Lifeboat Foundation

In a few seconds flat, you’ve gone from a neatly-equipped office to a home cinema…all within the same four walls. Who needs more than one room?

This is the dream of those who work on “programmable matter.”

In his recent book about AI, Max Tegmark makes a distinction between three different levels of computational sophistication for organisms. Life 1.0 is single-celled organisms like bacteria; here, hardware is indistinguishable from software. The behavior of the bacteria is encoded into its DNA; it cannot learn new things.

Continue reading “Stuff 3.0: The Era of Programmable Matter” »

If you’re the type of person who sometimes wakes up at 3am and lies in bed trying to wrap your tiny mind around the achingly vast Universe and where it’s all headed, well, we have something for you (also, same).

This incredible (and incredibly long) infographic from 2015 just keeps going and going and going. Which makes sense, because we’re talking about the entire lifespan of the Universe, from the moment of the Big Bang to the ‘heat death’ of everything we know and love.

Created by Slovak graphic designer Martin Vargic, the Timeline of the Universe covers the past 13.8 billion years of space, and then plots out what’s likely to occur in the next 10 billion or so.

Continue reading “This Timeline Shows The Entire History of The Universe, And Where It’s Headed” »

Elena Milova was at the Interventions to extend healthspan and lifespan 2018 conference in Kazan this week. This is an important conference in the aging research field, and it includes a variety of leading experts giving talks about their research. During the event, Elena had the opportunity to talk with professor David Gems about his work and his views on aging.

Professor Gems is a British geneticist and biogerontologist. He is Professor of Biology of Ageing at University College London, where he is also Deputy Director of the Institute of Healthy Ageing. His work focuses on understanding aging through the genetics of the nematode worm C. elegans.

A German mathematician, physicist and astronomer, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss rose from humble origins to become one of the world’s greatest minds.

Born in 1777 in Brunswick, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, Gauss was the only child of poor parents who had received little or no formal education. His mother was illiterate. But when Gauss started school at age seven, he was quickly recognized as a child prodigy who could solve complex math problems in his head.

While still a teenager, Gauss became the first person to prove the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity, a math theory to determine whether quadratic equations can be solved.

Not surprising and yet fascinating to actually see — “The researchers found that music activates the brain, causing whole regions to communicate. By listening to the personal soundtrack, the visual network, the salience network, the executive network and the cerebellar and corticocerebellar network pairs all showed significantly higher functional connectivity.”

“Ever get chills lis­ten­ing to a par­tic­u­lar­ly mov­ing piece of music? You can thank the salience net­work of the brain for that emo­tion­al joint. Sur­pris­ing­ly, this region also remains an island of remem­brance that is spared from the rav­ages of Alzheimer’s dis­ease. Researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah Health are look­ing to this region of the brain to devel­op music-based treat­ments to help alle­vi­ate anx­i­ety in patients with demen­tia. Their research will appear in the April online issue of The Jour­nal of Pre­ven­tion of Alzheimer’s Disease…

https://www.uqpower.com.au/podcast/spotlight-on-ira-pastor-genetic-regeneration

My #transhumanism work in this fun new article on future of sports:

Can bionic limbs and implanted technology make you faster and stronger? Meet biohackers working on the frontier.

Zoltan Istvan has achieved every runner’s fantasy: the ability to run without the hassle of carrying his keys. Thanks to a tiny chip implanted in his hand, Istvan doesn’t have to tie a key onto his laces, tuck it under a rock in the front yard, or find shorts with little zipper pockets built in. Just a wave of the microchip implanted in his hand will unlock the door of his home. The chip doesn’t yet negate the need for a Fitbit, a phone, or a pair of earbuds on long runs, but Istvan says it’s only a matter of time.

Continue reading “Quick Hits: Artificial Athletes” »

A new conductor material and a new electrode material could pave the way for inexpensive batteries and therefore the large-scale storage of renewable energy.

The energy transition depends on technologies that allow the inexpensive temporary storage of electricity from renewable sources. A promising new candidate is aluminium batteries, which are made from cheap and abundant raw materials.

Scientists from ETH Zurich and Empa, led by Maksym Kovalenko, Professor of Functional Inorganic Materials, are among those involved in researching and developing batteries of this kind. The researchers have now identified two new materials that could bring about key advances in the development of aluminium batteries. The first is a corrosion-resistant material for the conductive parts of the battery; the second is a novel material for the battery’s positive pole that can be adapted to a wide range of technical requirements.

Continue reading “New materials for sustainable, low-cost batteries” »

Move over, deep learning. Neuromorphic computing—the next big thing in artificial intelligence—is on fire.

Just last week, two studies individually unveiled computer chips modeled after information processing in the human brain.

The first, published in Nature Materials, found a perfect solution to deal with unpredictability at synapses—the gap between two neurons that transmit and store information. The second, published in Science Advances, further amped up the system’s computational power, filling synapses with nanoclusters of supermagnetic material to bolster information encoding.

Continue reading “Brain-Like Chips Now Beat the Human Brain in Speed and Efficiency” »