Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Although nothing in the laws of quantum physics limits such quantum weirdness to subatomic particles, the theory predicts that at much larger scales — say, the size of a cat — quantum effects should be so vanishingly small as to be unobservable in practice. Physicists have long debated whether this is just a limitation of our senses and instruments, or whether macroscopic objects are governed by their own set of laws that is fundamentally different from quantum mechanics. To explore this question, researchers have been pushing to observe quantum effects at ever larger scales. “One point of our research is, is there quantum in the classical world?” says Mika Sillanpää, a physicist at Aalto University in Finland.

Quantum drums

In an experiment at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, physicist Shlomi Kotler and his collaborators built a pair of vibrating aluminium membranes akin to two tiny drums, each around 10 micrometres long.

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Transitioning from fossil fuels to a clean hydrogen economy will require cheaper and more efficient ways to use renewable sources of electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen.

But a key step in that process, known as the or OER, has proven to be a bottleneck. Today it’s only about 75% efficient, and the precious metal catalysts used to accelerate the reaction, like platinum and iridium, are rare and expensive.

Now an international team led by scientists at Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has developed a suite of advanced tools to break through this bottleneck and improve other energy-related processes, such as finding ways to make lithium-ion batteries charge faster. The research team described their work in Nature today.

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Implantable electronics are among the most promising healthcare technologies, as they can help to remotely monitor specific biological processes associated with a patient’s health. While researchers have developed a variety of implantable devices over the past decade or so, existing technologies have several limitations that can prevent their widespread use in clinical settings.

The first factor preventing the large-scale implementation of existing implantable technologies is the structural mismatch between these devices and most organs/tissues in the body, which typically have complex 1D or 3D structures. Secondly, reliably fixing soft electronic devices on organs that are moving or pulsating has so far proved to be highly challenging.

Researchers at Daegu-Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology (DGIST) in South Korea and ETH Zürich have recently developed a new fiber-based strain-sensing device that could overcome the limitations of existing implantable electronics. This sensor, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, comprises a capacitive fiber strain sensor with an inductive coil for wireless readout.

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People who reach a very old age may have their genes to thank. Genetic variants that help to prevent DNA mutations and repair any that do occur have been found in supercentenarians and semi-supercentenarians – people who reach the ages of 110 and 105, respectively.

“DNA repair mechanisms are extremely efficient in these people,” says Claudio Franceschi at the University of Bologna in Italy. “It is one of the most important basic mechanisms for extending lifespan.”

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AI is fundamental to many products and services today, but its hunger for data and computing cycles is bottomless. Lightmatter plans to leapfrog Moore’s law with its ultra-fast photonic chips specialized for AI work, and with a new $80 million round, the company is poised to take its light-powered computing to market.

We first covered Lightmatter in 2018, when the founders were fresh out of MIT and had raised $11 million to prove that their idea of photonic computing was as valuable as they claimed. They spent the next three years and change building and refining the tech — and running into all the hurdles that hardware startups and technical founders tend to find.

For a full breakdown of what the company’s tech does, read that feature — the essentials haven’t changed.

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Maybe not lol.

If we ever found life on another planet it would probably be the biggest news of the millennium, and you’d expect the evidence to be published in a highly prestigious journal like Nature or Science. So, when a study claiming that mushrooms are growing on Mars appears in an obscure and largely discredited publication, you have to be more than a little skeptical.

Earlier this week, a preprint of a new study appeared online, bearing the eyebrow-raising title Fungi on Mars? Evidence of Growth and Behavior From Sequential Images. Unfortunately, the paper is due for publication in the journal Advances in Microbiology, which is part of the Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) portfolio. Given that SCIRP has a history of plagiarizing articles from other journals, it’s pretty difficult to take any of its content seriously.

The study itself comprises an analysis of images taken by NASA’s Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, which have been carrying out observations on the Red Planet, in addition to photographs taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Using red circles and arrows to highlight certain features, the study authors point out a series of structures that look a lot like rocks but also maybe a tiny bit like puffball mushrooms.

Continue reading “Nope, We Haven’t Just Found Evidence For Mushrooms Growing on Mars” | >

That’s good funding.

Berlin, Gerrmany — Michael Greve, founder of the Forever Healthy Foundation and owner of Kizoo Technology Ventures, announced today that he will make available an additional €300 million to be invested in rejuvenation biotech.

The funds, to be deployed via Kizoo, will be used to create and support more startups in the rejuvenation space. They will also allow Kizoo to maintain a strong commitment to its key startups during follow-up rounds and to advance the therapies from clinical development to public availability.

With this €300 million commitment, Michael Greve and Kizoo double down on their mission to accelerate the advent of rejuvenation biotechnology by doing lighthouse investments in entirely new, repair-based approaches that treat the root causes of aging and thus overcome age-related diseases. Through the creation of successful companies, they seek to inspire scientists, investors, and the general public by demonstrating that human rejuvenation is not science fiction anymore and that the resulting therapies are affordable and uncomplicated.

Continue reading “Founder of Forever Healthy doubles down on mission to accelerate rejuvenation biotechnology” | >