Lifeboat Foundation

The benefits of rejuvenation biotechnologies would extend to the whole human society. #aging

Rejuvenation isn’t good just for individuals and the people close to them. It is good for society as a whole, for a number of reasons. These reasons—which I will now proceed to discuss—should be enough make rejuvenation research a top priority for humanity in its entirety.

Ever heard anyone lamenting that the great minds of history are no longer with us? That we could certainly do with all the Einsteins, Montalcinis, Fermis, Curies, etc, living longer? And have you ever felt saddened when a great mind of our time died? You probably did, or at the very least know someone who did.

Just imagine how much faster would science and progress march if our greatest physicists, doctors, engineers, philantrophists, etc, could live an indefinitely long life. Remember that we’re not talking about a longer life spent in decrepitude and sickness: We’re talking about a 200-year-old Einstein with the experience of two centuries but the physical and mental agility of a 25-year-old. If he was still alive, maybe he could’ve figured out how to unify general relativity with quantum mechanics—something that has been eluding all efforts for decades. Every time a great person (or any person, for that matter) dies, their particular experience is lost forever. Never mind that there are other experts, or that similar knowledge is found in books; it’s not even remotely the same. Rejuvenation would allow us to benefit from the knowledge and wisdom of the best among us for centuries on end.

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The Eindhoven High Tech Campus, a 90-minute train ride south of Amsterdam, consists of two rows of nondescript mid-rise office buildings on either side of a wide, tree-lined road. In typical Dutch fashion, there’s more parking for bikes than cars, and the campus is flanked by stretches of neatly-maintained green fields and canals.

The place doesn’t have an especially high-tech feel to it. But on the third floor of a building near the end of the road, a division of Philips Lighting called GrowWise is using technology to tackle a crucial question: what are we going to eat once there are over nine billion people on Earth?

GrowWise is a vertical farming research facility, and in conjunction with Dutch fresh food distributor Staay Food Group, it’s laying the groundwork for the first commercial vertical farm in Europe, slated to open north-east of Amsterdam in a town called Dronten later this year.

Continue reading “A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Europe’s Huge New Vertical Farm” »

Technology can be wonderful. But how do you keep track of yourself when technology allows you to be everywhere at once?

In this film Prof. Yair Amichai-Hamburger (director of the Research Center for Internet Psychology at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications) argues that even though technology allows us to reach out and connect more easily than ever before, if we don’t ever take a step back, we can lose track of our humanity in the process.

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Self-driving cars are pretty cool. Really, who wouldn’t want to spend their daily commute surfing social media, chatting with friends or finishing the Netflix series they were watching at 4 am the night before? It all sounds virtually utopian. But what if there is a dark side to self-driving cars? What if self-driving cars kill the jobs? ALL the jobs?

In this video series, the Galactic Public Archives takes bite-sized looks at a variety of terms, technologies, and ideas that are likely to be prominent in the future. Terms are regularly changing and being redefined with the passing of time. With constant breakthroughs and the development of new technology and other resources, we seek to define what these things are and how they will impact our future.

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The automotive industry is undergoing a period of rapid and radical transformation fueled by a range of technological innovations, digital advancements and wave after wave of new entrants and alternative business models; as a result, the entire sector is seeing major disruption.

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Phase 1, which was the Design part of the competition, was completed back in 2015. Phase 2 is the Structural Member Competition, and the most recent level challenged competitors to 3D print a beam for bend testing. Scores were calculated based on the final material composition of the 3D printed beam and the maximum load that could be held before it failed.

Seoul-based Moon X Construction were not eligible for prize money, but $67,465 was awarded to Form Forge of Oregon State University for the second place entry. Foster and Partners with Branch Technology of Chattanooga, Tennessee came in third, earning $63,783, after getting $85,930 for getting first place in the first round of Phase 2. Fairbanks University of Alaska and CTL Group Mars of Illinois came in fourth and fifth respectively, with Singaporean team ROBOCON finishing in sixth place.

Continue reading “NASA announces winners for latest round of 3D Printed Habitat challenge, over $200k prize money awarded” »

High-bandwidth connections into the brain could treat blindness, paralysis, and speech disorders.

One of the most well-accepted physical theories makes no logical sense. Quantum mechanics, the theory that governs the smallest possible spaces, forces our human brains to accept some really wacky, uncomfortable realities. Maybe we live in a world where certain observations can force our universe to branch into multiple ones. Or maybe actions in the present influence things earlier in time.

A team of physicists did some thinking, and realized this latter idea, called retrocausality, is a consequence of certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, and therefore, certain interpretations of the nature of reality. Their new paper is more of a “what-if,” an initial look at how to make some of those quantum mechanical interpretations work. Some people I asked thought the work was important, some thought it didn’t matter. Others felt the authors’ interpretation of quantum mechanics avoids the problems posed by the new paper. But no matter what, quantum mechanics will force us to make some uncomfortable conclusions about the world.

• A group affiliated with the United Nations is launching a fake Mars and moon colony.
• Called M.A.R.S., the faux habitat is located in the remote countryside of southern Poland.
• Six volunteer astronauts will work and live inside M.A.R.S. for two weeks, starting on July 31.
• Organizers hope to use the data and lessons they learn to support real missions to the moon and Mars.

Atop a forested ridge in southern Poland, a mission on the surfaces of both Mars and the moon is about to launch.

The two-week mission is just a simulation, of course, since no entity on Earth is prepared to inhabit deep space. But the experiment — called the Poland Mars Analogue Simulation 2017 — will study a group of six volunteer “analogue” astronauts as they work through a realistic schedule of space exploration, then provide those findings to anyone who’s drawing up crewed missions beyond Earth.

Continue reading “Poland is about to launch a fake Mars colony on a hilltop” »