Lifeboat Foundation

Facebook today unveiled a project from its secretive Building 8 research group that’s working to create a brain-computer interface that lets you type with your thoughts. Regina Dugan, a former director of DARPA and the ex-head of Google’s experimental ATAP research group, announced the news today onstage at Facebook’s F8 developer conference. Dugan, who now heads up Building 8, says the goal is “something as simple as a yes-no brain click” that could fundamentally change how we interact with and use technology. While it does not exist today outside of very specific medical research trials, Dugan says her team is actively working to make it a reality.

The blind may be able to see with help from this chip.

Drawing inspiration from the plant world, researchers have invented a new electrode that could boost our current solar energy storage by an astonishing 3,000 percent.

The technology is flexible and can be attached directly to solar cells — which means we could finally be one step closer to smartphones and laptops that draw their power from the Sun, and never run out.

A major problem with reliably using solar energy as a power source is finding an efficient way to store it for later use without leakage over time.

Continue reading “This New Graphene-Based Electrode Could Boost Solar Storage” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjIm9yIm0zo

Unimaginable Radical Abundance:

Yesterday I took the time to read chapter 11 of Eric Drexler’s book Radical Abundance as to get a glimpse of what might be possible with Atomically Precise Manufacturing (APM). I highly recommend the book.

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil interviews the Father of Nanotechnology Eric Drexler” »

“A future without animal testing is getting closer. On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration agreed to a research-and-development collaboration with Emulate, a company that makes “organs-on-chips” technology.

The hope is that instead of testing new drugs or supplements on animals, researchers can use Emulate’s chips.

To start, the collaboration between the FDA and Emulate will focus on the company’s Liver-Chips, which are meant to show how an animal’s liver may react to a certain drug.

Continue reading “The FDA Just Struck a Deal That Could Replace Animal Testing With a Tiny Chip” »

The race to build larger and larger quantum computers is heating up, with several technologies competing for a role in future devices. Each potential platform has strengths and weaknesses, but little has been done to directly compare the performance of early prototypes. Now, researchers at the JQI have performed a first-of-its-kind benchmark test of two small quantum computers built from different technologies.

The team, working with JQI Fellow Christopher Monroe and led by postdoctoral researcher Norbert Linke, sized up their own small-scale quantum computer against a device built by IBM. Both machines use five qubits—the fundamental units of information in a quantum computer—and both machines have similar error rates. But while the JQI device relies on chains of trapped atomic ions, IBM Q uses coupled regions of superconducting material.

To make their comparison, the JQI team ran several quantum programs on the devices, each of which solved a simple problem using a series of logic gates to manipulate one or two qubits at a time. Researchers accessed the IBM device using an online interface, which allows anyone to try their hand at programming IBM Q.

Continue reading “Trapped ions and superconductors face off in quantum benchmark” »

Material scientists have predicted and built two new magnetic materials, atom-by-atom, using high-throughput computational models. The success marks a new era for the large-scale design of new magnetic materials at unprecedented speed.

Although magnets abound in everyday life, they are actually rarities—only about five percent of known inorganic compounds show even a hint of magnetism. And of those, just a few dozen are useful in real-world applications because of variability in properties such as effective temperature range and magnetic permanence.

The relative scarcity of these materials can make them expensive or difficult to obtain, leading many to search for new options given how important magnets are in applications ranging from motors to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines. The traditional process involves little more than trial and error, as researchers produce different molecular structures in hopes of finding one with magnetic properties. Many high-performance magnets, however, are singular oddities among physical and chemical trends that defy intuition.

Continue reading “Computers create recipe for two new magnetic materials” »

I’ve been reading about Gcam, the Google X project that was first sparked by the need for a tiny camera to fit inside Google Glass, before evolving to power the world-beating camera of the Google Pixel. Gcam embodies an atypical approach to photography in seeking to find software solutions for what have traditionally been hardware problems. Well, others have tried, but those have always seemed like inchoate gimmicks, so I guess the unprecedented thing about Gcam is that it actually works. But the most exciting thing is what it portends.

I think we’ll one day be able to capture images without any photographic equipment at all.

Continue reading “The endgame for cameras is having no camera at all” »

“These re-engineered organisms will change our lives over the coming years, leading to cheaper drugs, ‘green’ means to fuel our cars and targeted therapies for attacking ‘superbugs’ and diseases, such as cancer,” wrote Drs. Ahmad Khalil and James Collins at Boston University, who were not involved in the study.

Our brains are often compared to computers, but in truth, the billions of cells in our bodies may be a better analogy. The squishy sacks of goop may seem a far cry from rigid chips and bundled wires, but cells are experts at taking inputs, running them through a complicated series of logic gates and producing the desired programmed output.

Take beta cells in the pancreas, which manufacture and store insulin. If they detect a large spike in blood sugar, then they release insulin; else they don’t. Each cell adheres to commands like these, allowing us—the organism—to operate normally.

Continue reading “Scientists Hacked a Cell’s DNA and Made a Biocomputer Out of It” »