Lifeboat Foundation

A sci fi documentary looking at a timelapse of future spacecraft. From the future of AI spaceships, Starship orbital refuelling, and space station worlds, to Mars colonization and in-space manufacturing.

Other topics include: SpaceX and the launch of their fleet of Starships — waiting in parking orbit around Earth, ready for the launch window to open to Mars. NASA and the mission of landing on the Martian Moon Phobos. Advances in spacecraft technology for protecting humans during multi-year interstellar journeys.

Continue reading “TIMELAPSE OF FUTURE SPACECRAFT: 2025 — 3000+” »

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Watch here.

There hasn’t been a revolution quite like this before, one that’s shaken the talent industry so dramatically over the past few years. The pandemic, the Great Resignation, inflation and now talk of looming recessions are changing talent strategies as we know them.

Such significant changes, and the challenge of staying ahead of them, have brought artificial intelligence (AI) to the forefront of the minds of HR leaders and recruitment teams as they endeavor to streamline workflows and identify suitable talent to fill vacant positions faster. Yet many organizations are still implementing AI tools without proper evaluation of the technology or indeed understanding how it works — so they can’t be confident they are using it responsibly.

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Watch here.

To those that were part of the dot-com era tech scene, 2022 has a familiar energy. But now it’s all about the metaverse. And, just as they did in 1993 when the World Wide Web was launched into the public domain, many are asking themselves, “what is it, anyway?” What’s real, what’s hype and where are we headed?

The truth is, much like Internet 1.0 and all of its subsequent iterations, the metaverse is being defined as it’s being built. And contrary to what many believe, it’s more than just VR headsets and avatars. The metaverse is a place, an ecosystem, and above all else, an entirely new dimension. But to better understand this, it’s important to know how the metaverse is being developed.

A course in illusionism by Keith frankish.

A course of six lectures on the illusionist view of consciousness, prepared for the Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies in 2020.

There’s an epidemic in Western countries, and one few people are aware of. It’s an epidemic of visceral fat, a deep kind of fat that packs around vital organs, like the liver, and is linked with health problems like diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure.

You might assume that only people who are overweight or obese have too much visceral fat, but that’s not the case. Thin people, particularly inactive ones and older individuals, can have enough visceral fat to increase their risk of chronic health problems. They may look thin, but they’re not healthy because they have too much visceral fat and other markers of bad health.

Although it’s not easy to trim down visceral fat, science shows there are ways to reduce your body’s visceral fat burden and improve your health simultaneously.

We’ve been working on teaching #ameca a wider range of facial expressions.

Added 12 new actuators — now the challenge is how to control all the expressive capabilities.

A pill’s active ingredient can be absorbed quickly or slowly depending upon your body posture after taking it.

Corneal blindness occurs when the transparent membrane that covers the front of the eye and acts as a lens becomes opaque and prevents the light from reaching the back of the eye, inhibiting vision. It can be solved with a transplant, but experts estimate that 12.7 million people are currently waiting for a cornea donation. These membranes are in short supply: for every 70 that are needed, only one is available. In view of this problem, especially in countries where there are fewer donations of human corneas due to limited infrastructure, a group of Swedish researchers tested corneas made from pig skin collagen in 20 people who needed transplants (all of them Iranian or Indian citizens; 14 of them were blind). After two years, they all showed improvement, and those who were blind could see again. Although more complex clinical trials are still necessary to validate the measure, the first test of this bioengineered corneal tissue has proven to be safe. The results of this pilot study were published in the Nature Biotechnology journal.

There is also a socioeconomic aspect to corneal blindness: one million new cases are diagnosed every year, but according to researchers, most are concentrated in low-and middle-income countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East – precisely where it is most difficult to obtain a donated human cornea, due to endless “economic, cultural, technological, political and ethical barriers.” Finding an alternative to the human cornea transplant is key, the authors point out, to fighting keratoconus, a disease that weakens and thins the cornea, and which is the reason for most transplants.

In order to find an alternative to donated human cornea, the researchers bioengineered collagen, the main protein in the human cornea, as a raw material. “For an abundant yet sustainable and cost-effective supply of collagen, we used medical-grade collagen sourced from porcine skin, a purified byproduct from the food industry already used in FDA-approved medical devices for glaucoma surgery and as a wound dressing,” they explain in the article. Unlike the human corneas, which must be used in less than two weeks, bioengineered corneas can be stored for up to two years.

Circa 2015 face_with_colon_three

Molecular Electronics: Nanogap Electrodes towards Solid State Single-Molecule Transistors (Small 46/2015)

Ajuan Cui, Huanli Dong, Wenping Hu.

Continue reading “Nanogap Electrodes towards Solid State Single‐Molecule Transistors” »