Lifeboat Foundation

California is about to become the only state in the nation mandating that virtually every new home have solar panels by 2020.

A cure for baldness could be on the horizon after British scientists discovered that an osteoporosis drug stimulates hair growth three times quicker than other drugs.

Around four in 10 men suffer male pattern baldness by the age of 45 and two thirds by the age of 60.

At the moment only two drugs, minoxidil and finasteride, are available for the treatment of male pattern baldness (androgenetic alopecia) — the classic type of receding hair loss in men.

Continue reading “Baldness cure could come from side-effect of cancer drug” »

The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday approved a plan allowing SpaceX to build and operate a facility at the Port of L.A., where the Hawthorne space company will produce its next-generation BFR rockets and spacecraft.

With Google’s I/O developer conference kicking off later today, Google is setting the scene for what it expects to be one of the big themes of the event: artificial intelligence. Today, the company rebranded the whole of its Google Research division as Google AI, with the old Google Research site now directing to a newly expanded Google AI site.

Google has over the years worked on a wide variety of other computing pursuits beyond AI, and all of that content will continue to exist within that new site, the company said. But the move signals how Google has increasingly focused a lot of its R&D on breaking new ground across the many facets of AI specifically, from technologies like computer vision, natural language processing, and neural networks, through to applications across virtually any and every business that Google currently and potentially touches, such as video, search and mobile apps, but also healthcare, automotive applications and other verticals.

That’s not just Google reflecting how the wider world of tech is evolving; it’s also a measure of how much Google has influenced it.

Continue reading “Google goes all-in on artificial intelligence, renames research division Google AI” »

The first step to mining an asteroid is finding a suitable candidate. Scientists estimate there should be some ten nearby targets.

UberAir will fly electric passenger drones on short trips, the U.S. Army is researching Uber’s tech, and NASA has forged an agreement with the flying taxis.

It’s not a bird, nor a plane. But Uber’s new prototype vehicle unveiled Tuesday shows off its vision of the future of transportation—a “flying taxi” that aims to alleviate urban congestion.

A model of Uber’s electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle concept (eVTOL)—a cross between a helicopter and a drone—was displayed at the second annual Uber Elevate Summit in Los Angeles.

“Our goal is to radically improve global mobility,” said Uber Aviation product chief Nikhil Goel.

Biologist George Church says the idea is to live to 130 in the body of a 22-year-old.

Today we take an amusing look at how science fiction is often portrayed in a jarring way especially when dealing with the topic of life extension.

Those of us who fancy science fiction stories are used to all sorts of technological miracles taking place in them; some are plausible and might become reality at some point in the future, while others are mere fantasies, artistic liberties that are taken to tell a better story and will likely never translate into real-life technologies—or, if they will, they will do so at the cost of rethinking fundamental principles that we’ve thus far considered to be fully established.

In science fiction, we’ve seen faster-than-light travel, teleportation, portals, energy weapons, strong AI, telepathic powers, and radiation-induced superpowers of all kinds; unfortunately, the only “superpower” known to be actually induced by radiation thus far is cancer. Entire imaginary worlds have revolved around the existence of one or more of these marvels, and series and shows have assumed that they’re possible and imagined what our society would be like with them, but one particular possibility has been neglected or relegated to one or two episodes and then forgotten, as if it was of no importance whatsoever: the defeat of aging.

Continue reading “Life Extension Technology in Science Fiction” »