Lifeboat Foundation

Space exploration isn’t just romance; it’s not even just to keep the human species from having all its eggs in one basket. It’s also there, Daniel Suarez suggest, to save our economies from the day the debt-bubble bursts.

Besides biological immortality, there is also the possibility of digital immortality. The Human Connectome Project launched in 2010 aimed at mapping the entire human brain and to build its “network map” (connectome) to connect its structure to function and behaviour. Once the neural structure of the brain is completely deciphered, the mind can be uploaded into a computer that could control a robot that replicates a human in every respect.

The quest for eternal life is as old as humanity itself. “Grant us liberation from death for the sake of immortality, as the cucumber is severed from its bondage to the creeper”, runs one of the ancient Hindu prayers in the Mahamrityunjay, or the “great death-conquering” mantra. Death is the ultimate end, mysterious and terrible, against which even the strongest is powerless.

How to conquer death is a question every civilisation has tried to address. Myths have grown around immortal beings like gods in every culture, and of valiant but futile attempts of mortal men to attain immortality. But science may be closer to finding an answer to this ancient quest now more than ever before. In the early history of life, unicellular organisms like prokaryotes, protozoans and algae had ageless bodies and were immortal.

Continue reading “Quest for Immortality” »

Despite nearly crashing its lander into the lunar surface, NASA’s Apollo 10 mission paved the way for Apollo 11’s historic landing.

Zombie Pigs

In what is being called the largest agriculture seizure in US history, US authorities seized a million pounds of pork smuggled to a port in New Jersey from swine fever stricken China. RT America’s Sara Montes de Oca joins News.Views. Hughes with the details.

Continue reading “Coming Soon to your Dinner Table: swine fever smuggled Chinese pork?” »

The ancient, now-dormant volcano on which the island of Bermuda sits formed in a completely unique way, scientists have discovered. The finding not only solves a long-standing mystery about the island’s volcanic origins, but it also describes a new way volcanoes form.

In studying a rock core sample taken from Bermuda, drilled from 1972, geoscientists have discovered the first direct evidence that material from deep within Earth’s mantle transition zone —a layer rich in water, crystals and melted rock — can percolate to the surface to form volcanoes.

Researchers have long known that volcanoes form when tectonic plates converge, or as a result of mantle plumes that rise from the core-mantle boundary to make hotspots at Earth’s crust.

Continue reading “Scientists Discover a New Way Volcanoes Form, Sheds Light on Bermuda’s Origins” »

Quantum information protocols require various types of entanglement, such as Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen, Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger, and cluster states. In optics, on-demand preparation of these states has been realized by squeezed light sources, but such experiments require different optical circuits for different entangled states, thus lacking versatility. Here, we demonstrate an on-demand entanglement synthesizer that programmably generates all these entangled states from a single squeezed light source. This is achieved by a loop-based circuit that is dynamically controllable at nanosecond time scales and processes optical pulses in the time domain. We verify the generation of five different small-scale entangled states and a large-scale cluster state containing more than 1000 modes without changing the optical circuit. Moreover, this circuit enables storage and release of one part of the generated entangled state, thus working as a quantum memory. Our demonstration should open a way for a more general entanglement synthesizer and a scalable quantum processor.

Entanglement is an essential resource for many quantum information protocols in both qubit and continuous variable (CV) regimes. However, different types of entanglement are required for different applications (Fig. 1A). The most commonly used maximally entangled state is a two-mode Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) state (1), which is the building block for two-party quantum communication and quantum logic gates based on quantum teleportation (2, 3). Its generalized version is an n-mode Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state (4, 5), which is central to building a quantum network; this state, once shared between n parties, enables any two of the n parties to communicate with each other (5, 6). In terms of quantum computation, a special type of entanglement called cluster states has attracted much attention as a universal resource for one-way quantum computation (7–9).

To that end, Bezos instead suggested people consider taking up residence in O’Neill colonies, a futuristic concept for space settlements first dreamed up decades ago. “These are very large structures, miles on end, and they hold a million people or more each.”

Can we, as adults, grow new neurons? Neuroscientist Sandrine Thuret says that we can, and she offers research and practical advice on how we can help our brains better perform neurogenesis—improving mood, increasing memory formation and preventing the decline associated with aging along the way.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more.
Find closed captions and translated subtitles in many languages at http://www.ted.com/translate

Continue reading “You can grow new brain cells. Here’s how | Sandrine Thuret” »

SAN LEANDRO (KPIX) — It is the stuff of science fiction and Hollywood movies. The promise: upon your death, your body is frozen until some future medical breakthrough restores you to full health.

Roughly 400 Americans — before they died — decided to bank on the possibility that this will happen. Their bodies are now being held at three facilities in the United States, including one in the East Bay.

“This is like a hospital,” explained Steve Garan, who took KPIX 5 reporter Juliette Goodrich on a tour of Trans Time, a Bay Area Cryonics facility in San Leandro.

Continue reading “Inside TransTime Cryonics Facility: Bodies Frozen, Awaiting A Future Reawakening” »