’s photon rocket concept inevitably calls to mind his Silbervogel design. The ‘Silverbird’ had nothing to do with antimatter but was a demonstration of the immense imaginative power of this man, who envisioned a bomber that would be launched by a rocket-powered sled into a sub-orbital trajectory. There it would skip off the upper atmosphere enroute to its target. The Silbervogel project was cancelled by the German government in 1942, but if you want to see a vividly realized alternate world where it flew, have a look at Allen Steele’s 2014 novel V-S Day, a page-turner if there ever was one.
I almost said that it was a shame we don’t have a fictionalized version of the photon rocket, but as we saw yesterday, there were powerful reasons why the design wouldn’t work, even if we could somehow ramp up antimatter production to fantastic levels (by today’s standards) and store and manipulate it efficiently. Energetic gamma rays could not be directed into an exhaust stream by the kind of ‘electron gas mirror’ that Sänger envisioned, although antimatter itself maintained its hold on generations of science fiction writers and scientists alike.
Enter the Antiproton
Sänger’s presentation at the International Astronautical Congress in 1953 came just two years ahead of the confirmation of the antiproton, first observed at the Berkeley Bevatron in 1955. Now we have something we can work with, at least theoretically. For unlike the annihilation of electrons and positrons, antiprotons and protons produce pi-mesons, or pions, when they meet. Pions don’t live long, with charged pions decaying into muons and muon neutrinos, while neutral pions decay into gamma rays. Those charged pions, however, turn out to be helpful indeed.
Tempus fugit. I’m just about old enough to remember a time in which 2020 was the distant future of science fiction novels, too far away to be thinking about in concrete terms, a foreign and fantastical land in which anything might happen. Several anythings did in fact happen, such as the internet, and the ongoing revolution in biotechnology that has transformed the laboratory world but leaks into clinics only all too slowly. Here we are, however, close enough to be making plans and figuring out what we expect to be doing when the third decade of the 21st century gets underway. The fantastical becomes the mundane. We don’t yet have regeneration of organs and limbs, or therapies to greatly extend life, but for these and many other staples of golden age science fiction, the scientific community has come close enough to be able to talk in detail about the roads to achieving these goals.
Of all the things that researchers might achieve with biotechnology in the near future, control over aging is by far the most important. Aging is the greatest cause of death and suffering in the world, and none of us are getting any younger. That may change, however. SENS, the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, is a synthesis of the scientific view of aging as an accumulation of specific forms of cell and tissue damage, pulling in a century of evidence from many diverse areas of medical science to support this conclusion. Aging happens because the normal operation of our cellular biochemistry produces damage, wear and tear at the level of molecules and molecular structures, and some of that damage accumulates to cause failure of tissues and organs, and ultimately death.
Tethers Unlimited, Inc. (TUI) announced that it has signed a Public-Private Partnership with NASA to deliver a HYDROS™ propulsion system for a CubeSat mission. Concurrently, TUI has signed an associated contract to provide three HYDROS thrusters sized for Millennium Space Systems’ (MSS) ALTAIR™ class microsatellites to support three different flight missions. Total contract value for the two efforts is $2.2M.
The HYDROS propulsion system uses in-space electrolysis of water to generate hydrogen and oxygen gas, which it then burns in a bipropellant thruster. This water-electrolysis method allows small satellites to carry a propellant that is non-explosive, non-toxic, and unpressurized. The hydrogen and oxygen generated on-orbit will enable high-thrust and high-fuel-efficiency propulsion so these small satellites can perform missions requiring orbital agility and long-duration station-keeping.
The partnership with NASA is a cost-sharing program funded under NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate’s “Utilizing Public-Private Partnerships to Advance Tipping Point Technologies” Program. In this effort, TUI will conduct lifetime and environmental testing of prototypes of HYDROS systems sized for CubeSats and microsatellites and then deliver a flight unit HYDROS thruster intended for testing on a CubeSat mission as part of NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstration Program, at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.
Philadelphia, PA, USA / Mexico City, Mexico — Bioquark, Inc., (www.bioquark.com) a life sciences company focused on the development of novel bioproducts for complex regeneration, disease reversion, and aging, and RegenerAge SAPI de CV, (www.regenerage.clinic/en/) a clinical company focused on translational therapeutic applications of a range of regenerative and rejuvenation healthcare interventions, have announced a collaboration to focus on novel combinatorial approaches in human disease and wellness. SGR-Especializada (http://www.sgr-especializada.com/), regulatory experts in the Latin American healthcare market, assisted in the relationship.
“We are very excited about this collaboration with RegenerAge SAPI de CV,” said Ira S. Pastor, CEO, Bioquark Inc. “The natural synergy of our cellular and biologic to applications of regenerative and rejuvenative medicine will make for novel and transformational opportunities in a range of degenerative disorders.”
As we close in on $7 trillion in total annual health care expenditures around the globe ($1 trillion spent on pharmaceutical products; $200 billion on new R&D), we are simultaneously witnessing a paradoxical rise in the prevalence of all chronic degenerative diseases responsible for human suffering and death.
China and the US; tensions are mounting and China’s new Quantum Satellite is aiding more fuel to the flames.
By: James Holbrooks (UndergroundReporter) Beijing — Only days after completing production of the largest amphibious aircraft ever built, China has just revealed plans to launch the world’s first satellite designed to conduct quantum experiments in space — a move that could one day lead to a highly secure “orbital internet.”
Assuming the initial satellite performs well, as many as 20 additional craft would follow in the effort to create a new category of communications network. Chinese researchers believe their work could ignite a space race as other nations move to refine the technology.
An elliptical light beam in a nonlinear optical medium pumped by “twisted light” can rotate like an electron around a magnetic field.
Magnetism and rotation have a lot in common. The effect of a magnetic field on a moving charge, the Lorentz force, is formally equivalent to the fictitious force felt by a moving mass in a rotating reference frame, the Coriolis force. For this reason, atomic quantum gases under rotation can be used as quantum simulators of exotic magnetic phenomena for electrons, such as the fractional quantum Hall effect. But there is no direct equivalent of magnetism for photons, which are massless and chargeless. Now, Niclas Westerberg and co-workers at Heriot-Watt University, UK, have shown how to make synthetic magnetic fields for light [1]. They developed a theory that predicts how a light beam in a nonlinear optical medium pumped by “twisted light” will rotate as it propagates, just as an electron will whirl around in a magnetic field. More than that, the light will expand as it goes, demonstrating fluid-like behavior.
