Lifeboat Foundation

First in a series of Longevity Dialogues. Suggestions for future focus encouraged.

Host Mark Sackler conducts a lively discussion on issues involved with the anticipated implementation and implications of radical life extension. With XPrize innovation board member Sergey Young, and futurist authors David Wood and Jose Cordeiro.

A major new milestone has just been achieved in the quest for superconductivity. For the first time, physicists have achieved the resistance-free flow of an electrical current at room temperature — a positively balmy 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit).

This has smashed the previous record of −23 degrees Celsius (−9.4 degrees Fahrenheit), and has brought the prospect of functional superconductivity a huge step forward.

Continue reading “For The First Time, Physicists Have Achieved Superconductivity at Room Temperature” »

Re-Imagining Prisons — with AI, VR, and Digitalization.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador, interviews Ms Pia Puolakka, Project Manager of the Smart Prison Project, under the Criminal Sanctions Agency, within Finland’s Central Administration Unit.

Continue reading “Smart Prisons: Managing and Rehabilitating Prisoners with Psychology, Empathy and AI” »

In his quest to bring ever-faster cameras to the world, Caltech’s Lihong Wang has developed technology that can reach blistering speeds of 70 trillion frames per second, fast enough to see light travel. Just like the camera in your cell phone, though, it can only produce flat images.

Now, Wang’s lab has gone a step further to create a camera that not only records video at incredibly fast speeds but does so in three dimensions. Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering in the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering, describes the device in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

The new camera, which uses the same underlying technology as Wang’s other compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) cameras, is capable of taking up to 100 billion frames per second. That is fast enough to take 10 billion pictures, more images than the entire human population of the world, in the time it takes you to blink your eye.

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Sleep changes during aging may impact Alzheimer’s disease risk, and with the goal of minimizing that risk, can sleep, in particular, levels of deep sleep, be optimized?

NASA has reached an agreement with 14 US companies to develop technologies that will enable future modes of exploration in space and on the surface of the Moon. NASA says the value of these awards for “Tipping Point” technologies is more than $370 million.

With these awards, the space agency is leaning heavily into technologies related to the collection, storage, and transfer of cryogenic propellants in space. Four of the awards, totaling more than $250 million, will go to companies specifically for “cryogenic fluid management” tech demonstrations:

Eta Space of Merritt Island, Florida, $27 million. Small-scale flight demonstration of a complete cryogenic oxygen fluid management system. System will be the primary payload on a Rocket Lab Photon satellite and collect critical cryogenic fluid management data in orbit for nine months. Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colorado, $89.7 million. In-space demonstration mission using liquid hydrogen to test more than a dozen cryogenic fluid management technologies, positioning them for infusion into future space systems. SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, $53.2 million. Large-scale flight demonstration to transfer 10 metric tons of cryogenic propellant, specifically liquid oxygen, between tanks on a Starship vehicle. United Launch Alliance (ULA) of Centennial, Colorado, $86.2 million. Demonstration of a smart propulsion cryogenic system, using liquid oxygen and hydrogen, on a Vulcan Centaur upper stage. The system will test precise tank-pressure control, tank-to-tank transfer, and multiweek propellant storage.

More than half of the world’s population carries the bacterium Helicobacter pylori in their stomach mucosa. It often causes no problems throughout life, but sometimes it can cause inflammation, and in some cases, it can even lead to the development of stomach cancer.

Helicobacter pylori uses several ‘virulence’ factors that allow it to survive in the stomach and can lead to the development of disease. In this issue of the journal Molecular Cell, Professor Cynthia Sharma’s research team report that multiple of these factors are centrally regulated by a small RNA molecule called NikS. Prof. Sharma heads the Chair for Molecular Infection Biology II at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany.

Among the target genes regulated by NikS are the two most important virulence factors of Helicobacter pylori as well as two encoding outer membrane proteins. In particular, the JMU researchers were able to show that NikS regulates the CagA protein, a bacterial oncoprotein that plays a central role in the development of cancer instigated by Helicobacter pylori. In addition, a protein with a so far unknown function that is released into the environment by H. pylori is also under the control of NikS.

The Tesla Model 3 “refresh” has gone live on the electric car maker’s online configurator, and it comes with several compelling updates. As could be seen in the all-electric sedan’s order page, the Model 3 now comes with better range, better performance, new wheels, new features like a powered trunk, and more.

A look at the Model 3’s updated online configurator shows that the Standard Range variant, which used to have 250 miles of range, now has 263 miles of range per charge. The Model 3 Long Range Dual Motor AWD stands at the top range-wise with a whopping EPA rating of 353 miles per charge, far above the 322 miles that it previously offered. Even the Model 3 Performance, which is not optimized for maximum efficiency, now comes with 315 miles per charge, an improvement over its previous 299-mile EPA rating.

UK firm Reaction Engines hopes to revolutionize space access with a new class of propulsion system for reusable vehicles, as Oliver Nailard explains.

Reusable vehicles are vital to make access to space more affordable, but conventional rocket engines have their limits. Oliver Nailard describes how UK firm Reaction Engines hopes to revolutionize space access with a new class of propulsion system, the Synergetic Air Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE)

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