Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have developed a program that can read your brainwaves and produce an image based on what you’re thinking about.

Freezing the deceased in the hope of one day reviving them could become a mainstream service, advocates say.

Hundreds of comments under his post today: http://www.newsweek.com/quantum-archaeology-quest-3d-bioprin…ife-837967

Intelligent Machines

I rode in a car in Las Vegas that was controlled by a guy in Silicon Valley.

A startup thinks autonomous cars will need remote humans as backup drivers. For now, it’s kind of nerve-racking.

Continue reading “I rode in a car in Las Vegas that was controlled by a guy in Silicon Valley” »

The second part of LEAF’s interview with the SENS Research Foundation team is out!

Welcome to part two of our three-part Undoing Aging 2018 interview of Dr. Aubrey de Grey and his team at SENS Research Foundation. Today, we have some of the scientific questions that the community had about SENS; there are some very detailed responses, and we hope you enjoy them.

Regarding the use of senolytics, are you concerned about their potential to remove highly specialized cells like cardiomyocytes, which do not divide or do so very slowly? Could taking senolytics without the ability to replace these specialized lost cells be risky unless combined with replacement therapies?

Continue reading “Undoing Aging With Aubrey de Grey Part Two” »

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – It’s a staggering statistic.

Thousands of people are expected to be killed or somehow injured when a major earthquake hits, according to a newly released report. Depending on when a 9.0 Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) earthquake hits, the death toll and number of injured could reach into the “low tens of thousands.”

The newly released report was prepared for the Regional Disaster Preparedness Organization (RDPO).

Continue reading “Report: Thousands could die when earthquake hits metro” »

The strange, cosmic reason our evolutionary path will look ever luckier the longer we survive.

I t was hard times for the bomber pilots that floated over Europe, their planes incinerating cities below, like birds of prey. Even as they turned the once-bustling streets beneath to howling firestorms, death had become a close companion to the crews of the Allied bombers as well. In fact, surviving a tour with the Bomber Command had become a virtual coin flip. While their munitions fell mutely from bomb bays, an upward sleet of fire from smoldering city grids and darkened farmland shot the planes out of the sky like clay pigeons. For recruits encountering the freshly empty bunk beds of dead airmen, morale was sapped before they could even get in the cockpit. Hoping to slow this attrition, Allied officers studied the pattern of bullet holes in returning aircraft for vulnerable parts to reinforce with armor.

“They are extraordinarily stable arrangements of such chaotic elements.”

One of these was the question of what lay at its elusive poles. When scientists got the first images, they were stunned. At the north pole, eight storms surrounded one storm at the center. At the south pole, it was the same arrangement, only with five storms.

But the numbers stayed oddly constant: the storms weren’t drifting and merging, as current understanding of the science suggests they should.

Exotic physics can happen when quantum particles come together and talk to each other. Understanding such processes is challenging for scientists, because the particle interactions can be hard to glimpse and even harder to control. Moreover, modern computer simulations struggle to make sense of all the intricate dynamics going on in a large group of particles. Luckily, atoms cooled to near zero temperatures can provide insight into this problem.

Lasers can make cold atoms mimic the physics seen in other systems—an approach that is familiar terrain for atomic physicists. They regularly use intersecting laser beams to capture atoms in a landscape of rolling hills and valleys called an optical lattice. Atoms, when cooled, don’t have enough energy to walk up the hills, and they get stuck in the valleys. In this environment, the atoms behave similarly to the electrons in the crystal structure of many solids, so this approach provides a straightforward way to learn about interactions inside real materials.

But the conventional way to make optical lattices has some limitations. The wavelength of the laser light determines the location of the hills and valleys, and so the distance between neighboring valleys—and with that the spacing between atoms—can only be shrunk to half of the light’s wavelength. Bringing atoms closer than this limit could activate much stronger interactions between them and reveal effects that otherwise remain in the dark.

Continue reading “Two-toned light pattern creates steep quantum walls for atoms” »