Lifeboat Foundation

Chinese military technology is reaching “near-parity” with the West, a new report from the London-based think tank IISS has found. Western dominance in advanced military systems can no longer be taken for granted.

China accounted for a third of Asia’s military spending in 2016 and was looking to sell more arms abroad, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said in a report on Tuesday.

China’s overall defense budget last year was $145 billion (137 billion euros), 1.8 times higher than South Korea and Japan combined. China’s spending was topped only by the United States which spent $604.5 billion (572 billion euros) on defense in 2016.

Continue reading “China’s military progress challenges Western dominance, says IISS” »

A NASA technologist has teamed with the inventor of a new nanotechnology that could transform the way space scientists build spectrometers, the all-important device used by virtually all scientific disciplines to measure the properties of light emanating from astronomical objects, including Earth itself.

Mahmooda Sultana, a research engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, now is collaborating with Moungi Bawendi, a chemistry professor at the Cambridge-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, to develop a prototype imaging spectrometer based on the emerging quantum-dot technology that Bawendi’s group pioneered.

Not shocking to see; wonder how long this fact finally came out; as when you review much of the research and application of blockchaining that it is not hard to figure out that as more and more QC goes online; we would need a way to bridge block chaining environments to QC.

Quantum mechanics have ignited a transformational change in the way we envision the world and utilize technology. Economics is one of the prominent fields throughout which Quantum mechanics can be deployed. Quantum mechanics can be utilized to create a novel class of blockchains. A new paper has just been published exploring the possibilities of building blockchains on the basis of Quantum mechanics. It discusses how Quantum mechanics can be ideally deployed to build a new class of blockchains.

Quantum based blockchains, known as K-Chains, have a group of advantages over classical blockchains including communication of transactions at a Faster-Than-Light (FTL) speed, unlimited capacity of the network and an innovative offline blockchain that needn’t be connected to the internet for transactions to be executed. Extrapolation of these possibilities can lead to the creation of Quantum Turing Machines that rely on the Quantum Blockchain (K-Chain) technology. Real time data and communication protocols that span across distances of “light years” will be possible.

Continue reading “K-Chains – Blockchain Protocols Based On Quantum Mechanics” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Buf16_802kI

New work has demonstrated that bone injuries can be repaired using a sheet of a carbon compound that has photocatalytic characteristics, and combining it with stem cells derived from human bone marrow. These developments could lead to new treatments that can exert a powerful positive effect on skeletal fractures or periodontal disease. Check out the short video below that summarizes the findings in the report, which was published in the journal ACS Nano.

The scientists found that a chemical sheet made of carbon nitride, which absorbs red light, can support the growth of bone cells — osteogenic differentiation — because of the activation of a molecule that promotes gene expression. That molecule is a transcription factor called runt-related transcription factor 2 or Runx2. The absorption of red light and the emission of fluorescence by the carbon nitride sheets accelerates bone regeneration. It seems that when the sheets are exposed to red light in liquid conditions where cells are growing, electrons are released, which stimulates the accumulation of calcium in cell cytoplasm.

Continue reading “Promising New Technique Uses Stem Cells to fix Bone Damage” »

A NIMS research group led by Masahiro Goto, Distinguished Chief Researcher, Center for Green Research on Energy and Environmental Materials, and Michiko Sasaki, postdoctoral researcher, Center for Materials Research by Information Integration (currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tokyo) discovered that the amount of friction force between organic molecules and a sapphire substrate in a vacuum can be changed repeatedly by starting and stopping laser light irradiation. This discovery could potentially lead to the development of technology enabling the movement of micromachines and other small driving parts to be controlled.

The performance of micromachines—used as moving components in small devices such as acceleration sensors and gyroscopes—is greatly affected by adhesion force (the attractive force between two or more materials that stick to each other). Adhesion force in a micromachine increases the friction force. Since increased friction force seriously impedes the movement of moving components, it is necessary to maintain a low level of adhesion force. In addition, if the level of friction force can be controlled, it may be feasible to control the movement of micromachines, leading to expansion of their use and enhancement of their functions. A great deal of attention was previously drawn to techniques enabling silicon-based materials, a major micromachine material, to be coated with diamond-like carbon, self-assembled monolayers, or fluorine-containing organic films in order to reduce friction force and thereby improve the movement of micromachines.

Nice.

A Nanotech company came up with a way for fingerprints to stay invisible on glass and metal surfaces: Nanotechnology is taking us to new and unique places.

CRISPR/Cas9, a powerful gene editing technique that has already been used in a human, is thought by many as a “cut and paste” for DNA in living organisms. While in a sense that is what happens, delivering the ribonucleoprotein that does the genetic editing and the RNA that hones in on the target, into the cellular nucleus without being damaged is a challenge. That is why the efficiency of successful edits remains very low. Researchers at University of Massachusetts Amherst have now come up with nanoparticles that protect the protein and RNA as they’re brought to their work site.

The nanoparticles are engineered around their cargo and have shown a 90% success rate of getting the cargo into the nucleus, and a 30% editing efficiency, which is “remarkable” according to the researchers. So far the team has tested their technique on cultured cells, but they’re already working on trying the same in laboratory animals. As part of their research, they developed a novel way of tracking the Cas9 protein inside the cells, something that will certainly help other scientists in this area.

“By finely tuning the interactions between engineered Cas9En protein and nanoparticles, we were able to construct these delivery vectors. The vectors carrying the Cas9 protein and sgRNA come into contact with the cell membrane, fuse, and release the Cas9:sgRNA directly into the cell cytoplasm,” in a statement said Vincent Rotello, lead author of the study in ACS Nano. “Cas9 protein also has a nuclear guiding sequence that ushers the complex into the destination nucleus. The key is to tweak the Cas9 protein,” he adds. “We have delivered this Cas9 protein and sgRNA pair into the cell nucleus without getting it trapped on its way. We have watched the delivery process live in real time using sophisticated microscopy.”

Continue reading “Nanoparticles Deliver CRISPR/Cas9 Genetic Editor Safely Into Cells” »

I do have many friends working on this commercially; however, I prefer the work we’re doing in the Quantum Bio base around brain advancement v. deep mind learning/ intelligence research.

A site dedicated to the sciences, recent scientific discoveries and advances.

Quantum mechanics, the physics that governs nature at the atomic and subatomic scale, contains a host of new physical phenomena to explore quantum states at the nanoscale. Though tricky, there are ways to exploit these inherently fragile and sensitive systems for quantum sensing. One nascent technology in particular makes use of point defects, or single-atom misplacements, in nanoscale materials, such as diamond nanoparticles, to measure electromagnetic fields, temperature, pressure, frequency and other variables with unprecedented precision and accuracy.

Quantum sensing could revolutionize medical diagnostics, enable new drug development, improve the design of electronic devices and more.

For use in quantum sensing, the bulk nanodiamond crystal surrounding the point defect must be highly perfect. Any deviation from perfection, such as additional missing atoms, strain in the crystalline lattice of the diamond, or the presence of other impurities, will adversely affect the quantum behavior of the material. Highly perfect nanodiamonds are also quite expensive and difficult to make.