Lifeboat Foundation

“Three hours out of the Chinese mega-city of Guangzhou, through the sugarcane and banana plantations and deep into the rice paddies, strange things start to rise from the fields. Called diaolou, or watchtowers, they have an oddly Western look, frosted with arches and spires and little domes that contrast with the straight lines of many traditional Chinese houses. There are more than 1,800 of these towers standing today, reaching five, six, seven stories tall.”

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“To identify emerging trends, I use a six-part methodology beginning with seeking out those on the fringes doing unusual experimentation or research. Next I look for patterns using my CIPHER model, where I identify previously unseen contradictions, inflections, practices, hacks, extremes, and rarities. Then I ask practical questions, mapping trajectories, building scenarios, and pressure-testing my conclusions.”

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New advance could also lead to chips that can smell, taste.

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Where are the limits of human technology? And can we somehow avoid them? This is where quantum computers become very interesting.

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Chevrolet-FNR autonomous electric concept vehicle.

The car of the future just got a whole lot more interesting. See it in action in this video.

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A mathematical problem underlying fundamental questions in particle and quantum physics is provably unsolvable, according to scientists at UCL, Universidad Complutense de Madrid — ICMAT and Technical University of Munich.

It is the first major problem in physics for which such a fundamental limitation could be proven. The findings are important because they show that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.

A small spectral gap — the energy needed to transfer an electron from a low-energy state to an excited state — is the central property of semiconductors. In a similar way, the spectral gap plays an important role for many other materials. When this energy becomes very small, i.e. the spectral gap closes, it becomes possible for the material to transition to a completely different state. An example of this is when a material becomes superconducting.

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View the 10 Sci-Fi Films To Watch In 2016 photo gallery on Yahoo News. Find more news related pictures in our photo galleries.

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Glucosepane is one of the most significant mechanisms of aging and yet very few people are working on it!

As we age skin and blood vessels lose their elasticity. People care too much about the skin and too little about the blood vessels, but that is always the way of it. Appearance first and substance later, if at all. Yet you can live inside an aged skin; beyond the raised risk of skin cancer its damaged state arguably only makes life less pleasant, and the present state of medical science can ensure that the numerous age-related dermatological dysfunctions can be kept to a state of minor inconvenience. Loss of blood vessel elasticity, on the other hand, will steadily destroy your health and then kill you. Arterial stiffening causes remodeling of the cardiovascular system and hypertension. The biological systems that regulate blood pressure become dysfunctional as blood vessels depart from ideal youthful behavior, creating a downward spiral of increasing blood pressure and reactions to that increase. Small blood vessels fail under the strain in ever larger numbers, damaging surrounding tissue. In the brain this damage contributes to age-related cognitive decline by creating countless tiny, unnoticed strokes. Ultimately this process leads to dementia. More important parts of the cardiovascular system are likely to fail first, however, perhaps causing a stroke, or a heart attack, or the slower decline of congestive heart failure.

From what is known today, it is reasonable to propose that the two main culprits driving loss of tissue elasticity are sugary cross-links generated as a byproduct of the normal operation of cellular metabolism and growing numbers of senescent cells. Elasticity is a property of the extracellular matrix, an intricate structure of collagens and other proteins created by cells. Different arrangements of these molecules produce very different structures, ranging from load-bearing tissues such as bone and cartilage to elastic tissues such as skin and blood vessel walls. Disrupting the arrangement and interaction of molecules in the extracellular matrix also disrupts its properties. Persistent cross-links achieve this by linking proteins together and restricting their normal range of motion. Senescent cells, on the other hand, secrete a range of proteins capable of breaking down or remodeling portions of the surrounding extracellular matrix, and altering the behavior of nearby cells for the worse.

Continue reading “Scores of Labs Should be Gearing Up to Work on Glucosepane Cross-Link Breakers, But Are They?” »

As excitement builds around the first plasma, scheduled for December, on the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) experiment in Greifswald, Germany, PPPL physicist Sam Lazerson can boast that he has already achieved results.

Lazerson, who has been working at the site since March, mapped the structure of the magnetic field, proving that the main magnet system is working as intended. This was achieved using the trim coils that PPPL designed and had built in the United States. He presented his research at the APS Division of Plasma Physics Conference in Savannah, Georgia, on Nov. 18.

PPPL leads U.S. laboratories that are collaborating with the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in experiments on the W7-X, the largest and most advanced stellarator in the world. It will be the first optimzed stellarator fusion facility to confine a hot plasma in a steady state for up to 30 minutes. In doing so, it will demonstrate that an optimized stellarator could be a model for future fusion reactors.

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