Lifeboat Foundation

In 2016, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to three British scientists for their work on superconductors and superfluids, which included the explanation of a rather odd phase of matter.

Now, for the first time, their discovery has a practical application – shrinking an electrical component to a size that will help quantum computers reach a scale that just might make them useful.

In a collaboration with Stanford University in the US, a team of scientists from the University of Sydney and Microsoft have used the newly found phase of matter — topological insulator — in shrinking an electrical component called a circulator 1,000 times smaller.

Continue reading “Physicists Just Invented an Essential Component Needed For Quantum Computers” »

Although it is hard to get exact numbers, thousands of science students and professionals are thought to be among those seeking refuge. Now they are the focus of a documentary by Italian artist and film-maker Nicole Leghissa. Her Science in Exile recently premiered at the World Science Forum in Jordan, and will be shown globally in 2018.

What becomes of the scientists among those fleeing war and conflict in Africa and the Middle East, asks a documentary, Science in Exile.

While accidents have happened, one of the most appealing things about autonomous vehicles is their capacity to make our roads a safer place. Now, insurance companies are starting to offer financial incentives to promote adoption.

Britain’s largest automobile insurance company, Direct Line, has announced a 5 percent discount for customers who activate Autopilot functionality in their Tesla. It follows in the footsteps of Root, a startup that offers a similar promotion across nine states in the US.

Continue reading “Insurance Companies Are Now Offering Discounts if Your Let Your Tesla Drive Itself” »

A new study reveals that semi-synthetic organisms — in this case, E.coli bacteria containing two artificial DNA bases — can produce proteins.

What is a body other than the vessel for your consciousness? Does the one you’re using right now really matter all that much? Why not, when your current body gets all old and run down, don’t you just get a new, young, beautiful, and healthy one? That’s the pitch in the first trailer for Netflix’s new dystopian sci-fi series Altered Carbon, which takes the form of an advertisement for Psychasec.

“Centuries ago, mankind discovered a way to transfer consciousness into a new body making death a mere inconvenience,” says the commercial. “Since then we’ve been providing an unparalleled pedigree of human sleeves to only the most discerning clientele. Psychasec: Live forever in the body you deserve.”

Continue reading “Netflix’s Beautiful New Sci-Fi Series Will Make You Rethink Death” »

Anheuser-Busch says it reserved 40 electric big rigs.

The descendant of DeepMind’s world champion Go program stretches its muscles in a new domain.

It worked. Working with mice, they were able to reverse the disease symptoms of kidney disease, type 1 diabetes, and a form of muscular dystrophy. In the mouse with kidney disease, for example, they turned on two genes associated with kidney function and saw the kidney function improved.

The unassumingly named CRISPR/Cas9 is a technology that stands to remake the world as we know it. By allowing scientists to more easily than ever cut and paste all those As, Cs, Ts, and Gs that encode all the world’s living things, for one thing, it could one day cure many devastating diseases.

All that power, though, comes with one pretty sizable caveat: Sometimes CRISPR doesn’t work quite like we expect it to. While the scientific establishment is still embroiled in a debate over just how serious the problem is, CRISPR sometimes causes off-target effects. And for scientists doing gene editing on human patients, those mutations could wind up inadvertently causing problems like tumors or genetic disease. Yikes.

Continue reading “A Modified CRISPR Could Treat Common Diseases Without Editing DNA” »