Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2015

Invisibility cloaks are a staple of science fiction and fantasy, from Star Trek to Harry Potter, but don’t exist in real life, or do they? Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have devised an ultra-thin invisibility “skin” cloak that can conform to the shape of an object and conceal it from detection with visible light. Although this cloak is only microscopic in size, the principles behind the technology should enable it to be scaled-up to conceal macroscopic items as well.

Working with brick-like blocks of gold nanoantennas, the Berkeley researchers fashioned a “skin cloak” barely 80 nanometers in thickness, that was wrapped around a three-dimensional object about the size of a few biological cells and arbitrarily shaped with multiple bumps and dents. The surface of the skin cloak was meta-engineered to reroute reflected light waves so that the object was rendered invisible to optical detection when the cloak is activated.

Continue reading “Making 3D objects disappear: Researchers create ultrathin invisibility cloak” »

In the first experiment to take advantage of a new technology for producing powerful attosecond X-ray laser pulses, a research team led by scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University showed they can create electronic ripples in molecules through a process called “impulsive Raman scattering.”

Exploiting this unique interaction will allow scientists to study how electrons zipping around molecules kick off key processes in biology, chemistry, materials science and more. The researchers described their results in Physical Review Letters.

Typically, when X-ray pulses interact with matter the X-rays cause the molecules’ innermost “core” electrons to jump to higher energies. These core-excited states are highly unstable, decaying in just millionths of a billionth of a second. In a majority of X-ray experiments, that’s how the story ends: The excited electrons quickly return to their rightful places by transferring their energy to a neighboring electron, forcing it out of the atom and producing a charged ion.

The ability of future superintelligent machines and enhanced humans alike to instantly transfer knowledge and directly share experiences with each other in digital format will lead to evolution of intelligence from relatively isolated individual minds to the global community of hyperconnected digital minds. The forthcoming phenomenon, the Syntellect Emergence, or the Cybernetic Singularity, is already seen on the horizon, when Digital Gaia, the global neural network of billions of hyperconnected humans and superintelligent machines, and trillions of sensors around the planet, “wakes up” as a living, conscious superorganism. It is when, essentially, you yourself transcend to the higher Gaian Mind. https://link.medium.com/vXrDIWOns9

#CyberneticSingularity

“Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order… I believe that it’s the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous…

Continue reading “The Cybernetic Singularity: When Humankind Transcends Biology” »

Scientists from Regensburg and Zurich have found a fascinating way to push an atom with controlled forces so quickly that they can choreograph the motion of a single molecule within less than a trillionth of a second. The extremely sharp needle of their unique ultrafast microscope serves as the technical basis: It carefully scans molecules, similar to a record player. Physicists at the University of Regensburg now showed that shining light pulses onto this needle can transform it into an ultrafast “atomic hand.” This allows molecules to be steered—and new technologies can be inspired.

Atoms and molecules are the constituents of virtually all matter that surrounds us. Interacting with each other according to the rules of quantum mechanics, they form complex systems with an infinite variety of functions. To examine chemical reactions, biological processes in a cell, or new ways of solar energy harvesting, scientists would love to not only observe individual molecules, but even control them.

Most intuitively, people learn by haptic exploration, such as pushing, pulling, or tapping. Naturally, we are used to macroscopic objects that we can directly touch, squeeze or nudge by exerting forces. Similarly, atoms and molecules interact via forces, but these forces are extreme in multiple respects. First, the forces acting between atoms and molecules occur at extremely small lengths. In fact, these objects are so small that a special length scale has been introduced to measure them: 1 Ångström (1Å = 0.000,000,000,1 m). Second, at the same time, atoms and molecules move and wiggle around extremely fast. In fact, their motion takes place faster than picoseconds (1 ps = 0.000,000,000,001 s). Hence, to directly steer a molecule during its motion, a tool is required to generate ultrafast forces at the atomic scale.

In a recent study conducted in mice, researchers became one step closer to that understanding, discovering that exercise actually strengthens the brain’s resilience to stress. Exercise helps animals cope with stress by enabling an uptick in a crucial neural protein called galanin, the study suggests. This process influences stress levels, food consumption, cognition, and mood.

Leveraging this finding, researchers were able to genetically tweak even sedentary mice’s levels of galanin, shifts that lowered their anxious response to stress.

The study’s authors explain that this study helps pin down the biological mechanisms driving exercise’s positive effects on stress. While further human experiments are needed to confirm these findings, the researchers have practical advice for people looking to get these benefits: perform regular, aerobic exercise.

Excerpts of talks and interviews on biological radical life extension given by some of the world top longevity scientists.
The compendium includes thoughts, predictions and claims made by the following longevity leaders (listed in alphabetical order):
Aubrey de Grey, PhD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey
David Sinclair, PhD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Andrew_Sinclair
George Church, PhD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Church_(geneticist)
Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, PhD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Carlos_Izpisua_Belmonte
María Blasco Marhuenda, PhD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar%C3%ADa_Blasco_Marhuenda

I added embedded subtitles in English when scientists speak in Spanish.
For subtitles in Spanish when scientists speak in English, just choose the option in Youtube to add the subtitles in Spanish I created.

Continue reading “Top longevity scientists views on radical life extension” »

Brownian motion of particles in fluid is a common collective behavior in biological and physical systems. In a new report on Science Advances, Kai Leong Chong, and a team of researchers in physics, engineering, and aerospace engineering in China, conducted experiments and numerical simulations to show how the movement of vortices resembled inertial Brownian particles. During the experiments, the rotating turbulent convective vortical flow allowed the particles to move ballistically at first and diffusively after a critical time in a direct behavioral transition—without going through a hydrodynamic memory regime. The work implies that convective vortices have inertia-induced memory, so their short-term movement was well-defined in the framework of Brownian motion here for the first time.

Brownian motion

Albert Einstein first provided a theoretical explanation to Brownian motion in 1905 with the movement of pollen particles in a thermal bath, the phenomenon is now a common example of stochastic processes that widely occur in nature. Later in 1908, Paul Langevin noted the inertia of particles and predicted that their motion would be ballistic within a short period of time, changing to diffuse motion after a specific timeline. However, due to the rapidity of this transition, it took more than a century for researchers to be able to directly observe the phenomenon. Nevertheless, the “pure” Brownian motion predicted by Langevin was not observed in liquid systems and the transition spanned a broad range of time scales. The slow and smooth transition occurred due to the hydrodynamic memory effect, to ultimately generate long-range correlations.

One of, if not the oldest visible form of life, to which we owe much of our original Oxygen rich environment, these Stromatolites are under threat.

Agriculture has threatened an area holding an exceptional array of microbes.

Continue reading “Watch: Threatened pools in Mexican desert hold clues to early life” »

An amazing aspect of living in The Fourth Industrial Era is that we are at a new inflection point in bringing emerging technologies to life. We are in an era of scientific breakthroughs that will change the way of life as we currently know it. While there are many technological areas of fascination for me, the meshing of biology with machine is one of the most intriguing. It fuses many elements of technologies especially artificial intelligence and pervasive computing. I have highlighted two frontiers of “mind-bending” developments that are on the horizon, Neuromorphic technologies, and human-machine biology.

Neuromorphic Technologies

Human computer interaction (HCI) was an area of research that started in the 1980s and has come a long way in a short period of time. HCI was the foundation for what we call neuromorphic computing, the integration of systems containing electronic analog circuits to mimic neuro-biological architectures present in the biological nervous system.