Lifeboat Foundation

Just Amazing

Ralph Mobbs, a neurosurgeon at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, made medical history in late 2015 when he successfully replaced two vertebrae with custom made prosthesis. The patient, in his 60s, suffered from Chordoma, a particularly nasty form of cancer that had formed on his top two vertebrae and threatened to cinch off his spinal cord as it grew. That would have left him a quadriplegic. Complicating matters, those top two vertebrae are what allow you to turn and tilt your head, so it’s not like doctors can easily fashion a replacement out of bone grafted from another part of the patient’s body. They have to fit perfectly and that’s where the 3D printers come in.

Mobbs worked with Anatomics, an Australian medical device manufacturer, to craft perfect replicas of the patient’s top two vertebrae out of titanium. This is the first time that these two particular neck bones have been printed and installed. “To be able to get the printed implant that you know will fit perfectly because you’ve already done the operation on a model … It was just a pure delight,” Mobbs told Mashable Australia. “It was as if someone had switched on a light and said ‘crikey, if this isn’t the future, well then I don’t know what is’.”

Continue reading “Doctors implant 3D-printed vertebrae in ‘world’s first’ surgery” »

Australia’s improved alliance with China on defense, and Quantum Computing. Australia has been one of the early R&D groups working on Quantum Computing just like D-Wave, Stanford, UC Berkley, etc. So, this could help China drastically migrate much sooner to a Quantum infrastructure.

You think you’ve heard it before: Australia’s great security challenge this century is the dramatic shift in power to Asia epitomised by the rise of China.

But read of the latest Defence white paper if you want that abstract idea to sink in.

Continue reading “Defence white paper faces the reality of Australia’s engagement with Asia and the Pacific” »

I am glad to see this article publish because it expresses well how technology and biological properties can be intertwined and advance collectively together. It will take this type of an approach to provide the foundation that is needed to enable the future visions that Kurzweil and others have shared around Singularity.

2 decades ago, Lucent experimented with the cells from fish to see how they could enable digital transmission through their experiments. They had some small successes; however, it never fully matured. Today, however, with Quantum we will finally see the advancements in technology, medicine, and science that many have only dreamed about or read from books or saw in movies.

Biological systems can explore every possible solution rapidly.

Continue reading “NP-complete problem solved with biological motors” »

Interesting read; however, the author has limited his view to Quantum being only a computing solution when in fact it is much more. Quantum technology does offer faster processing power & better security; but, Quantum offers us Q-Dots which enables us to enrich medicines & other treatments, improves raw materials including fuels, even vegetation.

For the first time we have a science that cuts across all areas of technology, medical & biology, chemistry, manufacturing, etc. No other science has been able to achieve this like Quantum.

Also, the author in statements around being years off has some truth if we’re suggesting 7 yrs then I agree. However, more than 7 years I don’t agree especially with the results we are seeing in Quantum Networking.

Continue reading “Quantum Algorithms and Their Discontents” »

Using a sophisticated, custom-designed 3D printer, regenerative medicine scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have proved that it is feasible to print living tissue structures to replace injured or diseased tissue in patients.

Reporting in Nature Biotechnology, the scientists said they printed ear, bone and muscle structures. When implanted in animals, the structures matured into functional tissue and developed a system of blood vessels. Most importantly, these early results indicate that the structures have the right size, strength and function for use in humans.

Continue reading “Regenerative medicine scientists ‘print’ replacement tissue” »

Congress held a meeting today on what NASA’s overall purpose should look like under the next few presidents. But agreement on just what that purpose might be—as witnesses discussed everything from the planned Mars trip to a proposal for a space station hotel—seemed far away.

“If we treated the Air Force like we do NASA, we’d have no flying aircraft. We cannot decide every few years what we want the purpose of the space program to be,” said former NASA administrator Mike Griffin to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology this morning.

The Mars mission was a topic of heavy discussion. At one point, Congressman Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) waved a MARS 2033 bumpersticker over his head (whether he brought it with him to the meeting for that specific purpose, or simply has it on him at all times was unclear)—only to have his colleague Congressman Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) snap that perhaps Republicans should print their own Mars 2032 bumper stickers.

Continue reading “Congress Considers Moon Camps and a Space Station Hotel for NASA’s Future” »

In June, a team of programmers will release a ground-breaking new video game called No Man’s Sky, which uses artificial intelligence and procedural generation to self-create an entire cosmos full of planets. Running off 600,000 lines of code, the game creates an artificial galaxy populated by 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets that you can travel to and explore.

Though this artificial universe is realistic down to the dimensions of a blade of grass, faster than light-speed travel is available in order for players to bridge the unfathomable distances between stars.

Chief architect Sean Murray says No Man’s Sky is different than most games because the landscapes and distances aren’t faked. While most space-based games utilize a skybox that simply rotates between different modalities, No Man’s Sky is virtually limitless and employs real physics.

Continue reading “The Video Game that Made Elon Musk Question Whether Our Reality is a Simulation” »

The quantum world and our world of perception obey different natural laws. Leiden physicists search for the border between both worlds. Now they suggest an upper limit in a study reported in Physical Review Letters.

The laws of the quantum domain do not apply to our everyday lives. We are used to assigning an exact location and time to objects. But fundamental particles can only be described by probability distributions—imagine receiving a traffic ticket for speeding 30 to 250 km/h somewhere between Paris and Berlin, with a probability peak for 140 km/h in Frankfurt.

Boundary

Continue reading “Upper limit found for quantum world” »

Quantum mechanics is littered with different interpretations, but at the core of the entire school of thought is the question of whether there are multiple universes of not. At the core of this idea is the thought, explicated by quantum mechanics, that everything we observe is simply the collapse of all probable scenarios into one specific outcome. Reality, viewed from that perspective, has a very cluttered cutting room floor. But are the things removed from the reel scraps or alternative narratives? There’s the big question.

To answer that question, we need to dive a bit into the mechanisms of the thing. Quantum mechanics says that all particles in the universe can be represented by what are called “wave functions.” A single wave function basically illustrates all the information about a specific system (i.e. a particle), detailing everything from position to velocity. The wave function itself also outlines all the probable outcomes of that system as well.

Continue reading “Prove the Multiverse or Die Trying” »