Lifeboat Foundation

A new study out of the University of Chicago, the Canadian Museum of Nature and the Albany Museum challenges a long-held hypothesis that the larvae of modern lampreys are a holdover from the distant past, resembling the ancestors of all living vertebrates, including ourselves.

The new fossil discoveries indicate that ancient lamprey hatchlings more closely resembled modern adult lampreys, and were completely unlike their modern larvae counterparts. The results were published on March 102021, in Nature.

“We’ve basically removed lampreys from the position of the ancestral condition of vertebrates,” said first author Tetsuto Miyashita, formerly a Chicago Fellow at the University of Chicago and now a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature. “So now we need an alternative.”

Across the nation, environmentally minded scientists and engineers are leading a new generation of nuclear reactor designs. They see nuclear power as a clean, carbon-free energy source along with hydropower, wind, and solar.

The future of aviation, planes of the future.

As the aviation industry attempts to recover from the devastating effects of the pandemic, we take a in depth look at the future of flying. Will we soon be boarding commercial jets made in China? Or flying faster than the speed of sound? And what will the planes actually look like? Answers to these questions and more as Rob Watts reports on the future of flight.

Continue reading “A new global rivalry? Airbus, Boeing, Comac and the future of aviation” »

One of the biggest challenges will be to create superpositions of diamonds that can remain stable over distances of a meter. More than four years ago researchers at Stanford University managed to separate a superposition consisting of 10000 atoms by about half a meter—the current record. “But we’re talking about doing it with diamonds that would have a billion or 10 billion atoms, and that is way more difficult,” Mazumdar says.

Many of the other technologies needed for the device—high vacuums, ultralow temperatures, precisely controlled magnetic fields—have all been achieved separately by various groups. But bringing them together will not be easy. “Just because you can juggle and ride a bike doesn’t mean you can do both at once,” Morley says.

If the device is ever built, it could transform gravitational-wave astronomy. The world’s current gravitational-wave detectors are all firmly anchored to the ground. “The only orientation LIGO can have is due to Earth’s rotation,” Bose says. A small detector such as MIMAC, on the other hand, could be pointed at any direction in the sky. And any physics lab in the world could house it. “The challenge is to get one of them working,” Bose says. “If one of them works, it would be very easy to make several more.”

Today at 1 PM PST.

On Sunday, February 212021, at 1 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time, the U.S. Transhumanist Party invites Dr. Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation, for an in-depth conversation about recent developments in the quest to reverse the damage of biological aging. The discussion will cover current in rejuvenation research and advocacy, as well as delve into how the prospects for reaching longevity escape velocity have changed since Dr. de Grey’s remarks at the U.S. Transhumanist Party Discussion Panel on Life Extension nearly 4 years ago in 2017.

Continue reading “U.S. Transhumanist Party Virtual Enlightenment Salon with Aubrey de Grey” »

555-million-year-old oceanic creatures share genes with today’s humans, finds a new study.

As complex as modern humans can get, they still retain some features of the earliest animals on Earth. According to new research, we are not as different as we might think from strange prehistoric organisms that didn’t have any heads, arms, legs, or skeletons.

A study from UC Riverside identified 555-million-year-old oceanic creatures that share genes with humans and other contemporary animals.

Continue reading “Humans still similar to first animals without heads, arms, or skeletons” »

I will look at the idea that all disease could be almost stopped in its tracks with a universal treatment for aging. A lot of people ask when we will cure aging and the answer is it may well be here sooner than many realise.

It doesn’t matter how good the treatments are that we develop for cancer, heart disease, alzheimers, and any other of a number of the most common ways we finally die, it is really just a game of whack a mole. If you survive one, just wait a few years and another will get you.

Continue reading “An End To Aging — The Mother Of All Disease” »

“Ahsan Noor Khan, a PhD student and first author of the study, said: “We’re now looking to investigate how we could use low-cost existing systems, such as Wi-Fi routers, to detect emotions of a large number of people gathered, for instance in an office or work environment.” Among other things, this could be useful for HR departments to assess how new policies introduced in a meeting are being received, regardless of what the recipients might say. Outside of an office, police could use this technology to look for emotional changes in a crowd that might lead to violence.”

Research from the UK and an update from Elon Musk on human trials at his brain interface company show software is now eating the mind.

Continue reading “Thought-detection: AI has infiltrated our last bastion of privacy” »

Far underneath the ice shelves of the Antarctic, there’s more life than expected, finds a recent study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.