Lifeboat Foundation

‘Pulsar Guardian’ will let governmental and commercial customers run wargames simulating conflict in space.

Prof. S. Jay Olshansky is a Professor of the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Research Associate at the Center on Aging at the University of Chicago and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Chief Scientist at Lapetus Solutions, Inc. He has received multiple scientific awards, including the Irving S. Wright Award from the American Federation for Aging Research.

Prof. Olshansky is the co-author of multiple papers related to epidemiology and population, and the areas of his current research include estimates of the upper limits to human longevity, opportunities and challenges related to population aging, how morbidity changes over time, and forecasts of the size and age demographics of the population with and without medicines that address the underlying mechanisms of aging.

We had the opportunity to interview Prof. Olshansky at International Perspectives in Geroscience, a conference hosted at Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) on September 4–5.

Humanist and technoscientific notions of progress have been (mis)used to classify human and nonhuman life forms into hierarchical categories, thereby reducing the complexities of life stories into a linear account of development and innovation. At the same time, critical reflections on key concepts of modernist, Eurocentric and industry-driven concepts of time and historicity and, more forcefully perhaps, new findings in evolutionary biology and physics, have produced alternative narratives, sometimes with a reconsideration of premodern understandings of temporality like, for example, Gilles Deleuze ’s rereading of Leibniz in The Fold.[1] The modernist conception of History (with a capital H) as both an empirical reality and a specific disciplinary and disciplining knowledge [2] has thus become just one possible manifestation within a plurality of histor ies conditioned by socio-cultural particularities that honour the experience of bodies that, voluntarily or not, live outside re/productive timelines, for example.

An increasing number of researchers as well as artists are no longer interested in the taking and making time and space as human universals but in genealogies, intersections, “multiple modernities”[3] and the coexistence of non-simultaneous phenomena in the era of globalization, asymmetrical power relations and technoculture. Moreover, post-anthropocentric thinking and creativity, fostered in posthumanist discourse (including new materialism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, neocybernetic systems theory, etc.), also increasingly attends to nonhuman temporalities and how these are entangled, often in conflicting ways, with human time. Such considerations include the vexing question of how emancipatory goals of progressive social trans/formation and justice can be envisaged, let alone obtained, if we can no longer ground our theories and political practices in enlightened narratives of humanist progress and liberation.

The disappearance of 40-year-old mortgage broker William Earl Moldt remained a mystery for 22 years because the technology used to find him hadn’t been developed yet.

Moldt was reported missing on November 8, 1997. He had left a nightclub around 11 p.m. where he had been drinking. He wasn’t known as a heavy drinker and witnesses at the bar said he didn’t seem intoxicated when he left.

Particle physicists are planning the successor to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider – but how will they deal with the deluge of data from a future machine and the proliferation of theoretical models? Michela Massimi explains why a new scientific methodology called “model independence” could hold the answer.

It’s been an exciting few months for particle physicists. In May more than 600 researchers gathered in Granada, Spain, to discuss the European Particle Physics Strategy, while in June CERN held a meeting in Brussels, Belgium, to debate plans for the Future Circular Collider (FCC). This giant machine – 100 km in circumference and earmarked for the Geneva lab – is just one of several different projects (including those in astroparticle physics and machine learning) that particle physicists are working on to explore the frontiers of high-energy physics.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been collecting data from vast numbers of proton–proton collisions since 2010 – first at an energy of 8 TeV and then 13 TeV during its second run. These have enabled scientists on the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC to discover the Higgs boson in 2012, while light has also been shed on other vital aspects of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Kepler exoplanet may have more water than Earth, but that doesn’t mean it’s habitable, say researchers.

The threats of cyberattack and hypersonic missiles are two examples of easily foreseeable challenges to our national security posed by rapidly developing technology. It is by no means certain that we will be able to cope with those two threats, let alone the even more complicated and unknown challenges presented by the general onrush of technology — the digital revolution or so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution — that will be our future for the next few decades.

Technology is about to upend our entire national security infrastructure.

(Phys.org)—Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior.

Quantum mechanics tells us that light can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave. However, there has never been an experiment able to capture both natures of light at the same time; the closest we have come is seeing either wave or particle, but always at different times. Taking a radically different experimental approach, EPFL scientists have now been able to take the first ever snapshot of light behaving both as a wave and as a particle. The breakthrough work is published in Nature Communications.

Continue reading “The first ever photograph of light as both a particle and wave” »

TVs and radios blare that “artificial intelligence is coming,” and it will take your job and beat you at chess.

But AI is already here, and it can beat you — and the world’s best — at chess. In 2012, it was also used by Google to identify cats in YouTube videos. Today, it’s the reason Teslas have Autopilot and Netflix and Spotify seem to “read your mind.” Now, AI is changing the field of synthetic biology and how we engineer biology. It’s helping engineers design new ways to design genetic circuits — and it could leave a remarkable impact on the future of humanity through the huge investment it has been receiving ($12.3b in the last 10 years) and the markets it is disrupting.