Lifeboat Foundation

Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan sat down with ABC News Live to discuss the science and ethics of extending the human lifespan.

In his new book, “Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality,” Ramakrishnan explains why we may not want to lengthen our lives much longer.

Ramakrishnan’s thought-provoking argument is that a society where people lived for hundreds of years could potentially become stagnant, as it would consist of the same group of people living longer, raising important questions about societal dynamics and progress.

As many CEOs gloat over the idea of replacing their human workers with AI, some of them are now starting to fear that they, too, may be on the chopping block.

Per a new report from the IT consulting firm AND Digital which surveyed hundreds of business leaders in the US, the UK, and the Netherlands, 43 percent of respondents said they believed AI could take their job as CEO.

Denizens of the C-suite aren’t making a strong case for keeping their positions, either. Embarrassingly, nearly that exact same proportion — 45 percent — admitted to secretly making major business decisions “based on data and information obtained using ChatGPT.” Strong evidence, perhaps, that maybe replacing CEOs with AI isn’t such a bad idea after all.

As AI seems to grow more powerful every day, the CEO of Anthropic is saying that soon, it might be self-sustaining and self-replicating.

Engineers at Princeton University have quantified the cooling benefits of a simple solution for beating urban heat: reflecting solar radiation back from whence it came.

While the artificial intelligence revolution has just begun, it is transforming healthcare, speeding drug discovery, improving both diagnosis and patient communication.

Nissan says solid state batteries will double intensity of lithium batteries and cost less, and can also be used as energy storage.

Measuring a photon’s angular momentum after it passes through optical devices teaches an algorithm to reconstruct the properties of the photon’s initial quantum state.

The verification of a 63-year-old hypothesis indicates that nonequilibrium statistical mechanics could act as a theoretical framework for describing turbulence.

A quantum squeezing method can enhance interactions between quantum systems, even in the absence of precise knowledge of the system parameters.

Squeezed states are an important class of nonclassical states, where quantum fluctuations can be reduced in one property of a system, such as position. However, at the same time, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, quantum fluctuations increase in the conjugate property, in this case momentum. The ability to suppress noise in at least one variable is valuable in a wide range of areas in quantum technologies. Now Shaun Burd at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Colorado, and colleagues have experimentally demonstrated a squeezing-based enhancement method that requires no preknowledge of the system’s parameters [1]. The researchers use a trapped-ion system (Fig. 1) and show that they can amplify the motion of the ion using a combination of squeezing procedures. This experimental research can stimulate other novel applications of squeezing, for example, in dark matter searches.

For decades, quantum squeezing has played a central role in high-precision quantum measurements, such as gravitational-wave detection [2, 3] and nondemolition qubit readout [4– 6]. The methods typically involve applying a field or inserting an optical element that reduces the fluctuations in one observable. The measurements of this squeezed observable can beat the standard quantum limit and thus enable a significant improvement in the detection sensitivity or the readout signal-to-noise ratio.