Lifeboat Foundation

A new article on my campaign with a provocative headline, but most of the story is nice. I’ll be speaking in Florida on Saturday as part of the Immortality Bus tour. We visited Alabama’s largest megachurch yesterday:

His name sounds funny to Americans, but presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan says it’s totally normal in Hungary, from where his parents hail. Istvan himself was born in Los Angeles and worked for National Geographic for years — a job that led him to explore science, particularly the concept of transhumanism, which posits that people will merge with technology.

Today, Istvan continues to write for Vice, Psychology Today, Gizmod o, and more — when he’s not campaigning across the country and promoting the Transhumanist Party platform, which promises better lives — and hopefully immortality — through science. Istvan will speak this Saturday at the Church of Perpetual Life in Hollywood, which promotes the same ideals and which New Times featured in a cover story earlier this year.

Continue reading “Presidential Candidate Suggests We Microchip Syrian Refugees” »

Engineers from the University of New South Wales, Australia, have made an important breakthrough that brings quantum computers one step closer to reality.

The team created a quantum version of a standard computer code within a silicon chip. The discovery shows that it is possible to construct realistic and reliable quantum computers.

Quantum computers have the potential to solve problems much more quickly than any computer that exists today, as they combine the rules of informatics to phenomena of quantum mechanics that are not observed in everyday life. Namely, the principle of superposition, popularized by Schrödinger’s cat being both alive and dead, and entanglement.

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It has been hailed as a wonder material set to revolutionise everyday life, but graphene has always been considered too expensive for mass production – until now.

Scientists at Glasgow University have made a breakthrough discovery, allowing graphene to be produced one hundred times more cheaply than before, opening it up to an array of new applications.

First isolated in 2004, the miracle material can be used in almost anything from bendable mobile phone screens to prosthetic skin able to provide sensation.

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Chemical engineers in Israel have built a self-healing electronic sensor inspired by human skin that can rapidly ‘heal’ damage.

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D-Wave Systems Inc., the world’s first quantum computing company, announced that Los Alamos National Laboratory will acquire and install the latest D-Wave quantum computer, the 1000+ qubit D-Wave 2X™ system. Los Alamos, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, will lead a collaboration within the Department of Energy and with select university partners to explore the capabilities and applications of quantum annealing technology, consistent with the goals of the government-wide National Strategic Computing Initiative. The National Strategic Computing Initiative, created by executive order of President Barack Obama in late July, is intended “to maximize [the] benefits of high-performance computing (HPC) research, development, and deployment.”

“Eventually Moore’s Law (that predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every two years) will come to an end,” said John Sarrao, associate director for Theory, Simulation, and Computation at Los Alamos. “Dennard Scaling (that predicted that performance per watt of computing would grow exponentially at roughly the same rate) already has. Beyond these two observations lies the end of the current ‘conventional’ computing era, so new technologies and ideas are needed.”

“As conventional computers reach their limits in terms of scaling and performance per watt, we need to investigate new technologies to support our mission,” said Mark Anderson of the Laboratory’s Weapons Physics Directorate. “Researching and evaluating quantum annealing as the basis for new approaches to address intractable problems is an essential and powerful step, and will enable a new generation of forward thinkers to influence its evolution in a direction most beneficial to the nation.”

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Dark matter is called “dark” for a good reason. Although they outnumber particles of regular matter by more than a factor of 10, particles of dark matter are elusive. Their existence is inferred by their gravitational influence in galaxies, but no one has ever directly observed signals from dark matter. Now, by measuring the mass of a nearby dwarf galaxy called Triangulum II, Assistant Professor of Astronomy Evan Kirby may have found the highest concentration of dark matter in any known galaxy.

Triangulum II is a small, faint galaxy at the edge of the Milky Way, made up of only about 1,000 stars. Kirby measured the mass of Triangulum II by examining the velocity of six stars whipping around the galaxy’s center. “The galaxy is challenging to look at,” he says. “Only six of its stars were luminous enough to see with the Keck telescope.” By measuring these stars’ velocity, Kirby could infer the gravitational force exerted on the stars and thereby determine the mass of the galaxy.

“The total mass I measured was much, much greater than the mass of the total number of stars—implying that there’s a ton of densely packed dark matter contributing to the total mass,” Kirby says. “The ratio of dark matter to luminous matter is the highest of any galaxy we know. After I had made my measurements, I was just thinking—wow.”

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Nvidia shared some more details on its upcoming Pascal architecture for 2016 — the new GPU will offer 1TB/s of memory bandwidth and up to 16GB of VRAM.

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A team has, for the first time, discovered how to produce ultra-thin “diamond nanothreads” that promise extraordinary properties, including strength and stiffness greater than that of today’s strongest nanotubes and polymer fibers. Such exceedingly strong, stiff, and light materials have an array of potential applications, everything from more-fuel efficient vehicles or even the science fictional-sounding proposal for a “space elevator.”

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Here’s how doctors pulled off the most complicated face transplant ever.

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