Lifeboat Foundation

As the world’s political and business leaders gathered at Davos, it fell to a professor from the University of Bristol to reveal to them the full implications of a ‘fourth industrial revolution’.

Professor Jeremy O’Brien, director of the Centre for Quantum Photonics at the University of Bristol, addressed some of the most powerful people in the world yesterday at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland – to tell them just how rapidly quantum computers could change the world.

Part of the European Research Council (ERC) Ideas Lab delegation, Professor O’Brien has been actively involved with the WEF over the past few years and recently took on the role of co-chair of the Global Future Council on Computing. Last year he presented a talk on working towards a quantum computer discussing the future of computing and how new fields of computer sciences are paving the way for the next digital revolution.

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In Brief:

• Predictions from the co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Future Council, Melanie Walker, say we’ll soon enter a post-hospital world due to advances in personalized medicine, health monitoring, and nanotechnology.
• New and evolving technologies in medical science convince Walker we’ll live in a society not dependent on hospitals by 2030.

As the world of medicine is increasingly changed by biology, technology, communications, genetics, and robotics, predicting the outlook of the next few decades of medicine becomes harder. But that is exactly what Melanie Walker of the World Economic Forum does, and she predicts a bright new future for healthcare.

Yes, you read that right. The Global Challenges Foundation, founded by the Swedish billionaire László Szombatfalvy, has launched an international competition in order to find a better system for world governance. As Szombatfalvy writes in a letter published on the Foundation’s website:

The greatest threats we face today transcend national boundaries; they therefore need to be addressed jointly by all countries based on an increased realization of our mutual dependence. […] Our current international system – including but not limited to the United Nations — was set up in another era following the Second World War. It is no longer fit for purpose to deal with 21st century risks that can affect people anywhere in the world. We urgently need fresh new thinking in order to address the scale and gravity of today’s global challenges, which have outgrown the present system’s ability to handle them.

Continue reading “A Swedish Billionaire Will Award $5 Million For Reimagining Global Governance” »

Why is it so hard to convince people living longer is a good thing? This short article has some evidence worth considering.

Most advocates of life extension report facing resistance to the idea of increased lifespans by medical means when trying to disseminate this idea among general public. Resistance manifests itself in many forms, ranging from concerns such as overpopulation to concerns about unequal access to life extending treatments. But the most unexpected thing is probably that people often don’t want an increased lifespan at all. Surveys in different countries show, that when people are asked “how long would you like to live?”, they often give a number equal to or slightly higher than the current life expectancy in a given country[1–4].

But wait… Isn’t extending life for more decades a good thing that everyone should strive for? In reality we often do not see enough enthusiasm for the idea in general. So why is this?

Continue reading “Intrinsic resistance to the idea of life extension or wrong messaging?” »

Microbial burden is a real problem in aging and researchers are finding ways to boost our immune system to resist these microscopic enemies.

Microbial burden is a significant contribution to aging and our bodies are under daily attack from these microscopic invaders. The more completely we can remove these invaders the less impact they will have on the aging process.

“Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Newcastle University in the U.K. are investigating how infectious microbes can survive attacks by the body’s immune system. By better understanding the bacteria’s defenses, new strategies can be developed to cure infections that are currently resistant to treatments, the researchers said”

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Caspian tigers were some of the largest cats ever to roam the Earth, but they went extinct in the 1960s. Now, some scientists want to bring them back.

A new study, published in the journal Biological Conservation, lays out the plan to reintroduce the tigers using a subspecies, the Siberian tiger, which is genetically similar to the Caspian tiger.

The authors write in their paper that the Siberians tiger’s “phenotype proves adaptable to the arid conditions of the introduction site”.

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Why do we fear our own greatness?

(Phys.org)—Physicists have proposed that violations of energy conservation in the early universe, as predicted by certain modified theories of quantum mechanics and quantum gravity, may explain the cosmological constant problem, which is sometimes referred to as “the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics.”

The physicists, Thibaut Josset and Alejandro Perez at the University of Aix-Marseille, France, and Daniel Sudarsky at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, have published a paper on their proposal in a recent issue Physical Review Letters.

“The main achievement of the work was the unexpected relation between two apparently very distinct issues, namely the accelerated expansion of the universe and microscopic physics,” Josset told Phys.org. “This offers a fresh look at the cosmological constant problem, which is still far from being solved.”

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