Lifeboat Foundation

Aging is maleable and can be intervened to slow down and even reverse it.
Several experiments in animal models have shown that certain gene therapies as well as interventions via partial cellular reprograming can significantly extend healthspan and lifespan in mice and other model organisms.

An article published on December 30, 2020 in Fortune magazine, reaches the following conclusions:
* Without treatments to slow or reverse aspects of biological aging, an aging population means we are in for a health care cost tsunami.
* The most exciting opportunity for such an improvement in health productivity is to understand and address the biology of aging.
* There is promising scientific research on reversing aspects of aging, some of which is not far from clinical application.
* While all this research represents thrilling progress, we invest far too little in research that could help us go further in understanding and treating aging.

Continue reading “Aging isn’t nice — Let’s bring world leaders to the quest of solving it” »

Neuralink, co-founded by Elon Musk in 2016, has revealed a macaque with chips embedded on each side of its brain, playing a mind-controlled version of the 1972 video game, Pong.

Although established in 2016, Neuralink remained secretive about its work until July 2019, when Musk presented his concept for a new brain–machine interface (BMI). Not only would this help physically diseased or injured people, Musk believed it could also treat mental illness – and even be used by healthy individuals who might wish to enhance themselves.

A prototype in August 2020 demonstrated the Neuralink technology in a pig. This coin-sized chip, featuring a read/write link, contained 1024 channels with a wireless megabit data rate and all-day battery life. Brain signals conveying the pig’s sense of smell could be seen in real time. The FDA had by then approved it as a breakthrough device, allowing use in limited human trials under the US federal guidelines for testing medical devices.

Design could allow large numbers of qubits to be integrated in one device.

The rise of the EV.

“More companies now tell me they’re not spending money on engines because the incremental improvements aren’t worth it. There’s very little we can do to engines now to make them significantly more powerful or more efficient. The engine has been engineered to its end.”

Maurizio Bisogni.

Continue reading “The Gas Engine Is Dead. Welcome to the Electric Revolution” »

Men’s sperm counts are dropping, but women are stretching the clock.

“The reproductive life span of women in the United States has increased over the past 6 decades, as menarche has been starting earlier and coming later, according to an observational study.”

Changes in age at both menarche and, study of women followed over 6 decades shows.

Continue reading “Reproductive Life Span of U.S. Women Increasing” »

# Just 5 days left to upload an abstract to the SRIC3 Call for Papers! ## We need you to lead the Space Renaissance!

Choose among the following symposia tracks, all of them concurring to a coherent strategy for Space Settlement, kicking off the Civilian Space Development before 2025: * The immense social benefits of expanding Civilization into Outer Space * Civilization risk mitigation: space as the main Knight, defending humanity against the ‘Apocalypse’ multi-crisis * Global collaboration, working with Agencies, Companies, Space Advocacy Associations, United Nations and Governments of Planet Earth to promote Civilian Space Development and the 18th UN SDG * Space Safety: protecting human life and health in space, space debris recovering and reuse, space weather, defense from asteroids * Policies to Enable Communities Beyond Earth: technologies, financing, & Common Law * Earth orbit industrial development * The Moon and Cislunar development * Space Based Solar Power, feeding the Civilian Space Development * Greening the Solar System * Mars, the Asteroids Belt and beyond * A conceptual timetable for the founding steps of Space Settlement * Living, Sport, Art and Culture in Space, a Scifi futurologist–presentist narration * Congress Thesis 1 — Status of civilization and perspective of expansion into outer space * Congress Thesis 2 — A strategy to develop the Space Renaissance, towards 2025.

Continue reading “Call for papers abstract submission Space Renaissance” »

Superconductivity – the ability of a material to transmit an electric current without loss – is a quantum effect that, despite years of research, is still limited to very low temperatures. Now a team of scientists at the MPSD has succeeded in creating a metastable state with vanishing electrical resistance in a molecular solid by exposing it to finely tuned pulses of intense laser light. This effect had already been demonstrated in 2016 for only a very short time, but in a new study the authors of the paper have shown a far longer lifetime, nearly 10000 times longer than before. The long lifetimes for light-induced superconductivity hold promise for applications in integrated electronics. The research by Budden et al. has been published in Nature Physics.

Superconductivity is one of the most fascinating and mysterious phenomena of modern physics. It describes the sudden loss of electrical resistance in certain materials when they are cooled below a critical temperature. However, the need for such cooling still limits the technological usability of these materials.

In recent years, research by Andrea Cavalleri’s group at the MPSD has revealed that intense pulses of infrared light are a viable tool to induce superconducting properties in a variety of different materials at much higher temperatures than would be possible without photo-stimulation. However, these exotic states have so far persisted for only a few picoseconds (trillionths of a second), thus limiting the experimental methods for studying them to ultrafast optics.

Several hundred people have already booked their tickets and begun training for a spectacular voyage: a few minutes, or perhaps days, in the weightlessness of space.

The mainly wealthy first-time space travellers are getting ready to take part in one of several private missions which are preparing to launch.

The era of space tourism is on the horizon 60 years after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space.

Moore’s Law is dead, right? Think again.

Although the historical annual improvement of about 40% in central processing unit performance is slowing, the combination of CPUs packaged with alternative processors is improving at a rate of more than 100% per annum. These unprecedented and massive improvements in processing power combined with data and artificial intelligence will completely change the way we think about designing hardware, writing software and applying technology to businesses.

Continue reading “A new era of innovation: Moore’s Law is not dead and AI is ready to explode” »