Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Some people become incredibly confused about the effort to eliminate aging, which they see as a nebulous, ill-defined process. I refer to the concept of radical life extension, when aging as a process has been abolished. I am not referring to simple healthy longevity (the effort to live a healthy life until the current maximum lifespan of 110–120). Here are some common misconceptions:

1. The Fallacy of words

Eliminating aging will make us ‘immortal’ and we will live forever.

No, it won’t. If we eliminate aging as a cause of death, we may be able to live for an indefinite (not infinite) period, until something else kills us. Even in a world without aging, death can happen at any time (at age 10, 65 or 1003) and for any reason (a shot in the head, malaria, drowning). If we manage to eliminate aging as a cause of death, the only certain thing would be that we will not necessarily die when we reach the currently maximum lifespan limit of around 110–120 years. We would certainly NOT live for ever, because something else will kill us sooner or later. Our organs cannot be repaired if we perish in a nuclear explosion for example, or in a fire. Some statisticians have mentioned that, without aging, we may be able to live to 1700–2000 years on average before death happens due to some other catastrophic damage. This is a long time, but it is not ‘forever’.

Continue reading “The Seven Fallacies of Aging” | >

image credit - Protomag.com

Technology for pain-free healing:

“Your threshold for pain is near zero”, said my dentist, as she deftly moved the extremely thin fiber optic laser head away.

“That’s why I chose to fly in here. Gum filet carving doesn’t appeal to me”, I mumbled, my lips feeling leathery from the anesthetic spray.

There was a mild tingling as the laser killed millions of enemies under my gum-line. I lay back in the chair and considered the alternative I was presented only the day before by an over enthusiastic periodontist — A scalpel and suture gum flap procedure for “deep cleaning.”

‘This is 2013′, I had thought to myself. ‘There has to be a less primitive way… a less painful solution.’

Continue reading “Minimally Invasive Medical Technology – For the betterment of the human condition.” | >

Reuven Cohen,

It’s that time of the year again. You know, that time of year when technologists, pundits and bloggers get into the festive spirit and share technology predictions for the coming year. Being partially curious and possibly not wanting to be left out of the fun, I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring with my own set of prognoses. In terms of timeframe, whether it’s 2014 or 2050 is another story. Alas, this is a story about intersecting trends, asking the simple yet infinitely complex question of where is technology taking us?

The famous computer scientist Alan Kay can best sum up my opinion on technology predictions in his famous 1971 quote; “Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of Newton’s Laws!”

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by Tanya Lewis, LiveScience

The yellow arrow points to retinal ganglion cell, responsible for transmitting signals from the eye to the brain.

Using an inkjet printer, researchers have succeeded in printing adult eye cells for the first time. The demonstration is a step toward producing tissue implants that could cure some types of blindness.

Scientists have previously printed embryonic stem cells and other immature cells. But scientists had thought adult cells might be too fragile to print. Now, researchers have printed cells from the optic nerves of rats, finding the cells not only survived, but also retained the ability to grow and develop.

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Continue reading “Eye Cells Inkjet-Printed for First Time” | >

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While the rest of us are messing around with our PayPals and Amazon Payments, some folks in Argentina have created the first crowdfunding platform in America to take Bitcoin.

The platform, called Idea.me focuses primarily on artistic, musical, and retail projects although, as evidenced by the project photos, many campaigns have a philanthropic bent. The platform was “born in Argentina” wrote Pia Giudice and is now in seven countries in Latin America. It is the area’s only regional crowdfunding platform. The platform has seen $750,000 in funding and should be raising $2.4 million in March 2014 in a Series A.

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image via Voxman

Every once in a while an electric vehicle comes along which just wows my socks off. Usually they are also the ones I’ll never be able to pay for on a writer’s salary. The latest of these is the recently unveiled Wattman super electric motorcycle from Franch brand Voxan.

The Wattman, according to Voxan, is the most powerful electric motorcycle in the world. It is also one of the most badass looking ones to date. Sporting 200 hp and a torque of 200 Nm up to 10,500 RPM, the motorcycle can accelerate from 0 to 160 km/h (nearly 100 miles per hour) in a flat 5.9 seconds thanks to its belt drive motor.

Continue reading “Here’s The Electric Motorcycle You Want” | >

Ernst & Young LLP is predicting a rise in demand for certain types of insurance, such as cyber and nanotechnology.

The consulting firm announced Tuesday the release of the EY 2014 US Property-Casualty Insurance Outlook, which recommends that P&C carriers “invest in innovation of product development processes and delivery to meet rising demand for protection.”

For example, according to the report, a lack of “any meaningful history” with nanotechnology indicates that potential risks are not easy to assess.

“The emerging applications of nanotechnology in the manufacture or use of medicine, cosmetics, drug delivery, robotics, materials science and other products and systems create potential liability exposures,” EY noted. “Examples include bodily injury (analogous to asbestos exposure) and environmental damage from nanoparticles escaping uncontrolled into the air or water supply.”

Continue reading “Risk of nanotechnology difficult for insurers to assess: Ernst & Young” | >

By The Sentinel

STUDENTS and sci-fi enthusiasts got the chance to meet a ‘real-life human cyborg’ as part of a special demonstration.

Kevin Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading where he carries out research in artificial intelligence, robotics and cyborgs.

He became known as the world’s first cyborg when he had a silicon chip implanted in the nervous system of his arm, in order to link his brain directly with a computer. He then became the first person in the world to communicate electronically between his own and his wife’s nervous system.

by Jeremiah Budin

Bitcoin is a somewhat mysterious, fairly confusing type of digital currency that, until recently, you could use to buy large amount of drugs on the internet. But now you can use Bitcoin for something (arguably) even better than drugs: New York City real estate. A tipster recently sent along a listing for a $2,580/month one-bedroom sublet in 99 John Deco Lofts, accepting Bitcoin, which hit the market last month. And today, online apartment search marketplace RentHop announced in a press release that it will be accepting Bitcoin from people advertising NYC apartments on its site.

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By Robert McMillan

One of the top software engineers behind the Bitcoin digital currency wants to launch it into space.

Last month, Jeff Garzik floated the idea of Bitcoin in space on an internet discussion forum, pitching it as a way to always keep the system up and running — even if it’s attacked by malicious hackers.

The plan is to send up a Bitcoin computer on a tiny inexpensive satellite and have this machine communicate with terrestrial Bitcoin computers via radio. Garzik — who works at Bitcoin payment processor Bitpay and helps shape the open source software that drives the digital currency on thousands of machines across the internet — says that the satellite node could help the Bitcoin network fight back something known as a Sibyl attack. This is where malicious computers flood a node on the peer-to-peer network with bad data. It could give criminals a way of spending their bitcoins more than once, and it’s also part of the so-called selfish miner scenario that Cornell University researchers described last month, saying it could bring down the entire system.

Continue reading “Bitcoins in Space: Hacker to Fire Digital Currency Into Orbit” | >