Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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One of the most astonishing revelations might be that information equals reality. In other words, the basis for our material reality is actually immaterial information. Pattern and flow of information is what defines our experiential reality.

Everything boils down to the binary code of Nature. This is a basic tenet of Digital Physics which is the science of information. Nature computes. Deep down we are information technology. We run on genetic, neural and societal codes. Our DNA-based biology is clearly code-theoretic. We are alphabetic all the way down. We communicate intersubjectively mind-to-mind via language-structured exchange of information.

A recent study shows that human speech is transmitted at about 39 bits a sec. Idealist philosopher Terence McKenna used to say that “The world is made of language and if you know the words the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.”

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“I don’t want to interrupt Lucas’ neurodevelopment — he’s on the same path that a child his age would normally be,” Vogel said, adding that he’s started eating baby cereal and baby food. “We intervene with the best intentions and then possibly delay someone’s recovery — I don’t want to stunt his growth or neurodevelopment.”

In the future, Vogel said they will work with his family on cosmetic goals as well but that he has normal facial features, meaning the area the will need to address is the top of his skull. He added that the more bone he develops the more of his own tissue they can use, which will “lead to a better outcome.”

Vogel said the waiting has also paid off, as at a recent visit with Lucas he was lifting his head and trying to crawl, which is something a babies typically master between six and 10 months of age.

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At the Ending Age-Related Diseases 2019 Conference in New York City, we had the opportunity to interview Dr. Justin Rebo from the drug discovery biotech company BioAge.

BioAge is developing a drug discovery platform that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to discover targets that have the potential to promote healthy lifespan (healthspan) by slowing down aging and the ill health that it brings.

As the vice president of in-vivo biology at BioAge, Dr. Rebo leads the company’s internal in-vivo platform to find and assess the viability of new druggable targets for aging diseases and biomedical regeneration. With considerable business as well as academic experience in the aging field under his belt, Justin joined the BioAge team in 2018.

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Lunar lander developer Intuitive Machines has signed a contract with SpaceX for its first mission to the moon. The company announced this week that a Falcon 9 will launch its Nova-C lander in 2021 as part of a rideshare mission, but terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company won a contract from NASA in May to carry five payloads to the moon on that mission as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Separately, a federal appeals court this week upheld a verdict in favor of the company in a suit against Moon Express, another commercial lunar lander company. That suit, involving work disputes between the companies, led to Intuitive Machines receiving $4.1 million in cash and stock. [SpaceNews]

Maxar Technologies awarded a contract to Deployable Space Systems to manufacture flexible solar arrays for the first element of NASA’s lunar Gateway. The contract this week is for a pair of Roll Out Solar Array solar panels, each capable of producing 32.5 kilowatts of power. The arrays will be used on the Power and Propulsion Element that Maxar is building for NASA that will serve as the foundation for the Gateway in orbit around the moon. [SpaceNews]

A startup planning propellant depots in orbit for refueling satellites has raised $3 million. OrbitFab announced Thursday it raised the seed round of funding from venture capital fund Type 1 Ventures, Techstars and others. The company is working on technology to allow for refueling of satellites using small depots in orbit, and recently tested that technology on the International Space Station. At a conference in Washington earlier in the week, the company said it was still working on raising a funding round but hopes to have its first tanker in orbit by the end of next year. [TechCrunch].

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MANILA, Philippines — Now in its 8th year, Space Apps is an international hackathon for coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, technologists, and others in cities around the world, where teams engage with NASA’s free and open data to address real-world problems on Earth and in space. Space Apps 2018 included over 18,000 participants at more than 200 events in 75 countries.

Since its inception in 2012, NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge has become the world’s largest global hackathon, engaging thousands of citizens across the globe to use NASA’s open data to build innovative solutions to challenges we face on Earth and in space.

2018 hackathon at Huntsville, AL
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According to condensed matter physics predictions, at a high enough pressure, hydrogen should dissociate and transform into an atomic metal. However, the exact pressure range at which this occurs has not yet been ascertained, and the process through which hydrogen becomes a metal is still somewhat unclear.

In a recent study, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry demonstrated that at a pressure of 350–360 GPa and at temperatures below 200K, molecular starts to conduct and becomes semimetallic. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, provides interesting new insight about the transition of hydrogen at high pressures, unveiling some of the properties it acquires.

“Typically, metallic hydrogen is considered to be atomic hydrogen—a crystal built from protons after dissociation of the molecules,” Mikhail Eremets, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “However, hydrogen can also transform into a metal in the molecular state—in this case, electronic bands of molecular hydrogen crystal broaden and eventually overlap so that the band gap closes, free electrons and holes appear—this is metallic state.”

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Using a new time-based method to control light from an ultrafast laser, researchers have developed a nanoscale 3D printing technique that can fabricate tiny structures 1000 times faster than conventional two-photon lithography (TPL) techniques, without sacrificing resolution.

Despite the high throughput, the new parallelized technique—known as femtosecond projection TPL (FP-TPL)—produces depth resolution of 175 nanometers, which is better than established methods and can fabricate structures with 90-degree overhangs that can’t currently be made. The technique could lead to manufacturing-scale production of bioscaffolds, flexible electronics, electrochemical interfaces, micro-optics, mechanical and optical metamaterials, and other functional micro- and nanostructures.

The work, reported Oct. 3 in the journal Science, was done by researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Sourabh Saha, the paper’s lead and corresponding author, is now an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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Space bacteria — they’re tiny, invisible, and potentially harmful; even if no one is sure that they actually exist. But for most of the Space Age, NASA and other agencies have treated the possibility of pathogens from space carefully, both during our exploration of other worlds and because of the havoc they could conceivably wreak on Earth. Nowadays, though, there’s a new factor: Elon Musk.

The billionaire entrepreneur dreams of settling thousands of humans on the planet Mars and, oh yeah, he happens to own a rocket company that is slowly building the capability to do so. Musk and other leaders in the commercial space industry are looking at opening up previously unexplored possibilities — asteroid mining, private space stations, package delivery to the moon’s surface. Laudable as these goals are, they are also forcing governments around the world to rethink their space regulations and consider whether they’re up to these impending challenges.

As ever more players enter the space arena it’s time to make sure that everybody is following the best planetary protection practices. Exploring the universe should happen for the benefit of all, including future generations.

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