Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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A number of NASA scientists are currently researching the feasibility of warp drive (and EMdrive and a number of other modes of faster than light travel); however, most scientists think that such forms of space travel simply aren’t viable, thanks to the fundamental physics of our universe.

“Routine travel among the stars is impossible without new discoveries regarding the fabric of space and time, or capability to manipulate it for our needs,” says Neil deGrasse Tyson, the “Cosmos famous” astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, said “By my read, the idea of a functioning warp drive remains far-fetched, but the real take-away is that people are thinking about it — reminding us all that the urge to explore continues to run deep in our species.”

There have been hints the past few years that NASA may be on the path to discovering warp bubbles that could make the local universe accessible for human exploration. NASA scientists may be close announcing they may have broken the speed of light. According to state-of-the art theory, a warp drive could cut the travel time between stars from tens of thousands of years to weeks or months.

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As well as Gait Recognition. (Go ahead and wear a disguise.)

The mass surveillance of innocent Americans continues as George Orwell’s 1984 becomes more of a reality with each passing day. “All told, we are barreling toward a future where every ritual of public life carries implicit consent to be surveilled,” writes Sidney Fussell for The Atlantic.

A new report from Georgetown Law‘s Center on Privacy & Technology (CPT) suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) may be using the rampant problem of illegal immigration as a type of cover to track and spy on Americans in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. Three years ago, the center revealed that nearly half of all U.S. adults are already in the FBI’s facial recognition database, which is largely sourced from DMV photos.

ICE has apparently requested special access to Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) databases in at least three states – Utah, Washington State, and Vermont – which the federal agency plans to use in conjunction with facial recognition technology to scan people’s drivers’ license photos and match them against criminal and residency databases, all without their knowledge or consent.

Continue reading “Mass Surveillance: 1 in 2 Americans Are Already In A Government Facial Recognition Database” | >

The phrase “positive reinforcement,” is something you hear more often in an article about child rearing than one about artificial intelligence. But according to Alice Parker, Dean’s Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a little positive reinforcement is just what our AI machines need. Parker has been building electronic circuits for over a decade to reverse-engineer the human brain to better understand how it works and ultimately build artificial systems that mimic it. Her most recent paper, co-authored with Ph.D. student Kun Yue and colleagues from UC Riverside, was just published in the journal Science Advances and takes an important step towards that ultimate goal.

The AI we rely on and read about today is modeled on traditional computers; it sees the world through the lens of binary zeros and ones. This is fine for making complex calculations but, according to Parker and Yue, we’re quickly approaching the limits of the size and complexity of problems we can solve with the platforms our AI exists on. “Since the initial deep learning revolution, the goals and progress of deep-learning based AI as we know it has been very slow,” Yue says. To reach its full potential, AI can’t simply think better—it must react and learn on its own to events in . And for that to happen, a massive shift in how we build AI in the first place must be conceived.

To address this problem, Parker and her colleagues are looking to the most accomplished learning system nature has ever created: the . This is where comes into play. Brains, unlike computers, are analog learners and biological memory has persistence. Analog signals can have multiple states (much like humans). While a binary AI built with similar types of nanotechnologies to achieve long-lasting memory might be able to understand something as good or bad, an analog brain can understand more deeply that a situation might be “very good,” “just okay,” “bad” or “very bad.” This field is called and it may just represent the future of artificial intelligence.

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In a paper published in the July 31 issue of Science Translational Medicine, researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center used CRISPR-Cas9 to edit long-lived blood stem cells to reverse the clinical symptoms observed with several blood disorders, including sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia.

It’s the first time that scientists have specifically edited the genetic makeup of a specialized subset of adult blood stem cells that are the source of all cells in the blood and immune system.

The proof-of-principle study suggests that efficient modification of targeted stem cells could reduce the costs of gene-editing treatments for blood disorders and other diseases while decreasing the risks of unwanted effects that can occur with a less discriminating approach.

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A solid clarification article in a major newspaper where I point out that the transhumanism movement is vastly different than how Epstein interpreted in in 2011. Transhumanists need to speak up about what their vision of transhumanism is so others and media know what it really is about.

The revelation that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein planned to impregnate 20 women with his sperm in a “DNA seeding” centre left the world feeling sick. But for patrons of a small, but growing, political movement it caused utter chaos.

“This is the largest media coverage we have ever experienced,” says Zoltan Istvan, former presidential candidate and founder of the Transhumanist Party. “But this is the worst type of coverage. Lots of damage control is being done right now.”

The father-of-two has spent the morning taking telephone calls and sending emails to fellow “leaders” of the movement to try and work out some form of publicity crisis management strategy.

Continue reading “The truth about Jeffrey Epstein and his fascination with transhumanism” | >

Arch Intern Med. 1997 Feb 10;157:281–5.

Growing numbers of patients suffering from many symptoms believe that they have a condition called multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome (MCSS). It has been suggested that this syndrome can be triggered by exposure to any of a large and usually incompletely defined number of natural and synthetic chemical substances. Major medical organizations, including the National Research Council and the American Medical Association, have not recognized MCSS as a clinical syndrome because of a lack of valid, well-controlled studies defining it and establishing pathogenesis or origin. Lately, some have proposed that many patients with MCSS suffer from hereditary coproporphyria. However, this purported association is based chiefly on results from a single reference laboratory of a fundamentally flawed assay for erythrocyte coproporphyrinogen oxidase.

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