Lifeboat Foundation

With a focus on building the archetypal missions for NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket, the U.S.-based Boeing Corporation has outlined their view of what technologies can be used to accomplish humankind’s goal of visiting crews to the Martian system – missions Boeing believes are possible through the combination of the SLS rocket’s lift capability, the bourgeoning Solar Electric Propulsion technology field, and Bigelow’s soon-to-be-tested inflatable habitat modules.

From the Earth-Moon system to Mars:

Continuing from their initial presentation on potential SLS rocket uses beyond the opening two circumlunar missions, the Boeing Corporation has presented their idea of how to execute a phased approach to deep space exploration – with an eye for the eventual goal of landing human beings on the surface of Mars.

Continue reading “Boeing outlines technology for crewed Mars missions” »

Neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero likens himself to Peter Parker and Victor Frankenstein, and controversially claims that a successful human head transplant is imminent.

Click to read an excerpt – subscribers can read the whole thing.

The core of a neutron star is such an extreme environment that physicists can’t agree on what happens inside. But a new space-based experiment — and a few more colliding neutron stars — should reveal whether neutrons themselves break down.

A new analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler telescope has revealed a treasure trove of 20 extraterrestrial worlds astronomers say could hold life.

The new analysis includes several planets that orbit stars similar to our sun.

Continue reading “Kepler finds 20 habitable worlds ‘hiding in plain sight’” »

Elon Musk released this weekend the first image of the Boring Company’s new tunnel under Los Angeles and also expanded on the company’s plans for future segments of the project.

In recent articles, we have talked about the potential of the immune system to help repair tissue, including for peripheral nerve damage, Atherosclerosis, and Parkinson’s. Immune cells not only fight infection; as this new study shows, they also help the nervous system remove debris, paving the way for nerve regeneration following injury.

While previous studies suggested that nerve cell damage repair was conducted by other immune cell types, such as macrophages, researchers from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have shown that neutrophils also play a role.

Today we are looking at why some people claim it is pointless developing medicines to eradicate age-related diseases because we will all die anyway. Imagine if the medical world felt that way, there would be no medicine, no surgery or healthcare!

I don’t think anyone has ever asked me this question, but I do know from other advocates that this isn’t unheard of. Quite frankly, I think this question is rather bizarre, and its implications are even more so.

In this article, I’m not going to question the assumption about the inevitability of death; rather, I will take it for granted and try to explain why I think it has no relevance whatsoever to whether or not rejuvenation is worth pursuing.

Continue reading “The Death is inevitable, why bother with rejuvenation? Argument” »

Thank a new approach to spoofing image recognition AIs, developed by a team from Kyushu University in Japan, for that joke.

Trying to catch out AIs is a popular pastime for many researchers, and we’ve reported machine-learning spoofs in the past. The general approach is to add features to images that will incorrectly trigger a neural network and have it identify what it sees as something else entirely.

The new research, published on the arXiv, describes an algorithm that can efficiently identify the best pixels to alter in order to confuse an AI into mislabeling a picture. By changing just one pixel in a 1,024-pixel image, the software can trick an AI about 74 percent of the time. That figure rises to around 87 percent if five pixels are tweaked.

Continue reading “How Do You Turn a Dog into a Car? Change a Single Pixel” »

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