Lifeboat Foundation

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google Life Sciences, the Silicon Valley giant’s new foray into health and medicine, announced a new name Monday that slips easily off the tongue but might sound antiquated to a high-tech, life-sciences ear: Verily.

“Verily, I swear,” as Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII.

The word means “truly” or “certainly.” It dates back to 13th century Middle English and fell out of common use … well, a while ago. It often pops up, however, in the still very popular King James Bible.

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Osmo, the handheld shakefree camera.

This camera is pretty awesome! Time to make your next selfie vid look like a Spielberg movie.

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Exciting news as another group proposes to explore telomerase therapy for the Cardio Vascular system. This no doubt follows on from DePhino et al work on the P53-telomerase-PCG-1 aging axis work which showed the effects of short telomeres on vascular aging (and other organs) and its direct link to Mitochondrial function and Stem cell Decline via the P53-telomerase-PCG-1 aging axis.

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“The Internet of Everything – the moment cyberspace spills over into physical space.” Watch Jason Silva define our connected future. #WhyWait

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pi7iCUSXctY

How can a person see around a blind corner? One answer is to develop X-ray vision. A more mundane approach is to use a mirror. But if neither are an option, a group of scientists led by Genevieve Gariepy have developed a state-of-the-art detector which, with some clever data processing techniques, can turn walls and floors into a “virtual mirror”, giving the power to locate and track moving objects out of direct line of sight.

The shiny surface of a mirror works by reflecting scattered light from an object at a well-defined angle towards your eye. Because light scattered from different points on the object is reflected at the same angle, your eye sees a clear image of the object. In contrast, a non-reflective surface scatters light randomly in all directions, and creates no clear image.

Continue reading “The amazing camera that can see around corners (w/ video)” »

Flashing some interplanetary gold bling and sipping “space water” might sound far-fetched, but both could soon be reality, thanks to a new US law that legalizes cosmic mining.

In a first, President Barack Obama signed legislation at the end of November that allows commercial extraction of minerals and other materials, including water, from asteroids and the moon.

That could kick off an extraterrestrial gold rush, backed by a private aeronautics industry that is growing quickly and cutting the price of commercial space flight.

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It seems like every day we’re warned about a new, AI-related threat that could ultimately bring about the end of humanity. According to Author and Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom, those existential risks aren’t so black and white, and an individual’s ability to influence those risks might surprise you.

Image Credit: TED

Bostrom defines an existential risk as one distinction of earth originating life or the permanent and drastic destruction of our future development, but he also notes that there is no single methodology that is applicable to all the different existential risks (as more technically elaborated upon in this Future of Humanity Institute study). Rather, he considers it an interdisciplinary endeavor.

“If you’re wondering about asteroids, we have telescopes, we can study them with, we can look at past crater impacts and derive hard statistical data on that,” he said. “We find that the risk of asteroids is extremely small and likewise for a few of the other risks that arrive from nature. But other really big existential risks are not in any direct way susceptible to this kind of rigorous quantification.”

Continue reading “Can The Existential Risk Of Artificial Intelligence Be Mitigated?” »

Buried two kilometres underground in an active ore mine, DEAP-3600 is the most sensitive dark matter detector of its kind. Scientists are hoping to shine a light (so to speak) on one of the deepest mysteries of physics.

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Watch the video Russia planning to build permanent base on the moon on Yahoo News. The Kremlin plans to build a permanent base on the surface of the moon by 2030, according to Russian state-run news agency TASS.

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