Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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1. Silicon technology has taken humanity a long way forward from 1947 when the first transistor was invented by the Nobel prize winners Shockley, Bardeen & Brattain.

2. From smart mobile telephones we rely on to the sophisticated satellite navigation systems guiding our cars, a lot of techno-magic we see around us is a result of our ability to scale silicon-tech that turns hitherto science fiction into everyday reality at affordable prices.

3. All the Nobel laureates, scientists and engineers we liaise with at Quantum Innovation Labs http://QiLabs.net collectively realise the end of the silicon-scaling era is coming to end as the Moore’s Law era for Silicon-based computers finally concludes.

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Today, Toyota announced that it has hired Gill Pratt to drive its autonomous car research. Pratt is best known in this field for his work at DARPA and MIT, including starting the Robotics Challenge. The company is also investing $50 million in the research over the next five years as well as partnering with MIT and Stanford.

AAEAAQAAAAAAAAKxAAAAJDI5YjM4ZWM1LTFmOTgtNGEwNS04YmM3LTNiMWI4NmJiMjY2MQPratt has spent the past five years with DARPA, and laid out what’s important for Toyota at an event in Palo Alto today: “Our long-term goal is to make a car that is never responsible for a crash.”

Pratt will serve as Toyota’s “Executive Technical Advisor” on the research.

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Checkout the latest Longevity Reporter Newsletter (05th September, 2015), covering this week’s top news in health, aging, longevity.

This week: Dramatic Advances In Super-Resolution Imaging; This Stunning 3-D Model Provides A Fresh Perspective On Cancer; Want A Long Lifespan? You Need Stable Gene Networks; The Future Of Health: Precision Medicine; And more.

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An international team of researchers from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), IBM, the University of Edinburgh and Auburn University have shown that a new device concept — a ‘squishy’ transistor — can overcome the predicted power bottleneck caused by CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) technology reaching its fundamental limits.

Moore’s law predicted that the number of transistors able to fit on a given die area would double every two years. As transistor density doubled, chip size shrank and processing speeds increased. This march of progress led to rapid advances in and a surge in the number of interconnected devices. The challenge with making anything smaller is that there are fundamental physical limits that can’t be ignored and we are now entering the final years of CMOS transistor shrinkage.

Furthermore, this proliferation is driving an increase in data volume, accompanied by rising demands on energy to process, store and communicate it all; as a result, IT infrastructure now draws an estimated 10 % of the world’s electrical power. Previous efforts have focused on remediation by reducing the amount of energy per bit. However, soon we will hit a power barrier that will prevent continued voltage scaling. The development of novel, low-power devices based on different physical principles is therefore crucial to the continued evolution of IT.

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