Lifeboat Foundation

With the recent surge of enthusiastic support for LEAF/Lifespan.io and the idea of defeating aging, I really shouldn’t be complaining about the lingering holdouts opposing the idea of living healthy and longer lives for whatever reason. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to point out the jarring contradiction of a species whose members are constantly on the lookout to avoid danger, yet need to be reassured that at some point they will die and that science is by no means trying to prevent that.

Fear of life extension

This curious phenomenon was pointed out earlier this year by James Goodwin in the journal of the Gerontological Society of America[1]. In his article “Fear of life extension”, he argues that the commandment of geriatrics is “quality, not quantity” because policymakers fear a future in which longer life means overpopulation of nursing homes, and as a consequence, researchers working on interventions on aging need to clearly state that their goal is just making our final years a little better—but making us live longer? God forbid, no! We only want to live in perfect health for about 80 or 90 years, then magically drop dead for no apparent reason.

Science says it’s good to be funny.
via: World Economic Forum

The controversial chairperson of the science committee in the U.S. House of Representatives announced today that he will not seek re-election to Congress next fall. The pending departure of Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX) could give the U.S. scientific community a chance to recalibrate a rocky 5-year relationship with a key congressional committee.

Representative Lamar Smith’s tenure marked by bitter clashes with science community.

Transmedics, une machine qui permet de « réanimer » un coeur ayant cessé de battre. Une belle avancée pour augmenter considérablement le nombre de greffons disponibles pour les transplantations!

Via Explore Science

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUOu9RpzwJI

Has mobilized a team of the most experienced, connected and passionately curious minds from the US intelligence community, including the CIA and Department of Defense, that have been operating under the shadows of top-secrecy for decades.

Tom Delonge and the team members all share a common thread of frustration and determination to disrupt the status quo and want to use their expertise and credibility to bring transformative science and engineering out of the shadows and collaborate with global citizens to apply that knowledge in a way that benefits humanity.

Continue reading “To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science” »

Do you remember all the hoopla last year when the Higgs Boson was confirmed by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider? That’s the one called the ‘God particle’, because it was touted as helping to resolve the forces of nature into one elegant theory. Well—Not so fast, bucko!…

First, some credit where credit is due: The LHC is a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets interspersed by accelerators that boost the energy of the particles as they whip around and smash into each other. For physicists—and anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of what goes into everything—it certainly inspires awe.

Existence of the Higgs Boson (aka, The God Particle) was predicted. Physicists were fairly certain that it would be observed. But its discovery is a ‘worst case’ scenario for the Standard Model of particle physics. It points to shortcomings in our ability to model and predict things. Chemists have long had a master blueprint of atoms in the Periodic Table. It charts all the elements in their basic states. But, physicists are a long way from building something analogous. That’s because we know a lot more about atomic elements than the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy. _{[continue below image]}

Continue reading “Fundamental Particles & Forces: What do we know?” »

Science Fiction becomes Science Fact?

Check out Science and Star Wars, the new show where we use real-world science to explore a galaxy, far, far away, beginning next week! Paid for by IBM.

Continue reading “Science and Star Wars with IBM Trailer” »

For much of human history, living up to a ripe old age was seen as a gift from the gods, an aberration, or just the product of sheer luck. Given that up to the beginning of the twentieth century many of us succumbed to disease at an early age, being extremely fortunate to live anywhere past the age of forty, it should be no surprise that living a long life is still beatified today as something akin to winning the lottery.

Even when confronted with the galloping pace of scientific advances in human longevity, our historical sensibilities have led us to take a defeatist stance towards the subject: “Even if longevity interventions become available during my lifetime, I am already too late to take advantage of them, so why bother?”

Indeed, this hesitation to see human life extension as a real possibility in our lifetime, dismissing it as a dream belonging to the realms of science fiction[1] and futuristic utopias[2] is not an uncommon one, and as long as tangible rejuvenation therapies do not become available, we will feel validated in our pragmatism.

Doing well on such a challenge would appear to require significant advances in AI technology, making it a potentially powerful way to advance the field. In this video, Carissa Schoenick discusses “Moving Beyond the Turing Test with the Allen AI Science Challenge,” in the September 2017 CACM.

http://ow.ly/pyjO30f7EpM