Lifeboat Foundation

Nanoscale vortices known as skyrmions can be created in many magnetic materials. For the first time, researchers at PSI have managed to create and identify antiferromagnetic skyrmions with a unique property: critical elements inside them are arranged in opposing directions. Scientists have succeeded in visualizing this phenomenon using neutron scattering. Their discovery is a major step towards developing potential new applications, such as more efficient computers. The results of the research are published today in the journal Nature.

Whether a material is magnetic depends on the spins of its atoms. The best way to think of spins is as minute bar magnets. In a crystal structure where the atoms have fixed positions in a lattice, these spins can be arranged in criss-cross fashion or aligned all in parallel like the spears of a Roman legion, depending on the individual material and its state.

Under certain conditions it is possible to generate tiny vortices within the corps of spins. These are known as skyrmions. Scientists are particularly interested in skyrmions as a key component in future technologies, such as more efficient data storage and transfer. For example, they could be used as memory bits: a skyrmion could represent the digital one, and its absence a digital zero. As skyrmions are significantly smaller than the bits used in conventional storage media, data density is much higher and potentially also more energy efficient, while read and write operations would be faster as well. Skyrmions could therefore be useful both in classical data processing and in cutting-edge quantum computing.

The dramatic shift to online learning as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic risks widening educational inequalities.

Targeting Mechanisms of Aging Across Species — I am joined on this episode of ideaXme by Dr. Matt Kaeberlein, Professor of Pathology, Adjunct Professor of Genome Sciences, and Adjunct Professor of Oral Health Sciences, University of Washington, to discuss his research focus on cross-species mechanisms of aging, in order to facilitate interventions that extend healthspan and improve quality of life — #Ideaxme #Health #Wellness #Longevity #Aging #LifeExtension #Rapamycin #MTor #CElegans #ExtracellularVesicles #Geroscience #GenomicInstability #AlzheimersDisease #Neurodegeneration #Parkinsons #MitochondrialDysfunction #OralHealth #SystemsBiology #DogAgingProject #Science #Transhumanism #Innovation #Immortality #IraPastor #Bioquark #Regenerage The Dog Aging Project.

Ira Pastor, idea me life sciences ambassador and founder of Bioquark, interviews Dr. Matt Kaeberlein, Professor of Pathology, Adjunct Professor of Genome Sciences, and Adjunct Professor of Oral Health Sciences at the University of Washington.

Continue reading “Targeting the Mechanisms of Aging Across Species” »

Boxing, Business, and Well-Being — I am joined on this episode of ideaXme by George Foreman III; entrepreneur, professional boxer, trainer, coach, son / business partner of former two-time heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman, and founder of EverybodyFights, a rapidly expanding chain of high-end, state-of-the-art boxing and fitness gyms — #Ideaxme #Health #Wellness #Boxing #GeorgeForeman #Fitness #Gyms #Nutrition #Longevity #Aging #Healthspan #Lifespan #LifeExtension #Business #Entrepreneurship #Innovation #Startup #IraPastor #Bioquark #Regenerage

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador, interviews George “Monk” Foreman III; entrepreneur, professional boxer, trainer, coach, and Founder of Everybody Fights.

Continue reading “Boxer George ‘Monk’ Foreman III talks of Compassion and Everybody Fights!” »

Family Mart’s robots will still be controlled by human employees.

Hardly a day goes by that we don’t find ourselves stopping into one of Japan’s many convenience stores to grab a bite to eat or something to drink. But while we’ve come to expect tasty onigiri rice balls and tempting dessert beverages when we walk through the door, soon we might be seeing robots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8egE31KKKz8&feature=youtu.be

The Horizon 2020 EU-funded MOSAR project (MOdular Spacecraft Assembly and Reconfiguration) aims to develop a ground demonstrator for on-orbit modular and reconfigurable satellites.

The project will investigate and demonstrate technologies that enable a fundamental paradigm shift in satellite design and deployment that could potentially impact all future space missions.

Continue reading “MOSAR. A Modular and Reconfigurable Future for Space Missions” »

Does human consciousness exist separate from matter, or is it embodied in the body –a critical player in anything that has to do with mind? “We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.” answers neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who pioneered the field of embodied consciousness –the bodily origins of our sense of self. “We may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence,” he says. “we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species. There is no such thing as a disembodied mind.”

Consciousness is considered by leading scientists as the central unsolved mystery of the 21st Century: “I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness,” says Edward Witten, theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey who has been compared to Isaac Newton and Einstein about the phenomena that has been described as assuming the role spacetime did before Einstein invented his theory of relativity.

Some scientists have asked how can we be sure that the source of consciousness lies within our bodies at all? One popular, if mystical, idea, writes astrophysicist Paul Davies in The Demon in the Machine, “is that flashes of mathematical inspiration can occur by the mathematician’s mind somehow ‘breaking through’ into a Platonic realm of mathematical forms and relationships that not only lies beyond the brain but beyond space and time altogether.”

Karen Potter, Director of Sustainability Hub and ideaXme sustainability ambassador interviews Christoph Promberger, M.Sc., Executive Director Foundation Conservation Carpathia (FCC). https://www.carpathia.org

Karen Potter comments:

Continue reading “Saving Carpathia, The Vast Wilderness in the Heart of Europe” »

Introduction: In recent years a futurist aesthetic movement has emerged in response to renewed public concern for the environment and a seeming lack of reflection of that concern in much contemporary art and design. Deriving its name from similar aesthetic movements such as Cyberpunk and Steampunk, its roots lay in various eco/climate science fiction and Post-Industrial futurist literature and is considered ‘punk’ in the sense that it is reactionary, and in opposition, to both the naive corporate utopianism that dominated the 20th century and the dystopianism that emerged in its wake by the end of that century, persisting to the present. We now live in an era where pragmatism is a radical stance. Thus Solarpunk seeks to cultivate a positive, hopeful, vision of a future rooted in technologies and culture of sustainability, yet in the context of what it acknowledges will be dramatic changes in our way of life due to Global Warming and the environmental malfeasance of the past, the transition to a renewables-based infrastructure, and the collapse of Industrial Age paradigms. A culture that has weathered the dramatic disruptions coming with the end of the Industrial Age, taken its sometimes bitter lessons from that, and found a way forward.

What makes Solarpunk ‘punk’ is an underlying activist/revolutionary narrative it shares with the earlier punk movements tracing its origins to the narrative of one of Science Fiction’s earliest ‘antiheroes’; Captain Nemo of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Long mischaracterized in film, the original character of Nemo is an Indian victim of European colonialism who is radicalized by the murder of his family by colonialists. He then appropriates and improves upon the technology of the colonialist powers not just to fight against them but to create a model egalitarian society of the future in the secret haven of the underwater underworld, beyond the reach of those colonial powers. Thus he becomes the prototype tech-hero, turning the oppressors/dominators technology against them and repurposing it for the benefit of the rest of society.