Lifeboat Foundation

In my new Newsweek Op-Ed, I tackle a primary issue many people have with trying to stop aging and death via science. Hopefully this philosophical argument will allow more resources & support into the life extension field:

Philosophers often say if humans didn’t die, we’d be bored out of our minds. This idea, called temporal scarcity, argues the finitude of death is what makes life worth living. Transhumanists, whose most urgent goal is to use science to overcome biological death, emphatically disagree.

For decades, the question of temporal scarcity has been debated and analyzed in essays and books. But an original idea transhumanists are putting forth is reinvigorating the debate. It doesn’t discount temporal scarcity in biological humans; it discounts it in what humans will likely become in the future—cyborgs and digitized consciousnesses.

Continue reading “Eliminating Death Doesn’t Mean Life Will Get Boring” »

Researchers at IBM pitted their 127-qubit Eagle quantum computer against a conventional supercomputer in a challenge to perform a complex calculation – and the quantum computer won.

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

The research is a result of observations from awake language mapping during brain tumor surgery.

A team of Chinese researchers has developed a way to artificially produce speech, also known as speech synthesis, using cues from neural brain activity.

According to the South China Morning Post, the researchers claim that they have a mind-reading machine that is capable of turning human thought into spoken Mandarin.

Early Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) release holds nearly two million objects, including distant galaxies, quasars and stars in our own Milky Way.

Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the most robust multi-object survey spectrograph, capable of mapping more than 40 million galaxies, quasars, and stars, recorded an 80-terabyte data set this Tuesday.

Continue reading “First batch of DESI data available for scientists to mine” »

A team of theoretical and experimental physicists has made a fundamental discovery of a new state of matter.

In our day-to-day life, we encounter three types of matter—solid, liquid, and gas. But, when we move beyond the realm of daily life, we see exotic or quantum states of matter, such as plasma, time crystals, and Bose-Einstein condensate.

These are observed when we go to low temperatures near absolute zero or on atomic and subatomic scales, where particles can have very low energies. Scientists are now claiming that they have found a new phase of matter.

Researchers claim the new electronic chip can mimic human vision and memory, which could help make self-driving cars smarter.

Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) have successfully developed a tiny electronic device that, they claim, can mimic human vision and memory. This could be a promising step to one-day developing sophisticated ways to make rapid decision-making in self-driving cars.

Continue reading “Innovative human eye-mimicking chip has been developed at RMIT” »

MusicGen has been trained on 20,000 hours of music.

Meta has unveiled MusicGen, an artificial intelligence(AI) music-generating system which can be conditioned using text prompts or melodies. It’s similar to Google’s MusicLM, which can build on existing melodies, whether they are whistled, hummed, sung, or played on an instrument.

Generating music is a challenging task as it contains harmonies and melodies from different instruments, which create complex structures. Meta’s model was trained on 20,000 hours of music, reported Tech Xplore. Meta released a demo of MusicGen on Hugging Face, and Interesting Engineering decided to have a go at it.

Amazon’s cloud computing unit likes to build its services from the ground up, and AMD could be the perfect fit.

When Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) unveiled its new artificial intelligence (AI) chip during a keynote presentation in San Francisco on Tuesday, Wall Street reacted by sending its stock price down by 3.5 percent. This was attributed to the lack of a prospective buyer for the chip. It has now emerged that Amazon is considering the chip for its cloud unit, as per a Reuters.

AI models are the new buzzword in the tech industry, and Nvidia has hogged all the limelight when it comes to powering them. Once known for making great graphic cards for gaming purposes, Nvidia has recently gained popularity for its chips powering great AI models.

Summary: Researchers discovered a unique property of psychedelic drugs: their ability to reopen “critical periods” in the brain, times when the brain is highly susceptible to environmental learning signals. These periods, usually associated with skills development like language learning, are reopened by psychedelics for different lengths of time.

This breakthrough in understanding psychedelic drug function may have therapeutic implications for conditions like stroke and deafness. Further, it uncovers novel molecular mechanisms influenced by psychedelics.