Lifeboat Foundation

Many major advances in medicine, especially in neurology, have been sparked by recent advances in electronic systems that can acquire, process, and interact with biological substrates. These bioelectronic systems, which are increasingly used to understand dynamic living organisms and to treat human disease, require devices that can record body signals, process them, detect patterns, and deliver electrical or chemical stimulation to address problems.

With the price of a bitcoin surging to new highs in 2017, the bullish case for investors might seem so obvious it does not need stating. Alternatively it may seem foolish to invest in a digital asset that isn’t backed by any commodity or government and whose price rise has prompted some to compare it to the tulip mania or the dot-com bubble. Neither is true; the bullish case for Bitcoin is compelling but far from obvious. There are significant risks to investing in Bitcoin, but, as I will argue, there is still an immense opportunity.

Never in the history of the world had it been possible to transfer value between distant peoples without relying on a trusted intermediary, such as a bank or government. In 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity is still unknown, published a 9 page solution to a long-standing problem of computer science known as the Byzantine General’s Problem. Nakamoto’s solution and the system he built from it — Bitcoin — allowed, for the first time ever, value to be quickly transferred, at great distance, in a completely trustless way. The ramifications of the creation of Bitcoin are so profound for both economics and computer science that Nakamoto should rightly be the first person to qualify for both a Nobel prize in Economics and the Turing award.

For an investor the salient fact of the invention of Bitcoin is the creation of a new scarce digital good — bitcoins. Bitcoins are transferable digital tokens that are created on the Bitcoin network in a process known as “mining”. Bitcoin mining is roughly analogous to gold mining except that production follows a designed, predictable schedule. By design, only 21 million bitcoins will ever be mined and most of these already have been — approximately 16.8 million bitcoins have been mined at the time of writing. Every four years the number of bitcoins produced by mining halves and the production of new bitcoins will end completely by the year 2140.

Continue reading “The Bullish Case for Bitcoin” »

Long story short, qubits need a better immune system before they can grow up.

A new material, engineered by Purdue University researchers into a thin strip, is one step closer to “immunizing” qubits against noise, such as heat and other parts of a computer, that interferes with how well they hold information. The work appears in Physical Review Letters.

The thin strip, called a “nanoribbon,” is a version of a material that conducts electrical current on its surface but not on the inside — called a “topological insulator” — with two superconductor electrical leads to form a device called a “Josephson junction.”

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Queensland University of Technology of Australia, have developed a device that can isolate individual cancer cells from patient blood samples. The microfluidic device works by separating the various cell types found in blood by their size. The device may one day enable rapid, cheap liquid biopsies to help detect cancer and develop targeted treatment plans. The findings are reported in the journal Microsystems & Nanoengineering.

“This new microfluidics chip lets us separate cancer cells from whole blood or minimally-diluted blood,” said Ian Papautsky, the Richard and Loan Hill Professor of Bioengineering in the UIC College of Engineering and corresponding author on the paper. “While devices for detecting cancer cells circulating in the blood are becoming available, most are relatively expensive and are out of reach of many research labs or hospitals. Our device is cheap, and doesn’t require much specimen preparation or dilution, making it fast and easy to use.”

The ability to successfully isolate cancer cells is a crucial step in enabling liquid biopsy where cancer could be detected through a simple blood draw. This would eliminate the discomfort and cost of tissue biopsies which use needles or surgical procedures as part of cancer diagnosis. Liquid biopsy could also be useful in tracking the efficacy of chemotherapy over the course of time, and for detecting cancer in organs difficult to access through traditional biopsy techniques, including the brain and lungs.

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In my continuing work with the government of UAE / #Dubai, I have an article on #transhumanism that came out in a new portal launched with their recent World Government Summit 2019. Give it a read!

Everywhere around us a “super human” future is rapidly appearing. Sometimes called transhumanism, scientists, programmers, and engineers everywhere are working on radical technologies that not only become a part of our everyday reality, but also fit directly into our bodies.

Some examples are contact lenses that see in the dark. Others are endoskeletons attached to artificial limbs that can lift a half ton of weight. Still others are brain chip implants that read your thoughts and instantly communicate them with others. Sound like science fiction? Indeed, it does. Nevertheless, it’s coming very soon. In fact, much of the technology already exists. Some of it’s being sold commercially at your local superstore or being tested in laboratories right now around the world.

Continue reading “Radical New Technologies will Make People ‘Super Human’ and the Government More Efficient” »

A scientist working for the U.S. Navy has filed for a patent on a room-temperature superconductor, representing a potential paradigm shift in energy transmission and computer systems.

Salvatore Cezar Pais is listed as the inventor on the Navy’s patent application made public by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday.

The application claims that a room-temperature superconductor can be built using a wire with an insulator core and an aluminum PZT (lead zirconate titanate) coating deposited by vacuum evaporation with a thickness of the London penetration depth and polarized after deposition.

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Glass lenses, used in everything from smartphone cameras to microscopes, are bulky, heavy, and expensive. Now, a team of U.S. researchers has created high-power lenses from thin, flat arrays of nanosized towers of titanium dioxide that are thinner than a sheet of paper. The novel lenses are made from so-called metamaterials, engineered to control the way in which light waves interact (above). In this case, they are able to focus light across the visible spectrum. The setup allows them to magnify images up to 170 times with high resolution, as good as conventional state-of-the-art optics, the researchers report today in. The new lenses also have the potential to be fabricated—at much lower cost—with standard computer chip–making techniques. As a result, devices such as phones, tablets, and microscopes may soon be built with smaller, and cheaper, metalenses.

A team of Cambridge researchers have found a way to control the sea of nuclei in semiconductor quantum dots so they can operate as a quantum memory device.

Quantum dots are crystals made up of thousands of atoms, and each of these atoms interacts magnetically with the trapped electron. If left alone to its own devices, this interaction of the electron with the nuclear spins, limits the usefulness of the electron as a quantum bit—a qubit.

Led by Professor Mete Atatüre, a Fellow at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, the research group, located at the Cavendish Laboratory, exploit the laws of quantum physics and optics to investigate computing, sensing or communication applications.

Continue reading “Physicists get thousands of semiconductor nuclei to do ‘quantum dances’ in unison” »

Circa 2015

A new technique replaces the bulk of smartphone-friendly microchips with a transparent, flexible material made from wood pulp.