Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: A new study on aging reveals a surprising discovery about the connection between protein shape and mitochondrial health.

Source: Buck Institute.

Every cell in the body goes through thousands of chemical reactions each day, and each reaction involves tiny protein molecules folded into precise shapes to perform their functions. Misfolded proteins underlie some of the most common and devastating diseases of aging, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. A major focus of aging research is discovering ways to maintain protein shape and prevent misfolded proteins from wreaking havoc on cellular function.

Circa 2019

LONDON — A laboratory in Switzerland has found a way of using a laser to change and regulate the polarization, wavelength and intensity of light in “excitons” in 2D materials, creating the potential for a new generation of transistors with less energy loss and heat dissipation, opening up the potential for low-power quantum computing.

Excitons are created when an electron absorbs light and moves into a higher energy level, or “energy band” as it is called in solid quantum physics. This excited electron leaves behind an “electron hole” in its previous energy band. And because the electron has a negative charge and the hole a positive charge, the two are bound together by an electrostatic force called a Coulomb force. It’s this electron-electron hole pair that is referred to as an exciton.

Continue reading “‘Excitons’ Show Potential for Low-Power Quantum Computing” »

Circa 2012

Quantum ground-state problems are computationally hard problems for general many-body Hamiltonians; there is no classical or quantum algorithm known to be able to solve them efficiently. Nevertheless, if a trial wavefunction approximating the ground state is available, as often happens for many problems in physics and chemistry, a quantum computer could employ this trial wavefunction to project the ground state by means of the phase estimation algorithm (PEA). We performed an experimental realization of this idea by implementing a variational-wavefunction approach to solve the ground-state problem of the Heisenberg spin model with an NMR quantum simulator. Our iterative phase estimation procedure yields a high accuracy for the eigenenergies (to the 10–5 decimal digit).

New photo-oxygenation catalyst targets amyloid structure, recruits brain immune system cells.

A small, light-activated molecule recently tested in mice represents a new approach to eliminating clumps of amyloid protein found in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients. If perfected in humans, the technique could be used as an alternative approach to immunotherapy and used to treat other diseases caused by similar amyloids.

Researchers injected the molecule directly into the brains of live mice with Alzheimer’s disease and then used a specialized probe to shine light into their brains for 30 minutes each day for one week. Chemical analysis of the mouse brain tissue showed that the treatment significantly reduced amyloid protein. Results from additional experiments using human brain samples donated by Alzheimer’s disease patients supported the possibility of future use in humans.

I wish I had some sort of different response to give than this, but this summary is totally clear-eyed about the coming Semantic Apocalypse.

Artistic corpocracy

It’s actually even worse (in a way aptly not noticed by the Google employee). Because as we discussed, in the future advanced versions of this sort of AI will be solely owned and developed by Big Tech due the scaling laws around how they’re trained and run. The immediate licensing of GPT-3 by Microsoft was an augury of this. Indeed, the rights to interact with these AIs will be some of the most valuable licenses on the planet in the next decade. Consumers, even academic AI researchers, will communicate with company-owned trillion-parameter AIs solely via oracles, getting nowhere near the source code. The future of this technology belongs to huge corporations with major resources. So it’s not really that “AI is automating art”—no, corporations are automating art. And writing. And translation. And illustration. And music. And the thousand other human forms of creativity that give life meaning. They are now the province of Big Tech.

US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo has announced that the Commerce Department has established a high-level committee to advise the President and other federal agencies on a range of issues related to artificial intelligence (AI). Working with the National AI Initiative Office (NAIIO) in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the Department is now seeking to recruit top-level candidates to serve on the committee.

A formal notice describing the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC) and the call for nominations for the committee and its Subcommittee on Artificial Intelligence and Law Enforcement appears in the Federal Register published today.

“AI presents an enormous opportunity to tackle the biggest issues of our time, strengthen our technological competitiveness, and be an engine for growth in nearly every sector of the economy,” said Secretary Raimondo. “But we must be thoughtful, creative, and wise in how we address the challenges that accompany these new technologies. That includes, but is not limited to, ensuring that President Biden’s comprehensive commitment to advancing equity and racial justice extends to our development and use of AI technology. This committee will help the federal government to do that by providing insights into a full range of issues raised by AI.”

Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking scientific productivity while isolated from the spread of bubonic plague is legendary. University of California San Diego physicists can now claim a stake in the annals of pandemic-driven science.

A team of UC San Diego researchers and colleagues at Purdue University have now simulated the foundation of new types of artificial intelligence computing devices that mimic brain functions, an achievement that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. By combining new supercomputing materials with specialized oxides, the researchers successfully demonstrated the backbone of networks of circuits and devices that mirror the connectivity of neurons and synapses in biologically based neural networks.

The simulations are described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

My eBook and Training Program: https://www.thebioneer.com/product/superfunctional/

My physical book: https://www.thebioneer.com/product/functional-training-and-beyond/

Continue reading “FutureMan: The Future of Health and Fitness 2021-2150” »

The patent in question is for a system that would use quantum teleportation in order to boost a quantum computer’s reliability, while at the same time reducing the number of qubits required for a given calculation. This “teleportation” technology would help solve scaling issues and calculation errors that arise from system instability.

One of the main issues behind quantum development is once you start pushing the pedal to the metal, there are major issues when it comes to scalability and stability. Quantum computing is far different to the 0s and 1s of traditional technology, so AMD’s new teleportation patent is quite an important step towards solving that issue.