Lifeboat Foundation

Between 19:39 and 24 minutes we have Aubrey giving a list of companies and stating that investing is now taking off. Project 21 seems to be on track to start next year, and therapies available in 10–15 years will add 30 years to life and really be indefinite beyond that.

Rejuvenation Biotechnology: why age may soon cease to mean aging.
People are living longer — no longer because of reduced child mortality, but because we are postponing the ill-health of old age. But we’ve seen nothing yet: regenerative medicine and other new medicines will eventually be so comprehensive that people will stay truly youthful however long they live, which means they may mostly live very long indeed.

Continue reading “GFS 2020 — Aubrey de Grey — Rejuvenation Biotechnology: why age may soon cease to mean aging” »

Modifying the surface of power plant pipes to make it easier to prevent the build up of salt.

Behold the salt monsters. These twisted mineral crystals—formed from the buildup of slightly salty water in power plant pipes—come in many shapes and sizes. But the tiny monsters are a big problem: Each year, they cost the world’s power plants at least $100 billion, as workers have to purge the pipes and scrub them from filters.

Continue reading “These strange salt ‘creatures’ could help unclog power plant pipes” »

Lone Mercury was likely the product of a very different early environment, in which short-period protoplanets collided with and continually eroded its mantle, says new study.

One critical part of the Koenigsegg Gemera’s brain-scrambling powertrain is its ‘Freevalve’ petrol engine. You might have glossed over it while trying to compute the outputs, and they way that engine combines with three electric motors to produce, er, 1700bhp in all. Or in metric, 1.27 Megawatts. Or the power draw of a couple of hundred houses cooking dinner.

Christian von Koenigsegg, though, will talk for hours about this engine. He’s so affectionate about the thing he’s got a nickname rather than the usual dreary car-business habit of codenames. This, then, is the Tiny Friendly Giant.

Giant because 600bhp. Tiny because it’s just two litres and three cylinders. Maybe two litres isn’t that tiny in displacement (though CvK’s cars have mostly had big V8s) but it’s physically very small and easy to package. It has just the three cylinders, and no overhead camshaft casings, and no camshaft drive on the front.

Circa 2018

An elusive substance that permeates the universe exerts many detectable gravitational influences yet eludes direct detection.

Circa 2018 o.o

In 2018 an international team of researchers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and several other observatories uncovered, for the first time, a galaxy in our cosmic neighborhood that is missing most of its dark matter.

Scientists have been using a new form of gene therapy to treat a rare inherited eye condition which eventually causes severe tunnel vision.

Scientists have been using the new treatment on patients to try to halt further loss of sight. And they’ve been astonished to find that it has actually improved their vision.

Continue reading “Radical new gene therapy restores sight to patients with rare eye condition — BBC News” »

A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) have developed a system with which they can fabricate miniature robots building block by building block, which function exactly as required.

As one would do with a Lego system, the scientists can randomly combine individual components. The building blocks or voxels—which could be described as 3D pixels—are made of different materials: from basic matrix materials that hold up the construction to magnetic components enabling the control of the soft machine. “You can put the individual soft parts together in any way you wish, with no limitations on what you can achieve. In this way, each robot has an individual magnetisation profile,” says Jiachen Zhang. Together with Ziyu Ren and Wenqi Hu he is first author of the paper entitled “Voxelated three-dimensional miniature magnetic soft machines via multimaterial heterogeneous assembly.” The paper was published in Science Robotics on April 28, 2021.

The project is the result of many previous projects conducted in the Physical Intelligence Department at MPI-IS. For many years, scientists there have been working on magnetically controlled robots for wireless medical device applications at the small scale, from millimeters down to micrometers size. While the state-of-the-art designs they have developed to date have attracted attention around the world, they were limited by the single material with which they were made, which constrained their functionality.

On Thursday, China launched the core module of its planned space station to pave the way for construction to begin.

Designed to rival the International Space Station (ISS), from which Chinese astronauts have been barred, the assembly of the facility is expected to be completed by the end of next year.

The geopolitical tensions playing out on Earth are now out of this world as nations build alliances to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Continue reading “Space race reflects real-world politics” »