Lifeboat News: The Blog – Safeguarding Humanity

New genes associated with extreme longevity identified

Posted by Sean Brazell in biotech/medical, genetics, health, life extension, mathematics, neuroscience

Dec 24
2015

Death is a disease.

Diseases can and will be cured.

Do the math. wink

Disease GWAS show substantial genetic overlap with longevity. Shown are results for coronary artery disease and Alzheimer’s disease. The y axis is the observed P values for longevity, and the x axis is the expected P values under the null hypothesis that the disease is independent of longevity. The cyan, blue and purple lines show the P values for longevity of the top 100, 250, and 500 disease SNPs from independent genetic loci, respectively. Red lines show the background distribution of longevity P values for all independent genetic loci tested in both the longevity and disease GWAS. The grey horizontal line corresponds to the threshold for nominal significance (P = 0.05) for longevity. Significance of enrichment was determined with the hypergeometric test. (credit: Kristen Fortney et al./PLOS Genetics)

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Confronting the Multiverse: What ‘Infinite Universes’ Would Mean

Posted by Andreas Matt in cosmology

Dec 24
2015

Is it possible that our universe is but one of many, with laws that mean nothing in the “pocket universes” that co-exist all around, and through, us? Robert Lawrence Kuhn explores the multiverse with the help of the world’s leading experts on these theori.

This hoverboard costs $20,000 and can fly for six minutes

Posted by Klaus Baldauf in energy, space, transportation

Dec 24
2015

2015 was literally and figuratively the year of the hoverboard. While everyone was talking about the self-balancing scooters, two companies showed off skateboard-shaped boards that actually hovered a few inches above the Earth: Lexus with the “Slide” board, and Arx Pax with its second generation Hendo Hoverboard. Now, just days before the new year, another company called ArcaSpace is taking a shot at making the mythical hoverboard.

ArcaSpace is primarily a private space company, and one of the original 26 teams that competed in the Ansari X Prize competition in 2004. (It also entered the Lunar X Prize competition, too, before pulling out in 2013.) But early this morning the company released a video that shows off the “ArcaBoard,” a fan-powered rectangle that can lift a person off the ground by almost a foot.

The ArcaBoard gets its power — 430 pounds of thrust, or 272 horsepower, according to the company — from 36 electric fans. The company also says its built in some self-balancing tech to make it fly smoothly. Beyond that, though, it doesn’t look like there’s much to the experience. Dumitru Propescu, ArcaSpace’s CEO, is seen riding it in the video, but it doesn’t look like he has much control over where it’s going. It’s actually pretty reminiscent of the Hendo Hoverboard videos — sure, it hovers, but you can’t really steer it enough to ever use it to get anywhere.