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Venture Investing To Catalyze The Next Generation Of Founder-Led, Longevity Biotech Companies — Dr. Alex Colville, Ph.D., Co-Founder and General Partner — age1.

Dr. Alex Colville, Ph.D. is Co-Founder and General Partner of age1 (https://age1.com/), a venture capital firm focused on catalyzing the next generation of founder-led, longevity biotech companies, with a strategy of building a community of visionaries advancing new therapeutics, tools, and technologies targeting aging and age-related diseases.

With a recent initial closing of US$35 million, age1 will be focusing on founders and companies at the earliest stages of first-money in, pre-seed and seed funding, and is resourced to continue to support companies through later rounds.

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Work has begun on the seventh and final primary mirror of the ground-based Giant Magellan Telescope, which is expected to provide four times the image resolution of previous observatories when completed.

Computer-generated image of the finished Giant Magellan Telescope.

Scientists in the United States have begun fabricating and polishing the seventh and final primary mirror of the Giant Magellan Telescope. This will eventually complete its 368 square metre light collecting surface – forming the largest, most technically challenging optical system in astronomical history. When combined, all seven mirrors will collect more light than any other telescope in existence, making it a truly next-generation observatory.

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Archaeologists have unearthed the oldest known wooden structure, and it’s almost half a million years old.

The simple structure — found along a riverbank in Zambia — is made up of two interlocking logs, with a notch deliberately crafted into the upper piece to allow them to fit together at right angles, according to a new study of cut marks made by stone tools.

The earliest known wood artifact is a 780,000-year-old fragment of polished plank found at the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, while the oldest wooden tools for foraging and hunting on record — unearthed in Europe — date back about 400,000 years. It’s thought that Neanderthals made structures from bones or stalactites around 175,000 years ago.

Researchers have unearthed the oldest known wooden structure in Zambia, and it’s almost half a million years old, according to a new study.

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This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three physicists — Pierre Agostini at Ohio State University, US, Ferenc Krausz at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and Anne L’Huillier at Lund University, Sweden — for their research into attosecond pulses of light.

Attosecond physics allows scientists to look at the very smallest particles at the very shortest timescales (an attosecond is one-quintillionth of a second, or one-billionth of a nanosecond). The winners all developed experiments to be able to produce these ultrafast laser pulses, which can be used to probe our world at the smallest scales and have applications across chemistry, biology and physics.

The prize was announced this morning by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm, Sweden. The winners share a prize of 11 million Swedish kroner (US$1 million).

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Congrats to Anne & Pierre.

Inside atoms and molecules, electrons zip around at extreme speeds. Their motions can only be captured with super short pulses of light — like camera flashes that last billionths of a billionth of a second. The 2023 Nobel Prize in physics goes to three physicists who have helped create such “attosecond” blasts of laser light.

By offering superfast snapshots of electrons, their research is changing our view of the inner workings of atoms and molecules.

One of the winners is Anne L’Huillier, of Lund University in Sweden. Another is Pierre Agostini at Ohio State University in Columbus. The third is Ferenc Krausz. He works at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. The trio will split 11 million Swedish kronor, or about $1 million in prize money. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the honor October 3.

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It wouldn’t shock me if all the buzz around searching for the ‘locus of consciousness’ merely fine-tunes our grasp of how the brain is linked to consciousness — without actually revealing where consciousness comes from, because it’s not generated in the brain. Similarly, your smartphone doesn’t create the Internet or a cellular network; it just processes them. Networks of minds are a common occurrence throughout the natural world. What sets humans apart is the impending advent of cybernetic connectivity explosion that could soon evolve into a form of synthetic telepathy, eventually leading to the rise of a unified, global consciousness — what could be termed the Syntellect Emergence.

#consciousness #phenomenology #cybernetics #cognition #neuroscience

In summary, the study of consciousness could be conceptualized through a variety of lenses: as a series of digital perceptual snapshots, as a cybernetic system with its feedback processes, as a grand theater; or perhaps even as a VIP section in a cosmological establishment of magnificent complexity. Today’s leading theories of consciousness are largely complementary, not mutually exclusive. These multiple perspectives not only contribute to philosophical discourse but also herald the dawn of new exploratory avenues, equally enthralling and challenging, in our understanding of consciousness.

In The Cybernetic Theory of Mind (2022), I expand on existing theories to propose certain conceptual models and concepts, such as Noocentrism, Digital Presentism (D-Theory of Time), Experiential Realism, Ontological Holism, Multi-Ego Pantheistic Solipsism, the Omega Singularity, deeming a non-local consciousness, or Universal Mind, as the substrate of objective reality. In search of God’s equation, we finally look upward for the source. What many religions call “God” is clearly an interdimensional being within the nested levels of complexity. Besides setting initial conditions for our universe, God speaks to us in the language of religion, spirituality, synchronicities and transcendental experiences.

Continue reading “What Constitutes Your Stream of Consciousness?” | >

Professor René Ketting’s team at the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) in Mainz, Germany, along with Dr. Sebastian Falk’s group at the Max Perutz Labs in Vienna, Austria, have discovered a new enzyme, PUCH, which plays a key role in preventing the spread of parasitic DNA

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).

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In a breakthrough for the futuristic field of quantum computing, researchers have implemented a basic arithmetic operation in a fault-tolerant manner on an actual quantum processor for the first time. In other words, they found a way to bring us closer to more reliable, powerful quantum computers less prone to errors or inaccuracies.

Quantum computers harness the bizarre properties of quantum physics to rapidly solve problems believed to be impossible for classical computers. By encoding information in quantum bits or “qubits,” they can perform computations in parallel, rather than sequentially as with normal bits.

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