Lifeboat Foundation

Why is Alcor in Arizona? The main reason is that the risk of earthquakes and other natural disasters is fairly low. People opting for cryonics expect that their bodies might be in stasis for timescales measured in centuries.

As far as financial matters go, many of Alcor’s clients use life insurance policies to cover the cost of preservation and maintenance ($200,000 for a whole body or $80,000 for just the head). People use trust funds if they have net worth they want to recover when revived in the future.

Continue reading “Frozen in time: You can be cryogenically preserved, but will you ever be revived?” »

A pattern is emerging among COVID-19 patients arriving at hospitals in New York: Beyond fever, cough and shortness of breath, some are deeply disoriented to the point of not knowing where they are or what year it is.

At times this is linked to low oxygen levels in their blood, but in certain patients the confusion appears disproportionate to how their lungs are faring.

Jennifer Frontera, a neurologist at NYU Langone Brooklyn hospital seeing these patients, told AFP the findings were raising concerns about the impact of the coronavirus on the brain and nervous system.

Researchers with the world’s gravitational wave detectors said today they had picked up vibrations from a cosmic collision that harmonized with the opening notes of an Elvis Presley hit. The source was the most exotic merger of two black holes detected yet—a pair in which one weighed more than three times as much as the other. Because of the stark mass imbalance, the collision generated gravitational waves at multiple frequencies, in a harmony Elvis fans would recognize. The chord also confirms a prediction of Einstein’s theory of gravity, or general relativity.

Such mismatched mass events could help theorists figure out how pairs of black holes form in the first place. “Anything that seems to be at the edge of our predictions is most interesting,” says Chris Belczynski, a gravitational theorist at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, who was not involved in the observation. But the one event is “not quite in the regime where you can tell the different formation [routes] apart.”

Physicists first detected gravitational waves in 2015, when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a pair of detectors in Washington and Louisiana, spotted two black holes spiraling into each other, generating infinitesimal ripples in spacetime. Two years later, the Virgo detector near Pisa, Italy, joined the hunt, and by August 2017, the detectors had bagged a total of 10 black hole mergers.

For the last couple of years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been changing many fields and increasing efficiency by using improved datasets. One of those areas where AI has accelerated evolution is the robo-advisory, which is a field having extensive financial big data to analyze.

Robo-advisors are the systems that use algorithms to automatically perform investment decisions or tasks which are mostly done by human advisors. “Robo advisors are a potential solution to the complexities of financial decision making,” said Jill E. Fisch, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania at a conference of Pension Research Council.

In the main scheme, robo-advisors are merging customers’ information such as their financial goals, risk tolerances, timeframes, with the right asset allocation that qualifies customer’s needs. While making this merge, they use many algorithms including machine learning models to create the best fit for the customer. In the process of timeframe, they take lots of actions as well such as rebalancing the portfolio or performing tax-loss harvesting. This automatically increases efficiency while taking decisions at the right time for the portfolio.

“People usually say they want a human element to their interactions but Covid-19 has changed that,” says Martin Ford, a futurist who has written about the ways robots will be integrated into the economy in the coming decades.

“[Covid-19] is going to change consumer preference and really open up new opportunities for automation.”

Robot workers can help us keep social distance but once machines take over it will be hard to go back.

In today’s Federal Newscast, the Office of Personnel Management says agencies can lift the usual limits on premium pay and set higher annual premium pay caps for specific employees.

A woman in Pittsburgh has become the first documented case in a living person of an unusual medical condition where alcohol naturally brews in the bladder from the fermentation of yeast.

The condition, which researchers propose to call either ‘bladder fermentation syndrome’ or ‘urinary auto-brewery syndrome’, is similar to another incredibly rare condition, auto-brewery syndrome, where simply ingesting carbohydrates can be enough to make you inebriated, even without consuming any alcohol via regular means.

In the case, doctors became aware of what seems to be a related syndrome, after attending upon a 61-year-old patient who presented with liver damage and poorly controlled diabetes.

From China’s theft of intellectual property, including “one in five corporations saying China has stolen their intellectual property within the last year;” to Chinese influence and espionage in academia as exemplified by the recent criminal complaint against the Chair of the Harvard Chemistry and Biology Department; to Chinese investment in U.S. tech with “Chinese investor-backed deals with U.S. tech startups jumping as much as 185-percent” — China’s strategy has been fully exposed.

Retired Admiral William McRaven probably had it right when he said this is a “holy s— moment” for the United States.

U.S. policymakers now see China’s strategy for what it is — a not-so-subtle attempt to influence and ultimately control U.S. tech. The government of China has been engaged in a deliberate campaign to re-orient U.S. technology companies towards China.

When it comes to singularities, black holes are only half the story. White holes — regions of space where nothing can enter — are returning to the experimental spotlight.