Lifeboat Foundation

AI vs aging the ultimate showdown is in the making.

There are several scientists that are now convinced upon the idea that while aging is a natural occurrence that happens in all creatures, it is, in fact, a disease that can be treated or cured. In that regards, there are some scientists out there looking to slow down the process of aging, while others are looking to stop it all together.

Continue reading “Could Artificial Intelligence Really Be Used to Attain Human Immortality?” »

Researchers are perfecting technology that sniffs out signs of disease in breath, blood and urine.

A nice new write-up on my governor run: https://humanityplus.wordpress.com/2017/04/24/this-transhuma…alifornia/ #transhumanism

It’s a good time to be a transhumanist politician. As faith in the political establishment declines, new technologies, from gene editing to artificial intelligence, are transforming our lives faster than ever. The transhumanist author and politician Zoltan Istvan agrees. He thinks the time is ripe for pro-science and technology governance, and for leaders who will embrace the technologies that could fundamentally transform our conceptions of what it means to be human.

Istvan is a maverick who appears to thrive in an ‘outsider’ role. He self-published a sci-fi novel, The Transhumanist Wager, in 2013, which became a surprise bestseller on Amazon. In 2016, he made an unlikely run for US president as the leader of the Transhumanist Party. Now, he’s making a bid for Governor of California in the 2018 election under a Libertarian Party ticket.

Continue reading “This Transhumanist Politician Wants to be Governor of California” »

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Elon Musk discusses his new project digging tunnels under LA, the latest from Tesla and SpaceX and his motivation for building a future on Mars in conversation with TED’s Head Curator, Chris Anderson.

FOR years Elon Musk, a South African-born tech entrepreneur, has been telling anyone who will listen that the future of travel is the hyperloop. (Although he thinks it might also be driverless cars. Or perhaps affordable space travel.) Dubai may be about to test the limits of Mr Musk’s imagination.

The hyperloop is a train that moves along a tube that is kept at a thousandth of the normal atmospheric pressure at sea level. Because air resistance is one of the biggest obstacles to high-speed travel, all but eliminating it means that hair-raising velocity becomes possible. The proposed technology could shunt passengers along tunnels at perhaps 745mph, which is faster than a jet plane.

Physicists have been testing the properties of new 2D quantum materials that could usurp graphene as the ‘wonder materials’ of the future.

These materials, which can conduct electricity at nearly the speed of light, could replace silicon in the next generation of hyper-speed computers. One could even form the basis of a new “exotic superconductor” that could actually break time-reversal symmetry — or reverse the flow of time.

“Finally, we can take exotic, high-end theories in physics and make something useful,” says one of the researchers, Jing Xia, from the University of California, Irvine.

Continue reading “These New Quantum Materials Can Conduct Electricity at Nearly the Speed of Light” »

DARPA announced the Targeted Neuroplasticity Training, or TNT, program last March, and work now has begun on the effort to discover the safest and most effective ways to activate a natural process called “synaptic plasticity.”

Plasticity is the brain’s ability to strengthen or weaken its neural connections to adapt to changes in the environment. For TNT Program Manager Dr. Doug Weber, such plasticity is about learning.

“We’re talking about neural plasticity, or how the neurons, which are the working units in the brain, how their function changes over time as we train on new skills,” he said during a recent interview with DoD News.

Continue reading “DARPA Funds Brain-Stimulation Research to Speed Learning” »

A researcher crunches the numbers on time travel using his own TARDIS. Also, a weird new material could be the real-world version of a flux capacitor.