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While flooding has caused mass evacuations and road closures in Texas and Louisiana, Californians are doing all they they can do make it rain. Last week, for the first time since 2002, Los Angeles County officials authorized cloud seeding with the hope that the technology will force the clouds in their region to produce 15 percent more rainfall.

Cloud seeding is a rain-making technique developed by Bernard Vonnegut (brother of Kurt in 1946. Essentially, it is the process of shooting silver iodide into clouds, which attract water vapors because it shares a similar molecular structure to ice. It then freezes and, when the ice becomes heavy enough and falls, it melts its way down to the surface as rain.

In Los Angeles, the Utah-based company North American Weather Consultants — hired for $55,000 a year — set up land-based generators in 10 locations in L.A. county. These generators shoot the silver iodide up with the hope that the created stormwater will fall in the dams and watersheds within the area.

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LEAF attended the first Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit in Madrid recently. Here is another report from Elena Milova from the conference.

Elena Milova brings us another interesting interview from the recent International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit where she caught up with Senior Scientist at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) of Argentina Dr. Rodolfo Gustavo Goya.

Dr. Goya admits he used to be a rebel from a young age. At 17 he decided he was not happy about aging and that he wanted to make a difference. He became a biochemist in the hope he could do something about age-related health deterioration and he continues to rebel against mother nature to this day. Dr. Goya has lead a number of studies on cellular reprogramming and restoration of function in important organs like the thymus and brain. He is also daring to challenge death itself by studying different aspects of cryopreservation and openly supports cryonics as a logical extension of medicine.

Continue reading “Dr. Rodolfo Goya – Could Yamanaka Factors Delay Human Aging?” | >

The smallest and most advanced chips currently commercially available are made up of transistors with gates about 10 nm long, but IBM has now unveiled plans to cut them in half. To create 5 nm chips, the company is ditching the standard FinFET architecture in favor of a new structure built with a stack of four nanosheets, allowing some 30 billion transistors to be packed onto a chip the size of a fingernail and promising significant gains in power and efficiency.

First coined in the 1970s, Moore’s Law was the observation that the number of transistors on a single chip would double every two years. The trend has held up pretty well ever since, but the time frame of the doubling has slowed down a little in recent years. In consumer electronics, 14 nm chips are still stock-standard, but advances from the likes of Intel and Samsung mean that 10 nm versions have started hitting the high-end market.

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From the archives.

Solar rotation rates. Credit: NASA

Most Astronomy 101 courses continually pound the idea that our own star is almost boringly average. After all, it’s only one of billions of G-spectral type, solar-like stars in the galaxy.

But the sun’s relative magnetic quiescence, in comparison to other sun-like stars, may be the reason we’re here to talk about it. Or so suggests new observations of a nearby bright solar type star that is a close analogue to our own.

Continue reading “Sun’s Peculiar Rotation Key To Complex Life, New Data Suggests” | >

The X Prize Foundation has launched a number of competitions over the years that includes everything from addressing water quality and women’s safety to exploring the depths of the ocean, to sending rovers to the moon. Now, it’s assembled a supergroup of some of the world’s best-known science fiction authors to help the organization imagine what the future will look like.

The Science Fiction Advisory Council is made up of 64 advisors, which includes some of the biggest names from the world of science fiction literature, film, and television: Charlie Jane Anders, Paolo Bacigalupi, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, David Goyer, Nancy Kress, Annalee Newitz, Larry Niven, Bruce Sterling, J. Michael Straczynski, Charles Stross, Andy Weir, and many others. Eric Desatnik, X Prize’s senior public relations director, told The Verge in an e-mail that he brought the idea of the advisory council to the foundation’s founder, Peter Diamandis last year, who “said yes before I could even finish my sentence.”

The goal, he explains, “is to accelerate positive change in the world by bringing together” people who have already been doing just that. He noted that several of the foundation’s projects, were inspired directly by science fiction stories, including this the tricorder-style device that was awarded a $2.6 million prize.

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This is the age of the citizen journalist where people on the street armed with a smartphone and a Twitter account are often the first on the scene of an accident, fire or other emergency. These folks know about an incident that requires emergency services well before first responders.

Dataminr introduced a new product on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt today in New York City that searches the Twitter firehose for emergency situations throughout the city, and channels news alerts to first responders.

The system is designed to filter out fake announcements, jokesters, pranksters and other non events, so first responders aren’t wasting their time chasing rumors of non-events.

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Do you remember the details of your very first birthday? Of course you don’t. But Rebecca Sharrock does, because the 27-year-old from Brisbane has got something called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). It’s a condition that stops people from being able to forget anything, and it’s thought that only around 60–80 people in the world have it. As a result, Rebecca is able to recall every part of her life in vivid detail, whether it be the dreams she had at eighteen months old or being photographed in a car just 12 days after her birth!

“My parents carried me to the driver’s seat of the car (my father’s idea) and placed me down upon it for a photo,” she wrote in a recent blog post. “As a newborn child I was curious as to what the seat cover and steering wheel above me were. Though at that age I hadn’t yet developed the ability to want to get up and explore what such curious objects could be.” As if this isn’t impressive enough, she can even recite the entire collection of Harry Potter books! She’s also currently writing her own book about her experiences, called My Life is a Puzzle, and it sounds as if the contents are going to be very memorable indeed. (h/t)

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Please enjoy this interview with Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer and Co-founder of SENS Research Foundation — one of the most successful advocacy and fundraising initiatives supporting breakthrough research on the main mechanisms of aging and age-related diseases. http://www.sens.org

In this video Dr. de Grey speaks about the progress in developing interventions to tackle age-related damages identified by SENS as the main ones.

Interviewer — LEAF/Lifespan.io Board member Elena Milova.

Dr. de Grey received his BA in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000, respectively. He is Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research (http://www.liebertpub.com/overview/rejuvenation-research/127/), is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organizations.

Continue reading “Dr. Aubrey de Grey Interview : Controlling the Main Aging Damages — Where Are We Now?” | >