Lifeboat Foundation

This week our guest is business and technology reporter, Peter Ward. Earlier this year, Peter released his book The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever, where he investigates the many movements and organizations that are seeking to extend human life, from the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida, to some of the biggest tech giants in Silicon Valley.

In this episode, we explore Peter’s findings, which takes us on a tour from cryonics to mind uploading, from supplements to gene editing, and much more. Along the way, we discuss the details of how one might actually achieve immortality, the details of senescent cells and telomeres, whether it’s better to live healthy than to live long, the scams and failures that seem to dominate the space, as well as the efforts that seem most promising.

Continue reading “The Failures and Opportunities of Immortality | Peter Ward, Feedback Loop, ep 75” »

Scientists at the recently opened SETI Post-Detection Hub at the University of St Andrews in Scotland have a daunting task ahead of them: figure out what…

One potential application: Enhancing the sensitivity of atomic magnetometers used to measure the alpha waves emitted by the human brain.

Scientists are increasingly seeking to discover more about quantum entanglement, which occurs when two or more systems are created or interact in such a manner that the quantum states of some cannot be described independently of the quantum states of the others. The systems are correlated, even when they are separated by a large distance. Interest in studying this kind of phenomenon is due to the significant potential for applications in encryption, communications, and quantum computing.

Performing computation using quantum-mechanical phenomena such as superposition and entanglement.

The first important generative models for images used an approach to artificial intelligence called a neural network — a program composed of many layers of computational units called artificial neurons. But even as the quality of their images got better, the models proved unreliable and hard to train. Meanwhile, a powerful generative model — created by a postdoctoral researcher with a passion for physics — lay dormant, until two graduate students made technical breakthroughs that brought the beast to life.

DALL·E 2 is such a beast. The key insight that makes DALL·E 2’s images possible — as well as those of its competitors Stable Diffusion and Imagen — comes from the world of physics. The system that underpins them, known as a diffusion model, is heavily inspired by nonequilibrium thermodynamics, which governs phenomena like the spread of fluids and gases. “There are a lot of techniques that were initially invented by physicists and now are very important in machine learning,” said Yang Song, a machine learning researcher at OpenAI.

Who threatens a war that could kill billions? Yet since Hiroshima, nations have sought nuclear weapons and planned for horrific casualties.

The goal of this activity was to have fun & boost everyone’s imagination to the limit. Everyone was shocked by Dall. E 2’s creative scope & infinite possibilities.

As this session was interactive & thought-provoking, it turned the usual tiresome process of learning into an energetic experience.

For those unfamiliar with Dall. E 2, it is Open AI’s newest tool that helps generate images from text inputs in seconds. The name “Dall. E 2” is a combination of the Spanish artist Salvador “Dali” & Pixar’s “Wall-E”. Dall. E 2 uses GPT 3 (Third generation Generative Pre-trained transformer) which is Open AI’s newest software release.

Papyrus boats, rowing and transport ships, sacred boats… during the Pharaonic era, various boats sailed the Nile and even the high seas.

Without the Nile, the holy river, Egypt would only be a vast desert. In ancient times, the annual rise of its waters guaranteed the sustenance of those who lived on its shores and, at the same time, served as a privileged communication route along the thousands of kilometers of its channel.

For this reason, in the daily life of the ancient Egyptians, ships played a fundamental role, whether it was for the movement of people, the transport of goods, or numerous religious ceremonies.

Cortical inhibitory interneurons undergo diverse forms of long-term synaptic plasticity. In this Review, Sjöström and colleagues describe the diversity of this interneuron plasticity and highlight that the plasticitome, a comprehensive database of plasticity rules, is needed to understand circuit plasticity complexity.

A new radiation-based mechanism adds to the ways that amino acids could have been made in space and brought to the young Earth.