Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Those who are venturing into the architecture of the metaverse, have already asked themselves this question. A playful environment where all formal dreams are possible, where determining aspects for architecture such as solar orientation, ventilation, and climate will no longer be necessary, where – to Louis Kahn’s despair – there is no longer a dynamic of light and shadow, just an open and infinite field. Metaverse is the extension of various technologies, or even some call them a combination of some powerful technologies. These technologies are augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and a 3D world.

This technology is still under research. However, the metaverse seems to make a significant difference in the education domain. Also, its feature of connecting students across the world with a single metaverse platform may bring a positive change. But, the metaverse is not only about remote learning. It is much more than that.

Architecture emerged on the construction site, at a time when there was no drawing, only experimentation. Over time, thanks to Brunelleschi and the Florence dome in the 15th century, we witnessed the first detachment from masonry, a social division of labor from which liberal art and mechanical art emerge. This detachment generated different challenges and placed architecture on an oneiric plane, tied to paper. In other words, we don’t build any structures, we design them. Now, six centuries later, it looks like we are getting ready to take another step away from the construction site, abruptly distancing ourselves from engineering and construction.

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When the inside of a mollusk shell shimmers in sunlight, the iridescence isn’t produced by colored pigments but by tiny physical structures self-assembled from living cells and inorganic components. Now, a team of researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed a platform to mimic this self-assembly ability by engineering living cells to act as a starting point for building composite materials.

Engineered living (ELMs) use living as “materials scaffolds” and are a new class of material that might open the door to self-healing materials and other advanced applications in bioelectronics, biosensing, and smart materials. Such materials could mimic emergent properties found in nature—where a complex system has properties that the individual components do not have—such as iridescence or strength.

Borrowing from this complexity seen in nature, the Berkeley Lab researchers engineered a bacterium that can attach a wide range of nanomaterials to its cell surface. They can also precisely control the makeup and how densely packed the components are, creating a stable hybrid living material. The study describing their work was recently published in ACS Synthetic Biology.

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In nature, wood, shells, and other structural materials are lightweight, strong, and tough. Significantly, these materials are made at the ambient temperature in the local environment – not at the high temperatures at which human-made structural materials are generally processed. Similar materials are difficult to make synthetically. In a review article in Nature Materials, a team of scientists assessed the common design motifs of a range of natural structural materials and determined what it would take to design and fabricate structures that mimic nature. They considered the remaining challenges to include the need for comprehensive characterization of strength and toughness to identify underlying multiscale mechanisms.

This comprehensive assessment provides new inspiration and understanding of design principles that may lead to more efficient synthetic approaches for advanced, lightweight structural materials for transportation, buildings, batteries, and energy conversion.

In the natural world, many of the structural materials (wood, shells, bones, etc.) are hybrid materials made up of simple constituents that are assembled at ambient temperatures and often have remarkable properties. Even though the constituent materials generally have poor intrinsic properties, the superior extrinsic properties of the hybrid materials are the result of the arrangement of hard and soft phases in complex hierarchical architectures, with dimensions spanning from the nanoscale to the macroscale. The resulting materials are lightweight and usually show interesting combinations of strength and toughness, even though these two key structural properties tend to be mutually exclusive. It is relatively easy to make materials that are strong or tough, but difficult to make materials that are both.

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Summary: Understanding how changes in the brain relate to changes in well-being is key to developing new targets for the treatment of mental health disorders.

Source: University of Oxford.

Associate Professor Miriam Klein-Flügge and colleagues looked at brain connectivity and mental health data from nearly 500 people. In particular, they looked at the connectivity of the amygdala—a brain region well known for its importance in emotion and reward processing.

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Summary: Study reveals a strong connection between certain bacteria residing in the gut and metabolites, small molecules found in the blood.

Source: Uppsala University.

There are strong links between bacteria living in the gut and the levels of small molecules in the blood known as metabolites. Such is the finding of a new study led by researchers from Uppsala University and Lund University, which is now published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Researchers at Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified a gene marker that may lead to a more effective, precision treatment for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). The researcher’s findings are published in Nature Cancer.

“Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is one of the most lethal cancers,” says the paper’s senior author Zhenkun Lou, Ph.D. Dr. Lou says while Poly-ADP-ribose-polymerase inhibitors (PARPi) are now an FDA-approved option for standard maintenance therapy for patients with metastatic PDAC who harbor pathogenic germline BRCA1/2 mutations, only about 10 percent of patients with PDAC harbor pathogenic mutations of the homologous recombination (HR) genes. “This leaves most patients missing out on this encouraging treatment strategy,” says Dr. Lou.

In this study, Dr. Lou and his colleagues found that the protein METTL16 may be a new biomarker for PARPi treatment, and that PDAC with elevated expression of METTL16, may benefit from PARPi treatment.

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Quantum computers and communication devices work by encoding information into individual or entangled photons, enabling data to be quantum securely transmitted and manipulated exponentially faster than is possible with conventional electronics. Now, quantum researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have demonstrated a method for encoding vastly more information into a single photon, opening the door to even faster and more powerful quantum communication tools.

Typically, quantum communication systems “write” information onto a photon’s spin . In this case, photons carry out either a right or left circular rotation, or form a quantum superposition of the two known as a two-dimensional qubit.

It’s also possible to encode information onto a photon’s orbital angular —the corkscrew path that light follows as it twists and torques forward, with each photon circling around the center of the beam. When the spin and angular momentum interlock, it forms a high-dimensional qudit—enabling any of a theoretically infinite range of values to be encoded into and propagated by a single photon.

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I am registering Posthuman as a religion in UK, and MVT (although evidence based) as a “religious belief” — which seems consistent with.gov requirements, since the Posthuman Movement started 1988 in UK. Why shouldn’t rational folk benefit from the same financial benefits awarded to promoters of Supernaturalism and religious daftness? Perhaps Transhumans should also consider this, or jointly with https://Posthuman.org? Any USA citizens interested in this approach? https://www.gov.uk/…/charitable…/charitable-purposes…

Posthuman Psychology, MVT research, World Philosophy, Software development.

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