Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 11723

Overwatch launches May 24, 2016 on PS4. Pre-order now to unlock early access to the Overwatch Open Beta for you and a friend starting May 3: http://bit.ly/1qlCYVO

“Alive” weaves a tale of Widowmaker, the peerless Talon assassin who stalks her prey with deadly efficiency. In this episode, we spend a fateful night in London’s King’s Row — where you’ll discover how one death can change everything.

Set your sights on the second animated short in our four-part series: Alive! Then play FREE during the Open Beta May 5–9: http://blizz.ly/1U5gi77

Read more

When Khoshnevis imagines the future of colonies on Mars, he imagines very tall buildings, with a lot of protection from the elements.

“Gravity is one third of Earth’s, and therefore with less construction material we can build stronger structures out there, therefore we can build much taller,” he says. “The cost of energy for elevators and all that will be much less. Theoretically everything could be three times as high as here with the same consumption of energy,” he says.

A human utopia on Mars will soon be technologically feasible, but it will take some political will to get there, he says. It will take sustained resources and effort over decades to get the ball rolling, and keep it moving forward. “There really has to be philosophical support for this — that this is the future of humanity, Mars is the closest thing to a livable planet, so we should not miss the opportunity — we should dedicate a good effort in making sure that we go there and we change the conditions of Mars to make it habitable, because one planet is not enough for this amazing species.”

Read more

In the pages of comic books and on the silver screen, superheroes like Wolverine and Deadpool have a “healing factor” that allows their bodies to regenerate and recover from injuries or illness at an amazing rate – but certainly nothing like that is possible in real life, right?

Amazingly, a team of scientists led by John Pimanda, a hematologist and associate professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, published a study in Monday’s edition of the journal PNAS reporting that they had successfully reprogrammed bone and fat cells into induced multipotent stem cells (iMS) – the first step to making such a repair system a reality.

As they explained in a statement, stem cell therapies using iMS cells could theoretically repair a fractured bone or fix injured spinal discs, using a technique similar to how salamanders are able to regenerate lost limbs. These treatments could radically alter the field of regenerative medicine, and perhaps most surprisingly, the authors believe they could be available in just a few years. The technique, which has been successfully tested in mice, “is a significant advance on many of the current unproven stem cell therapies, which have shown little or no objective evidence they contribute directly to new tissue formation,” Pimanda said.

Read more

#SyntheticBiology: Robotic lab to custom-make synthetic bacteria.

Imperial College opens UK’s first robotic lab that automates the creation & rebooting of bacteria custom-made to produce pharmaceuticals and other materials. The robots will automate the synthesise of complete DNA strands, which consists millions of base pairs, and transplant entire genomes into bacteria chassis.

H/T: @CSERCambridge

Read more

Got a grand burning a hole in your pocket? You could get a new laptop — or you could send this tiny, palm-sized satellite to space. That’s what a team of engineers at Arizona State hope, anyway: their “FemtoSats” are meant to be as cheap a space-bound platform as has ever been devised.

At just 3cm per side and 35 grams (that’s about 1.2 inches and 0.077 pounds, dogs of the Imperial system), the SunCube 1F is the prototype FemtoSat. It’s powered by a salvaged scrap of solar panel (they don’t make them small enough off the shelf), the tiny unit includes propulsion, imaging, communication, and data collection.

“The design standard bootstraps from the Cal Poly CubeSat standard and is extensible, allowing major customization,” wrote Jekan Thanga, the ASU assistant professor who heads up the project, in an email to TechCrunch.

Read more

eb35ff85-f339-4837-9fe0-8671b0617cd9.img
“Virtually all new fossil fuel-burning power-generation capacity will end up “stranded”. This is the argument of a paper by academics at Oxford university. We have grown used to the idea that it will be impossible to burn a large portion of estimated reserves of fossil fuels if the likely rise in global mean temperatures is to be kept below 2C. But fuels are not the only assets that might be stranded. A similar logic can be applied to parts of the capital stock.”

Read more

My new article for The Hufffington Post on whether transhumanism will change racism in the near future:

2016-04-07-1460007795-625540-cyborg438398_960_720.jpg
A future transhumanist? — CCO Public Domain

Despite decades of progress, racism and bigotry are still prevalent in the United States. Often, they even dominate the news in American media, like during the Baltimore riots or the Ferguson shooting. Movements like Black Lives Matter remind us that the society we live in still has many biases to be fought against, but that good work can be done to combat bigotry if people unite against it.

Continue reading “Will Transhumanism Change Racism in the Future?” | >

The Sea Hunter, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s most ambitious unmanned vessel to date, may well be the most advanced self-navigating surface craft in the world. Its 130-foot trimaran hull is designed for a maximum speed of 27 knots and operations in conditions up to sea state five. It can conduct missions of up to 70 days without resupply, and can work unmanned to perform tasks too risky for human sailors. It is even capable of complying with the Rules of the Road, in certain well-defined situations. And it can do all of these things at a construction cost of $23 million, a bit under one percent of the price for a Zumwalt -class destroyer (excluding R&D).

But the project’s engineers acknowledge that truly autonomous operation lies some way off for Sea Hunter. Crucially, it does not presently have the ability to perceive and understand COLREGS-defined lights, shapes, sounds and vessel categories. The Rules require vessels to “at all times maintain a proper lookout by sight and hearing as well as by all available means… so as to make a full appraisal of the situation and of the risk of collision.” Among other things, this implies the bridge team’s ability to understand the COLREGS give-way requirements for differing vessel types (Rule 18). While Sea Hunter knows that under the right circumstances it has the right of way when interacting with a power driven vessel, it cannot tell the difference between a power driven vessel and a sailboat or a vessel restricted in its ability to maneuver – vessel classes which will have the right of way over Sea Hunter (with exceptions).

Read more