Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Getting the Corporate Ears of the People Who Rule the World! By Andres Agostini at www.linkedin.com/in/andresagostini

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If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Procter & Gamble, talk to them through the notions of and by Process Re-engineering.

If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at GE, talk to them through the notions of and by Six Sigma.

If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at RAND Corporation, talk to them through the notions of and by Herman Khan’s (Dr. Strangeloves’) Scenario Methodology.

If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Mitsubishi Motors and Honda, talk to them through the notions of and by Kaisen.

If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at NASA and DARPA and the Industrial-Military Complex, talk to them through the notions of and by Systems Approach with the Perspective of Applied Non-Theological Omniscience.

If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Lockheed Martin, talk to them through the notions of and by Six Sigma and Skunk Works.

If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Toyota, talk to them through the notions of and by Toyota Production System (methodology).

If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Royal Dutch Shell, talk to them through the notions of and by Pierre Wack’s Scenario Methodology.

If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Mayo Clinic, talk to them through the notions of and by Dr. Joseph Juran’s (Total Quality Assurance) Prescription (ISBN: 978–0787900960).

If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Google, talk to them through the notions of and by Strong Quantum Supercomputing and Reversing of Human Death.

If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Xerox, talk to them through the notions of and by PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated).

If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at ExxonMobil, talk to them through the notions of and by Efficiency and Productivity as well as Return On Investment (ROI) per Petroleum Barrel produced (outputted).

If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Boeing, talk to them through the notions of and by Aerospace Engineering, Avionics, Systems Engineering, Reliability Engineering, Safety Engineering, Industrial Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering.

If you want to seize the undivided attention of top executives at Loyd’s of London, Swiss RE, Munich RE, talk to them through the notions of and by Minimax, Statistics, Actuarial Science, Predictive Analytic, and Systems Engineering.

(A Brief Excerpt of the White Swan book).

Kuzweil AI

USC Viterbi School of Engineering researchers have developed a flexible, transparent, energy-efficient, lower-cost hybrid design that could replace silicon as the traditional transistor material used in electronic chips.

The new design, described in a paper recently published in Nature Communications, combines carbon nanotube thin-film transistors with thin-film transistors comprised of indium, gallium and zinc oxide (IGZO).

Electrical engineering professor Dr. Chongwu Zhou and USC Viterbi graduate students Haitian Chen, Yu Cao, and Jialu Zhang developed this energy-efficient circuit by integrating carbon nanotube (CNT) thin film transistors (TFT)

The inclusion of IGZO thin film transistors was necessary to provide power efficiency to increase battery life. If only carbon nanotubes had been used, the circuits would not be power-efficient.

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Maureen Wise — Nation of Change
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You’ve probably heard that bees—their honey, their awesome pollinating powers and their stingers—are on the decline. It’s a global problem that affects more than just the little yellow and black buzzers; it can and will interrupt the way we produce food if it continues. Bees pollinate most of the crops farmers grow worldwide, so without them, we don’t have food. Most scientists agree that pesticides, drought, habitat loss, pollution and other major environmental concerns are all contributing to colony collapse disorder. It’s a big deal and there are a lot of people working to keep bees buzzing.

A new project has set out to help understand the issue in individual colonies and bring the problem to the people called Open Source Beehives. This multi-continent partnership between Open Tech Collaborative and Fab Lab Barcelona proposes public participation through easily made backyard hives in conjunction with software that will track hive health.

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Brandon Baker — Nation of Change
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A large wheel has been strolling the Baltimore Inner Harbor the past month, doing its best to clean the trash that has littered a city landmark and tourist attraction.

It’s called the Inner Harbor Water Wheel, and though it moves slow, it has the capability to collect 50,000 pounds of trash. The timing for John Kellett’s solar-powered creation is crucial—hands and crab nets simply can’t keep up with the growing amount of wrappers, cigarette butts, bottles and other debris carried from storm drains into the harbor.

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ArchDaily

“Plastic is an extremely durable material, taking 500 years to biodegrade, yet it’s designed to be used for an average of 5 minutes, and so it’s thrown away. Few know where this mass of junk will end up … in the oceans, killing and silently destroying everything, even us.”

Cristian Ehrmantraut has developed a prototype for a floating platform that filters the ocean and absorbs plastic. Located 4 km from the coast of , close to the center of the mega-vortex of plastic located in the South Pacific, the tetrahedral platform performs a kind of dialysis, allowing the natural environment to be recovered as well as energy and food to be produced.

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By Suzanne Jacobs — MIT Technology Review

Last week Google and Novartis announced that they’re teaming up to develop contact lenses that monitor glucose levels and automatically adjust their focus. But these could be just the start of a clever new product category. From cancer detection and drug delivery to reality augmentation and night vision, our eyes offer unique opportunities for both health monitoring and enhancement.

“Now is the time to put a little computer and a lot of miniaturized technologies in the contact lens,” says Franck Leveiller, head of research and development in the Novartis eye care division.

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Written By: — Singularity Hub
robot-ping-pong-olympics 1
Japan likes robots. And while some Americans raised on a confusing sci-fi diet of Star Wars, Terminator, and iRobot are perhaps a little wary of advanced AI and robotics—Japan simply can’t wait for the “robot revolution.”

In a recent tour of Japanese robotics firms, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe declared his intention to create a government task force to study and propose strategies for tripling the size of Japan’s robotics industry to $24 billion.

And one more thing, Abe said, “In 2020, I would like to gather all of the world’s robots and aim to hold an Olympics where they compete in technical skills.”

While mere mortals compete in the 2020 summer Olympics in Tokyo—in a stadium somewhere nearby, the world’s most advanced robots may go head to head in events showcasing their considerable prowess (hopefully by then, right?).

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By Smitha Mundasad — BBC News
Picture of children reaching for food
Scientists have discovered a central hub of brain cells that may put the brakes on a desire to eat, a study in mice shows.
And switching on these neurons can stop feeding immediately, according to the Nature Neurosciences report.
Researchers say the findings may one day contribute to therapies for obesity and anorexia.
Experts say this sheds light on the many complex nerve circuits involved in appetite control.

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By Susan Young Rojahn — MIT Technology Review

Researchers and investors are already dreaming up ways to devise medical treatments based on the near-fantastical findings that the blood of young mice can rejuvenate older mice. In some cases, a single protein found circulating in the blood is sufficient to restore muscle tissue and improve brain activity.

The excitement is spurred by three newly published studies that showed that components of blood from young mice were able to repair damage and improve the function of the muscles and brains of older mice. Previous work from one of the research teams involved has also shown that a specific component of young blood can repair the damaged hearts of older mice.

“We started this work more than a decade ago, with a kind-of crazy hypothesis that there might be something in the blood that influences tissue repair with age,” says Amy Wagers, a researcher at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, who is a coauthor on two of the three new works. (MIT Technology Review has covered Wagers’s work in the past, in “Young Blood Reverses Signs of Aging in Old Mice”; however, the study in question in that story was later retracted due to questions over the role of particular cells: “Research on Rejuvenating Effect of Young Blood Retracted.”) Last year, Wagers had reported that linking the circulatory systems of an older mouse and a younger mouse at the hip helped improve the appearance and function of the weakened, enlarged hearts of older mice. The team then screened the blood of young and old mice to look for differences and found that older mice had less of a protein growth factor called GDF11, which is also found in human blood.

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By: Emily Singer — Quanta Magazine

Applying game theory to the behavior of genes provides a new view of natural selection.

In what appears to be the first study of its kind, computer scientists report that an algorithm discovered more than 50 years ago in game theory and now widely used in machine learning is mathematically identical to the equations used to describe the distribution of genes within a population of organisms. Researchers may be able to use the algorithm, which is surprisingly simple and powerful, to better understand how natural selection works and how populations maintain their genetic diversity.

By viewing evolution as a repeated game, in which individual players, in this case genes, try to find a strategy that creates the fittest population, researchers found that evolution values both diversity and fitness.

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