Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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For decades after its inception in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—DARPA, the central research and development organization of the Department of Defense—focused on developing vast weapons systems. Starting in 1990, and owing to individuals like Gorman, a new focus was put on soldiers, airmen, and sailors—on transforming humans for war. The progress of those efforts, to the extent it can be assessed through public information, hints at war’s future, and raises questions about whether military technology can be stopped, or should.

Gorman sketched out an early version of the thinking in a paper he wrote for DARPA after his retirement from the Army in 1985, in which he described an “integrated-powered exoskeleton” that could transform the weakling of the battlefield into a veritable super-soldier. The “SuperTroop” exoskeleton he proposed offered protection against chemical, biological, electromagnetic, and ballistic threats, including direct fire from a.50-caliber bullet. It “incorporated audio, visual, and haptic [touch] sensors,” Gorman explained, including thermal imaging for the eyes, sound suppression for the ears, and fiber optics from the head to the fingertips. Its interior would be climate-controlled, and each soldier would have his own physiological specifications embedded on a chip within his dog tags. “When a soldier donned his ST [SuperTroop] battledress,” Gorman wrote, “he would insert one dog-tag into a slot under the chest armor, thereby loading his personal program into the battle suit’s computer,” giving the 21st-century soldier an extraordinary ability to hear, see, move, shoot, and communicate.

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Some truly beautiful images!

Our cosmos is freaking wonderful. And a few talented and patient photographers have managed to capture all of its glory. It’s time to celebrate them, by ogling some of their most brilliant photos.

Every year, the Royal Observatory Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition picks the best photos by astrophotographers. And now, a new book collects the most incredibly gorgeous images from the past several years, bringing the cosmos to your coffee table. We’re happy to be able to share some of the pictures from the book Astronomy Photographer of the Year: Prize-winning Images by Top Astrophotographers with you.

Above: Aurora Brutality by Tommy Richardsen, from 2012.

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Calculations show that if the wormhole’s throat is orders of magnitude longer then the width of its mouth, it does indeed create Casimir energy at its centre.

Cambridge Physicists Find Wormhole Proof:-Physicists at the University of Cambridge have established a theoretical groundwork for the reality of wormholes, which are pipes that join two different points in space-time. If a part of information or physical object could pass through the wormhole, it might open the door to time travel or immediate communication through huge distances. “But there’s a problem: Einstein’s wormholes are extremely unsteady, and they don’t stay open long enough for something to pass over.” In 1988, physicists reached the deduction that a type of negative energy called Casimir energy might keep wormholes open.

The hypothetical solution established at Cambridge has to do with the properties of quantum energy, which conveys that even vacuums are teaming by means of waves of energy. If you visualize two metal plates in a vacuum, some waves of energy would be excessively big enogh to fit between the plates, meaning that the space-time among the plates would have negative energy. “Under the right circumstances, could the tube-like shape of the wormhole itself generate Casimir energy? Calculations show that if the wormhole’s throat is orders of magnitude longer then the width of its mouth, it does indeed create Casimir energy at its centre.”

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(Medical Xpress)—A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Japan has succeeded in growing kidneys from stem cells that worked as they were supposed to after being transplanted into rats and pigs. The team outlines their work and results in a paper they have had published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers have met with success in the past, using human stem cells to grow organs, in this case kidneys, unfortunately, the kidneys that have been grown have all developed without a urinary pathway—the means by which urine makes its way out of the and to a tube that connects with the bladder. Such kidneys experience hydronephrosis, where they bloat with urine. In this new effort, the researchers found a way to grow both a kidney and a pathway and an initial bladder, all of which successfully replicated the work normally done by natural organs for a period of time.

The team used the organogenic niche method to grow kidneys using rat stem cells, which when tested, were able to produce urine. Next, they grew a urinary pathway, which was in effect, a type of drainage tube. Then, they grew a blabber that would be compatible with the drainage tube. With all the parts, grown, the kidney was placed inside a rat, then the pathway was added, followed by the bladder they’d grown—the new bladder was then connected to the rat’s native . After sewing up the rat, they found the whole system worked. The team then repeated what they had done with a much larger animal, one much closer in size to humans—a pig—and found the same results.

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Bill__0337This week’s episode welcomes Bill Andrew’s, Ph. D., President and Founder of the biotechnology firm Sierra Sciences. Bill is widely considered the foremost researcher on aging and telomeres and most of his entire professional career has been devoted to finding a cure for aging. Most notably, he led a team in 1997 at Geron Corporation to successfully identify the human enzyme telomerase. An enzyme that causes Telomeres to lengthen, thus enabling cells to replicate itself without hitting their Hayflick limit (i.e. the number of times a cell is able to reproduce itself). It is believed that only human embryonic stem cells and cancer cells are immortal and do not possess a Hayflick limit.

Our conversation explores the science, possibilities, and social impacts of finding a cure for aging. He explains his company’s quest to create a safe and affordable drug that will lengthen telomeres in every cell in your body. He believes his research team is one year away from starting human trials if he receives the additional funding necessary to finish his research.

Join us in this fascinating discussion that is sure to change the way you view aging and our future.

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Stanford engineers have developed a transparent silicon overlay that can increase the efficiency of solar cells by keeping them cool. The cover collects and then radiates heat directly into space, without interfering with incoming photons. According to a local HVAC Spokane, WA company, “If mass-produced, the development could be used to cool down any device in the open air – for instance, to complement air conditioning in cars.”

After a full day in the sun, solar cells in California can approach temperatures of 80° C (175° F), even in winter months. Excessive heat can pose problems because, while the cells need sunlight to harvest energy, they also lose efficiency as they heat up. A standard silicon cell, for example, will drop from 20 to 19 percent efficiency by heating up just 10° C (18° F) or so.

Laptops address the overheating problem with the help of carefully engineered fans and heat sinks, but for solar panels and other devices that work in the open air, space itself could serve as heat sink par excellence. The coolness of space, approaching absolute zero, would negate the need for elaborate and expensive heat dissipation contraptions – if only we had a way to access it from the ground.

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Have you hugged or told someone that you love them today? Maybe it wasn’t someone — maybe it was your smartphone that you gave an extra squeeze or gave an extra pat as you slipped it into your pocket. Humans have become increasingly invested in their devices, and a new era of emotional attachment to our devices and other AI seems to be upon us. But how does this work itself out on the other end — will or could AI ever respond to humans in an emotional fashion?

Communication Sparks Emotional Response

AI is broad, and clearly not all AI are meant to give and receive in an emotional capacity. Humans seem prone to respond to features that are similar to its own species, or to those to which it can relate to in some sort of communicative way. Most “emotional” or responsive algorithm-based capabilities have been programmed into robots that are in a humanoid – or at least a mammal-like – form.

Think androids in customer-service, entertainment, or companion-type roles. There are also robots like PARO, the baby harbor seal used for therapeutic interaction with those in assisted living and hospital environments.

In a 2003 paper published through the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Cynthia Breazeal quotes a study by Reeves and Nass (1996), whose research shows humans (whether computer experts, lay people, or computer critics) generally treat computers as they might treat other people.

Breazeal goes on to state that humanoid robots (and animated software agents) are particularly relevant, as a similar morphology promotes an intuitive bond based on similar communication modes, such as facial expression, body posture, gesture, gaze direction, and voice.

An Emotional Model for AI

This in and of itself may not be a complete revelation, but how you get a robot to accomplish such emotional responses is far more complicated. When the Hanson Robotics’ team programs responses, a key objective is to build robots that are expressive and lifelike so that people can interact and feel comfortable with the emotional responses that they are receiving from a robot.

In the realm of emotions, there is a difference between robot ‘responses’ and robot ‘propensities’. Stephan Vladimir Bugaj, Creative Director at Hanson Robotics, separated the two during an interview with TechEmergence. “Propensities are much more interesting and are definitely more of the direction we’re going in the immediate long-term”, he says.

“An emotional model for a robot would be more along the lines of weighted sets of possible response spaces that the robot can go into based on a stimulus and choose a means of expression within that emotional space based on a bunch of factors.” In other words, a robot with propensities would consider a set of questions, such as “What do I think of the person? How did it act in the last minute? How am I feeling today?”. This how most humans function through reason, though it happens so habitually and quickly in the subconscious that we are hardly aware of the process.

Context of immediate stimulus would provide an emotional frame, allowing a robot to have a more complex response to each stimulus. The use of short-term memory would help the robot build a longer-term emotional model. “You think of it as layers, you can think of it as interconnected networks of weighted responses…as collections of neurons, there’s a lot of different ways of looking at it, but it basically comes down to stages of filtering and considering stimuli, starting with the input filter at the perceptual level.”

Similar to a human being, robots could have more than one response to a stimulus. An initial reaction or reflex might quickly give way to a more “considered response”, cause by stored and shared information in a neural-like network. Stephan describes a hypothetical scene in which a friend enters a room and begins taking swings at his or her friend. At first, the friend who is on the defense might react by immediately assuming a fighting stance; however, it might only take a few seconds for him or to realize that the other person is actually just “horsing around” and being a bit of an antagonist for sport.

This string of events provides a simple way to visualize emotional stages of reaction. Perception, context, and analysis all play a part in the responses of a complex entity, including advanced robots. Robots with such potential complex emotional models seem different from AI entities programmed to respond to human emotions.

The Beginnings of Responsive Robots

These AI don’t necessarily need to take a human-like form (I’m thinking of the movie Her), as long as they can communicate in a language that humans understand. In the past few years, innovators have started to hit the IndieGogo market with domestic social robots such as Jibo and EmoSPARK, meant to enhance human wellbeing through intelligent response capabilities.

Patrick Levy Rosenthal, founder of EmoSpace, envisioned a device that connects to the various electronic objects in our homes, able to adjust their function to positively affect our emotional state. “For the last 20 years, I believe that robotics and artificial intelligence failed humans…we still see them as a bunch of silicon… we know that they don’t understand what we feel.”

Rosenthal set out to change this perception with EmoSPARK, a cube-like AI that calibrates with other objects in the user’s home, such as an mp3 music player. The device, according to Rosenthal, tracks over 180 points on a person’s face, as well as the relation between those points – if you’re smiling, your lips will be stretched and eyes more narrow. The device also detects movement and voice tonality for reading emotional cues. It can then respond to those cues with spoken prompts and suggestions for improving mood – for example, asking if its human user needs to hear a joke or a favorite song; it can also respond to and process spoken commands.

While robots that respond to humans’ emotionally-based states and requests may soon be available to the masses, robots that have their own emotional models – that can “laugh and cry” autonomously, so to speak – are still out of reach, for the time being.