Lifeboat Foundation

Overpopulation is the most common objection people make to developing rejuvenation biotechnology and potentially increasing healthy human lifespan. We take a look at why that is and if the figures support this concern.

Any discussion of rejuvenation biotechnology almost certainly includes the subject of overpopulation and that objection medical advances that directly address the various processes of aging will lead to an overpopulated world. Such dire predictions are a common theme when advances in medicine that could increase human lifespans are concerned.

Overpopulation is a word that gives the simple fact of population growth a negative connotation. It implies that an increase in the number of people will harm our lives in different ways: it might be famine, scarcity of resources, excessive population density, increased risks of infectious diseases, or harm to the environment.

Continue reading “Will increased lifespans cause overpopulation?” »

If we ever want future robots to do our bidding, they’ll have to understand the world around them in a complete way—if a robot hears a barking noise, what’s making it? What does a dog look like, and what do dogs need?

AI research has typically treated the ability to recognize images, identify noises, and understand text as three different problems, and built algorithms suited to each individual task. Imagine if you could only use one sense at a time, and couldn’t match anything you heard to anything you saw. That’s AI today, and part of the reason why we’re so far from creating an algorithm that can learn like a human. But two new papers from MIT and Google explain first steps for making AI see, hear, and read in a holistic way—an approach that could upend how we teach our machines about the world.

“It doesn’t matter if you see a car or hear an engine, you instantly recognize the same concept. The information in our brain is aligned naturally,” says Yusuf Aytar, a post-doctoral AI research at MIT who co-authored the paper.

Continue reading “MIT and Google researchers have made AI that can link sound, sight, and text to understand the world” »

Google’s “MultiModal” can manage eight tasks at once.

The first footage of DNA replication in real time has a shocking surprise.

Can we live to 1,000? It was outrageous when he said it at ideacity in 2008… and again in 2015. Now he’s back to update us on the incredible progress that has been made toward life extension.

Michael Kramer of Zoomer Radio talks with Aubrey de Grey at ideacity 2017. Aubrey de Grey is an English author and biomedical gerontologist, currently the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation. Find out more about ideacity at http://www.ideacity.ca/ideacity-2017/

Continue reading “About Michael Kramer” »

Geoffrey Hinton, a scientist at the heart of artificial intelligence’s recent breakthroughs, has helped make Toronto a leading research location.

Private enterprises are working to convert sci-fi concepts, such as affordable fusion power and commercial space travel, into 21st century realities. And they’re bringing in the funding to make it happen.

SpaceX successfully launched a used rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Friday afternoon. It landed safely minutes later.

An international team led by the University of Chicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering has discovered how to manipulate a weird quantum interface between light and matter in silicon carbide along wavelengths used in telecommunications.

The work advances the possibility of applying quantum mechanical principles to existing optical fiber networks for secure communications and geographically distributed quantum computation. Prof. David Awschalom and his 13 co-authors announced their discovery in the June 23 issue of Physical Review X.

“Silicon carbide is currently used to build a wide variety of classical electronic devices today,” said Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering at UChicago and a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. “All of the processing protocols are in place to fabricate small quantum devices out of this material. These results offer a pathway for bringing quantum physics into the technological world.”

Continue reading “Atomic imperfections move quantum communication network closer to reality” »