Lifeboat Foundation

US Government may have discovered a new method of safely getting rid of old chemical and other old stockpile weapons.

Getting rid of chemical weapons is one of the military’s most unpleasant duties. But in the future, it may be no more difficult than incinerating garbage, thanks to a team of DARPA-funded scientists who think they can turn some of the world’s deadliest poisons into harmless dirt.

Chemical weapons, including nerve agents and mustards, have been banned under international law since the 1990s, but many countries still harbor large stockpiles. In 2013, a horrific chemical weapons attack in Syria—called the Ghouta attack —claimed hundreds of civilian lives, prompting the international community to intervene and eliminate the country’s chemical weapons reserves. By August 2014, 600 metric tons of deadly weapons had been destroyed (in the military parlance, “demilitarized”) aboard the US Navy vessel MV Cape Ray.

Continue reading “DARPA Has a Simple Plan to Clean Up the World’s Deadliest Weapons” »

As specialists gather in private to discuss a grand plan for constructing a human genome, Drew Endy and Laurie Zoloth argue that such an enormous moral gesture should not be discussed behind closed doors.

Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images.

At Harvard today, an invitation-only group of about 150 scientists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs, met to discuss if and how to construct from scratch an entire human genome – the heritable genetic material that in nature is transferred from parents to children.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=m3JAtvsqfF8

CEO Harald Krueger has announced a third electric model in their BMW i series: a self-driving, intelligent luxury car named i Next, to be released by 2021.

Shortly after the announcement of its first two electric models i3 and i8, BMW is confirming its release of a third model in its “BMW i” series. Their first self-driving car, called i Next, is an autonomous, intelligent luxury car which will be released in 2021.

Continue reading “BMW’s First Self-Driving Car to Come Out in 2021” »

I still ponder on this question “Under current US laws, can I possibly win a suit against a law firm for poor representation because they used AI on my case and I lost my case that ended up causing me to lose millions and impacted my reputation? And, could this firm lose their license through the state board resulting from my claim & suit as well as others who claimed poor representation due to AI used on their case?” I believe they can under current laws.

Welcome to the firm, robot lawyers!

Last week, BigLaw firm BakerHostetler announced that it was partnering with ROSS Intelligence to bring artificial intelligence to its Bankruptcy, Restructuring, and Creditor Rights practice. ROSS will be used to help BakerHostetler’s non-robot lawyers research more quickly and intelligently. Will other firms follow their lead?

Continue reading “BigLaw Firm Brings Artificial Intelligence on Board” »

Another report on the Russian land give away from NY Daily News.

They’re Putin it all on the line.

Continue reading “What you can do with the free Russian land Putin is giving away” »

“Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, may have unique insight into the multibillion-dollar lawsuit filed against his company by another Silicon Valley heavyweight, Oracle Corporation.”

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Russia’s new frontier land grab. Anyone wanting to move to Siberia?

WASHINGTON — Call it the Muscovite version of “manifest destiny.” On Monday, President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill that offers every Russian citizen a tract of land in their country’s remote Far East.

“All citizens will be entitled to apply for up to hectare of land in the Kamchatka, Primorye, Khabarovsk, Amur, Magadan and Sakhalin regions, the republic of Sakha, or the Jewish and Chukotka autonomous districts,” the Moscow Times reports. This is a vast stretch of territory spanning the upper Arctic reaches near Alaska, down to islands off the coast of Japan and deep into the Siberian hinterland.

Continue reading “Own a piece of Siberia for free: Russia offers hectare of land to citizens willing to move to Far East” »

What would you say if I told you that aging happens not because of accumulation of stresses, but rather because of the intrinsic properties of the gene network of the organism? I’m guessing you’d be like: surprised .

So, here’s the deal. My biohacker friends led by Peter Fedichev and Sergey Filonov in collaboration with my old friend and the longevity record holder Robert Shmookler Reis published a very cool paper. They proposed a way to quantitatively describe the two types of aging – negligible senescence and normal aging. We all know that some animals just don’t care about time passing by. Their mortality doesn’t increase with age. Such negligibly senescent species include the notorious naked mole rat and a bunch of other critters like certain turtles and clams to name a few. So the paper explains what it is exactly that makes these animals age so slowly – it’s the stability of their gene networks.

What does network stability mean then? Well, it’s actually pretty straightforward – if the DNA repair mechanisms are very efficient and the connectivity of the network is low enough, then this network is stable. So, normally aging species, such as ourselves, have unstable networks. This is a major bummer by all means. But! There is a way to overcome this problem, according to the proposed math model.

Continue reading “10 responses to ‘Hacking Aging’” »

Tech capital is first major US city to require all new buildings of 10 storeys or under to have solar panels, reports BusinessGreen.