Lifeboat Foundation

[Editor’s note: “Quantum Computing Will Be Bigger Than the Discovery of Fire!” was previously published in June 2022. It has since been updated to include the most relevant information available.]

It’s commonly appreciated that the discovery of fire was the most profound revolution in human history. And yesterday, I read that a major director at Bank of America (BAC) thinks a technology that hardly anyone is talking about these days could be more critical for humankind than fire!

The use of AN electrical current as a weed-destroying mode of action continues to gain traction globally.

An electrical current, like the broad-spectrum herbicides it is being developed to replace, affects only the treated plants and kills the affected plant to the root — without chemical toxicity, residues or the development of weed resistance.

Crop. Zone.

Fun visual essays explain key concepts of machine learning.

It turns out there are many ways of “doing” intelligence, and this is evident even in the apes and monkeys who perch close to us on the evolutionary tree. This awareness takes on a whole new character when we think about those non-human intelligences which are very different to us. Because there are other highly evolved, intelligent, and boisterous creatures on this planet that are so distant and so different from us that researchers consider them to be the closest things to aliens we have ever encountered: cephalopods.

Cephalopods—the family of creatures which contains octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish—are one of nature’s most intriguing creations. They are all soft-bodied, containing no skeleton, only a hardened beak. They are aquatic, although they can survive for some time in the air; some are even capable of short flight, propelled by the same jets of water that move them through the ocean. They do strange things with their limbs. And they are highly intelligent, easily the most intelligent of the invertebrates, by any measure.

Octopuses in particular seem to enjoy demonstrating their intelligence when we try to capture, detain, or study them. In zoos and aquariums they are notorious for their indefatigable and often successful attempts at escape. A New Zealand octopus named Inky made headlines around the world when he escaped from the National Aquarium in Napier by climbing through his tank’s overflow valve, scampering eight feet across the floor, and sliding down a narrow, 106-foot drainpipe into the ocean. At another aquarium near Dunedin, an octopus called Sid made so many escape attempts, including hiding in buckets, opening doors, and climbing stairs, that he was eventually released into the ocean. They’ve also been accused of flooding aquariums and stealing fish from other tanks: Such tales go back to some of the first octopuses kept in captivity in Britain in the 19th century and are still being repeated today.

Russia calculated that the Chinese side had sufficient financial resources and manufacturing capabilities, compensating for the Russian civil aviation industry’s financial problems. Moreover, the Russian side intended to use its advantage in engine technology to dominate production and thereby enter the huge Chinese civil aviation aircraft market. The Russians thought they had a strong selling point with the Central Aerodynamics Institute, known as TsAGI, which has more than a century of experience. Chinese technicians, however, did not share President Xi’s political calculations, and they did not think highly of Russia’s technological prowess. They believed that the Russian era of developing wide-body aircraft was part of a bygone Soviet legacy and that the real developers had already retired.

But a more fundamental problem is that Beijing’s motivation to cooperate with Russia was one-sided. China had hoped that money would entice Russia to share its engine technology, but Beijing had no intention of sharing its giant market with Moscow. With these conflicting interests from the start, it was only a matter of time before serious troubles began derailing the project.

The Russians originally wanted to use their own IL-96 aircraft as a blueprint for development. The Chinese, on the other hand, insisted on using the Boeing 787,777 and Airbus A350 as benchmarks for the development of jets with a two-aisle cabin layout, a range of 12,000 kilometers and 280 seats.

Christian Angermayer, founder of talks longevity investment, optimism on SPAC deal and light at the end of the tunnel for the biotech market.
One of the speakers at October’s Rejuvenation Startup Summit in Berlin is the entrepreneur and investor, Christian Angermayer.

With more than $3 billion under management through his Apeiron Investment Group, Angermayer is a major figure in the longevity sector through his platform biotech companies Cambrian and Rejuveron – building on his belief that everyone wants to live healthier, happier and longer lives.

Continue reading “Christian Angermayer on longevity and biotech investment” »

New research shows that we might be able to revive bodies we once thought beyond repair. That could increase medical inequities, but it’s still worth pursuing.

At the heart of merging galaxies is the closest pairing of supermassive black holes ever found that will eventually collide and create a larger black hole.

Liquid crystals consist of rod-shaped molecules that slosh around like a fluid, and in those that are nematic the molecules are mostly parallel to each other. For devices like TV screens, the odd molecule that faces the wrong way has to be removed during the manufacturing process, but these defects are key for building a liquid crystal computer, says Kos.

In ordinary computers, information is stored as a series of bits, electronic versions of 1s and 0s. In Kos and Dunkel’s liquid crystal computer, the information would instead be translated into a series of defective orientations. A liquid crystal defect could encode a different value for every different degree of misalignment with other molecules.

Electric fields could then be used to manipulate the molecules to perform basic calculations, similar to how simple circuits called logic gates work in an ordinary computer. Calculations on the proposed computer would appear as ripples spreading through the liquid.