Lifeboat Foundation

Dr. Michael R. Rose is Professor at Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University Of California, Irvine. His main area of work has been the evolution of aging.
“Our task is to make nature, the blind force of nature, into an instrument of universal resuscitation and to become a union of immortal beings.“
- Nikolai F. Fedorov

We hold faith in the technologies & discoveries of humanity to END AGING and Defeat involuntary Death within our lifetime.

Continue reading “Dr. Michael R. Rose presents ‘Biological Immortality is REAL’” »

Education Saturday with Space Time.

This episode of space time is brought to you by the information flowing through an impossibly complex network of quantum entanglement, that just happens to mutually agree that you and I exist inside it. Oh, and Schrodinger’s cat is in here too.

Continue reading “How Do Quantum States Manifest In The Classical World?” »

Zhou Yi was terrible at math. He risked never getting into college. Then a company called Squirrel AI came to his middle school in Hangzhou, China, promising personalized tutoring. He had tried tutoring services before, but this one was different: instead of a human teacher, an AI algorithm would curate his lessons. The 13-year-old decided to give it a try. By the end of the semester, his test scores had risen from 50% to 62.5%. Two years later, he scored an 85% on his final middle school exam.

“I used to think math was terrifying,” he says. “But through tutoring, I realized it really isn’t that hard. It helped me take the first step down a different path.”

Skoltech researchers have offered a solution to the problem of searching for materials with required properties among all possible combinations of chemical elements. These combinations are virtually endless, and each has an infinite multitude of possible crystal structures; it is not feasible to test them all and choose the best option (for instance, the hardest compound) either in an experiment or in silico. The computational method developed by Skoltech professor Artem R. Oganov and his PhD student Zahed Allahyari solves this major problem of theoretical materials science. Oganov and Allahyari presented their method in the MendS code (stands for Mendelevian Search) and tested it on superhard and magnetic materials.

“In 2006, we developed an algorithm that can predict the crystal structure of a given fixed combination of chemical elements. Then we increased its predictive powers by teaching it to work without a specific combination — so one calculation would give you all stable compounds of given elements and their respective crystal structures. The new method tackles a much more ambitious task: here, we pick neither a precise compound nor even specific chemical elements — rather, we search through all possible combinations of all chemical elements, taking into account all possible crystal structures, and find those that have the needed properties (e.g., highest hardness or highest magnetization)” says Artem Oganov, Skoltech and MIPT professor, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a member of Academia Europaea.

The researchers first figured out that it was possible to build an abstract chemical space so that compounds that would be close to each other in this space would have similar properties. Thus, all materials with peculiar properties (for example, superhard materials) will be clustered in certain areas, and evolutionary algorithms will be particularly effective for finding the best material. The Mendelevian Search algorithm runs through a double evolutionary search: for each point in the chemical space, it looks for the best crystal structure, and at the same time these found compounds compete against each other, mate and mutate in a natural selection of the best one.

Education Saturday with Space Time.

To quote eminent scientist Tyler Durden: “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” Actually… not necessarily true. If the quantum multiverse is real there may be a version of you that lives forever.

Continue reading “Does Quantum Immortality Save Schrödinger’s Cat?” »

With the help of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, Juliette Stecenko is exploring cosmology—a branch of astronomy that investigates the origin and evolution of the universe, from the Big Bang to today and into the future. As an intern through DOE’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program, administered at Brookhaven by the Office of Educational Programs (OEP), Stecenko is using modern supercomputers and quantum computing platforms to perform astronomy simulations that may help us better understand where we came from.

Stecenko works under the guidance of Michael McGuigan, a computational scientist in the quantum computing group at Brookhaven’s Computational Science Initiative. The two have been collaborating on simulating Casimir energy—a small force that two electrically neutral surfaces held a tiny distance apart will experience from quantum, atomic, or subatomic fluctuations in the vacuum of space. The vacuum energy of the universe and the Casimir pressure of this energy could be a possible explanation of the origin and evolution of the universe, as well a possible cause of its accelerated expansion.

“Casimir energy is something scientists can measure in the laboratory and is especially important for nanoscience, or in cosmology, in the very early universe when the universe was very small,” McGuigan said.

Cassowaries are big flightless birds with blue heads and dinosaur-looking feet; they look like emus that time forgot, and they’re objectively terrifying. They’re also, along with their ostrich and kiwi cousins, part of the bird family that split off from chickens, ducks, and songbirds 100 million years ago. In songbirds and their relatives, scientists have found that the physical make-up of feathers produce iridescent colors, but they’d never seen that mechanism in the group that cassowaries are part of—until now. In a double-whammy of a paper in Science Advances, researchers have discovered both what gives cassowary feathers their glossy black shine and what the feathers of birds that lived 52 million years ago looked like.

“A lot of times we overlook these weird flightless birds. When we’re thinking about what early birds looked like, it’s important to study both of these two sister lineages that would have branched from a common ancestor 80 million or so years ago,” says Chad Eliason, a staff scientist at the Field Museum and the paper’s first author.

“Understanding basic attributes—like how colors are generated—is something we often take for granted in living animals. Surely, we think, we must know everything there is to know? But here, we started with simple curiosity. What makes cassowaries so shiny? Chad found an underlying mechanism behind this shine that was undescribed in birds. These kinds of observations are key to understanding how color evolves and also inform how we think about extinct species,” says Julia Clarke, a paleontologist at the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin and the paper’s senior author. Eliason began conducting research for this paper while working with Clarke at the University of Texas as part of a larger project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF EAR 1355292) to study how flightless birds like cassowaries have evolved their characteristic features.

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change under the influence of experience and activities. Several aspects of neuroplasticity are noteworthy: neurogenesis (development of new nerve cells) and synaptogenesis (development of new contacts between nerve cells) among them. Neuroplasticity used to be thought of as a limited phenomenon, mostly restricted to the early years of life. More recently it has been demonstrated that neuroplasticity continues throughout life, even in advanced age. This provides the conceptual basis for a wide range of therapeutic efforts aiming to slow the detrimental effects of aging on the brain and to treat various brain disorders.

What are the factors influencing neuroplasticity? The question is compelling both as a scientific challenge and because of the therapeutic promise of neuroplasticity once we know how to control and harness it. Among such factors, the environmental factors influencing neuroplasticity are particularly intriguing. It turns out that a strong relationship exists between what people do with their brains and how their brains age.

Both anecdotal observations and formal research suggest that education confers a protective effect against dementia. Highly educated people are less likely to succumb to its effects. Robert Katzman was the first to note that the prevalence of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, is lower in people with advanced education. The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Aging sponsored a study of the predictors of cognitive change in older persons. Education emerged as by far the most powerful predictor of cognitive vigor in old age.

Education Saturday with Space Time.

Why is it that we can see these multiple histories play out on the quantum scale, and why do lose sight of them on our macroscopic scale? Many physicists believe that the answer lies in a process known as quantum decoherence.

Continue reading “How Decoherence Splits The Quantum Multiverse” »