Lifeboat Foundation

Early November 2018, Conrad Holton visited Japan at the invitation of Hamamatsu Photonics to attend the three-day Photon Fair, the company’s big event looking at its technologies and vision for the future. The Fair is held every five years near its headquarters in Hamamatsu City, about 150 miles southwest of Tokyo. In addition to thousands of customers, suppliers, and students who attended, the event was open to the public for one day to show the many technologies just emerging from the company’s research labs and how these technologies might impact fields ranging from the life sciences to transportation and manufacturing.

An interview with the CEO of Hamamatsu Photonics shows how an engineering company with a singular focus on photonics can succeed.

UNITY Biotechnologies has recently announced an expansion of its first-stage human trial of UBX0101, a drug that has been shown to have senolytic properties in mice [1] and that the company hopes will be useful in treating painful osteoarthritis of the knee.

An expanded clinical trial

UNITY Biotechnologies, a $495 million biotech company in the process of creating senolytic medicines that target one of the aging processes, has just announced an expansion of its first-stage human trial of the first drug in its pipeline (UBX0101), which targets painful osteoarthritis of the knee.

A participation in the annual Supercomputing conference taking place in Salt Lake City, UT, USA from November 14–17, 2016.

(CNN) — Intensive lowering of blood pressure, to a less than 120 mm Hg level, can have a measurable impact on mild cognitive impairment (MCI) — a well-established precursor of dementia, a new study finds.

Previous studies have suggested high blood pressure could be a risk factor for dementia and mild cognitive impairment, leading US researchers to explore whether lowering pressure could reduce this risk in a large randomized trial on more than 9000 people.

Lowering blood pressure did not significantly reduce dementia risk, but the secondary results showed a significant reduction in MCI, according to the study published Monday.

Continue reading “Lowering blood pressure could cut risk factor for dementia” »

Researchers are always looking for new materials that can help power electronics and medical devices in the future. MIT has made a breakthrough with a new material that makes that goal closer to reality. The breakthrough is thanks to a fully flexible device that can convert WiFi signals into electricity that could power devices.

Buckyballs! We love them.

JILA researchers have measured hundreds of individual quantum energy levels in the buckyball, a spherical cage of 60 carbon atoms. It’s the largest molecule that has ever been analyzed at this level of experimental detail in the history of quantum mechanics. Fully understanding and controlling this molecule’s quantum details could lead to new scientific fields and applications, such as an entire quantum computer contained in a single buckyball.

The imperative of developing artificial intelligence (AI) could not be more clear when it comes to exploring space beyond the Solar System. Even today, when working with unmanned probes like New Horizons and the Voyagers that preceded it, we are dealing with long communication times, making probes that can adapt to situations without assistance from controllers a necessity. Increasing autonomy promises challenges of its own, but given the length of the journeys involved, earlier interstellar efforts will almost certainly be unmanned and rely on AI.

The field has been rife with speculation by science fiction writers as well as scientists thinking about future missions. When the British Interplanetary Society set about putting together the first serious design for an interstellar vehicle — Project Daedalus in the 1970s — self-repair and autonomous operation were a given. The mission would operate far from home, performing a flyby of Barnard’s Star and the presumed planets there with no intervention from Earth.

We’re at an interesting place here because each step we take in the direction of artificial intelligence leads toward the development of what Andreas Hein and Stephen Baxter call ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI), which they describe in an absorbing new paper called “Artificial Intelligence for Interstellar Travel,” now submitted to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. The authors define AGI as “[a]n artificial intelligence that is able to perform a broad range of cognitive tasks at similar levels or better than humans.”

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence and the Starship” »

For a long time, biohackers have been playing with magnets by embedding then under their skin as a novelty extra-sensation. I, personally, don’t see the point, but morphological, taxonomic, and cladic freedom are at work so I celebrate their actions.

Our skin’s ability to perceive pressure, heat, cold, and vibration is a critical safety function that most people take for granted. But burn victims, those with prosthetic limbs, and others who have lost skin sensitivity for one reason or another, can’t take it for granted, and often injure themselves unintentionally.

Chemists Islam Mosa from UConn, and James Rusling from UConn and UConn Health, along with University of Toronto engineer Abdelsalam Ahmed, wanted to create a sensor that can mimic the sensing properties of skin. Such a sensor would need to be able to detect pressure, temperature, and vibration. But perhaps it could do other things too, the researchers thought.

“It would be very cool if it had abilities human skin does not; for example, the ability to detect magnetic fields, sound waves, and abnormal behaviors,” said Mosa.

Device made from flexible, inexpensive materials could power large-area electronics, wearables, medical devices, and more.