Lifeboat Foundation

Musk, to the rescue!

University of Central Florida researchers have developed a way to control the speed of light. Not only can they speed up a pulse of light and slow it down, they can also make it travel backward.

Testing these six lenses — the largest of which is 1.1 meters in diameter — will continue for about six weeks at the Mayall Telescope near Tucson, Arizona. It’s part of an effort to get DESI up and running sometime this year.

When complete, DESI will measure the light of tens of millions of galaxies reaching back 12 billion light years. That will enable scientists to 3D map the universe like never before and to measure its expansion. Ultimately, scientists are looking for insight into dark energy, which makes up an estimated 68 percent of the universe and is said to be the force behind its accelerating expansion. Scientists on the research team say they’re just as excited to find what they’re looking for — a better understanding of dark energy — as they are to discover what other mysteries DESI might reveal.

Researchers spot the signatures of nuclear fusion in a table-top-sized setup commonly used to study the plasmas found in stars and other astrophysical objects.

Future nuclear fusion reactors promise the possibility of supplying Earth with an unlimited source of clean energy. Attempts to create these reactors typically involve building-sized contraptions to generate the hot plasma needed to initiate fusion reactions. Now Yue Zhang at the University of Washington in Seattle and colleagues have successfully ignited sustained fusion using a setup that is small enough to sit on a table.

The discovery of a fossilized, 42-million-year-old, four-legged whale is shedding new light on the evolution and geographical spread of these aquatic mammals.

The ancestors of modern whales and dolphins evolved from a small, four-limbed hoofed animal that lived in south Asia around 50 million years ago, during the Eocene. Fossil evidence suggests these aquatic mammalian pioneers reached North America by 41.2 million years ago, swimming from West Africa across the Atlantic. The surprise discovery of a previously unknown, 42.6-million-year-old quadrupedal whale along the coast of Peru has resulted in an important addendum to this story: Ancient whales made South America, and not North America, their first home in the New World. Details of this discovery were published today in Current Biology.

Next week, the robotic probe built by the nonprofit SpaceIL is to attempt to land on the lunar surface.

We recently attended the Undoing Aging Conference in Berlin and had the opportunity to interview Professor Vittorio Sebastiano of Turn. Bio, a company developing partial cellular reprogramming techniques to reverse cellular aging.

As we age, our cells experience changes to their epigenetic markers, and this, in turn, changes gene expression, which is proposed to be a primary reason we age. Recently, there has been considerable interest in resetting these epigenetic markers to reverse cellular aging; induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) creation uses similar techniques.

Continue reading “An Interview with Prof. Vittorio Sebastiano of Turn.Bio” »

More details on Intel Capital’s new investments in 14 disruptive startups:

Disrupting Artificial Intelligence

Untether AI (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is developing ultra-efficient, high-performance AI chips that will be the foundation for the next wave of innovation in AI. Untether AI has invented an entirely new type of chip architecture that is specifically designed for neural net inference by eliminating bottlenecks in data movement. This unique architecture moves data 1,000 times faster than traditional architectures, resulting in extreme performance and efficiency. The company was founded by a team of scientists, engineers and experienced entrepreneurs who have successfully brought to market more than 1 billion chips.

Continue reading “Intel Invested $117 Million into AI Startups Including Untether AI” »

Humans could build a permanent settlement on Mars where a new branch of human civilization and social order could be created, said a Mars exploration advocate on Thursday.

“We could easily have humans on Mars in 10 years or faster if it is an international project,” Robert Zubrin, the Mars Society president, told the Global Times in an exclusive interview on Thursday in Beijing.

By then, human beings could go back and forth between Mars and Earth anytime by taking reusable rockets and the technology would be cheaper and cheaper as the spaceflight frequency to Mars increases, he said.