Lifeboat Foundation

“We don’t think people will give up their own cars. Americans like to do everything in the cars. They eat in cars, they drink in cars, they have entertainment in cars and they change clothes in cars — people who leave the office at lunch and sleep in their cars, or wait in their cars for an hour at a time for their children. Driving is really the distracting thing we do in cars.” Read more

Mourning Aibo.

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Do androids dream of electric sheep? The day dreams of A.I. Neural networks.

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“Many—if not most—of the Earth’s aquifers are in trouble. … That’s the finding of a group of NASA scientists, who published their study of global groundwater this week in the journal Water Resources Research. Water levels in 21 of the world’s 37 largest known aquifers, they report, are trending negative.”

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Levitation and the defiance of gravity is possible. If until now levitation was just a magic act or circus “reality” or, tractor beam technology existed just in sci-fi movies, recently, a team of Japanese researchers have demonstrated the first technology that not only brings the mythology of levitation to life but leap frogs it to create a tractor beam, lifting and moving objects across 3 dimensions using sound alone.

The essence of levitation technology is the countervailing of gravity. By stoping gravity, levitation is possible. It is known that an ultrasound standing wave is capable of suspending small particles at its sound pressure nodes. The acoustic axis of the ultrasound beam in conventional studies was parallel to the gravitational force, and the levitated objects were manipulated along the fixed axis (i.e. one-dimensionally) by controlling the phases or frequencies of bolted Langevin-type transducers.

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Nicky Ashwell, 29, from London, can now carry out tasks with both hands for first time with hand developed by prosthetic experts Steeper

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Brain activity recorded by electrocorticography electrodes (blue circles). Spoken words are then decoded from neural activity patterns in the blue/yellow areas. (credit: CSL/KIT)

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I have mentioned mTOR as one of the main aging genes on multiple occasions. It’s about time I tell you what it is, what it does and why it is so important in aging.

mTOR has a little m in front of TOR, which means I am speaking about mammals. It technically means «mechanistic» TOR, but think of it as the molecule that mice and all of us have, whereas in worms is it just TOR.

mTOR gene produces one mTOR protein that can act in two pretty different ways. mTOR does so, because it forms two complexes with other molecules. These complexes are called mTORC1 and mTORC2. Yeah, I know, it’s a lot of letters, but C1 and C2 stand for «complex 1» and «complex 2», so it kinda makes sense.

Continue reading “The mTOR Story Part 1 — What Makes This Important Pro-Aging Molecule Active?” »