Lifeboat Foundation

I’m excited to share my new Op-Ed for The New York Times on the pro-life versus pro-choice debate of the artificial womb. Could this change the abortion divide forever? Conservatives may need to step up and embrace ectogenesis. Liberals should let them. The transhumanism tech will be here in a few years.

The technology would allow fetuses to develop outside the female womb so women would no longer have be pregnant.

Lux Capital, a New York-based venture capital firm, has raised more than $1 billion across two new funds to back companies on “the cutting edge of science.” The firm raised $500 million for its sixth flagship early-stage fund and another $550 million for an opportunity fund focused on growth-stage investments. Limited partners include global foundations, university endowments, and tech billionaires.

Lux also announced a new hire: Deena Shakir, formerly of GV (Google Ventures), has joined as an investment partner.

To the regular person, Lux’s investments are considered moonshot. The firm has backed entrepreneurs that are working on everything from neurostimulation to nuclear energy to synthetic biology. During my last interview with co-founder and managing partner Josh Wolfe, I actually called one of his portfolio companies “freaking crazy.”

What have we learned from fifty years of “software crisis”?

Actually probe expensive gear in real life? Pah. It’s 2019. We’re Boeing digital.

The US Army will field 50 kilowatt (kW)-class lasers on a platoon of four Stryker vehicles in 2022. They will support the Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (M-SHORAD) mission. The directed energy M-SHORAD capability is intended to protect maneuvering Brigade Combat Teams from unmanned aerial systems (UAS), rotary-wing aircraft, and rockets, artillery and mortar (RAM).

The major forces shaping equity markets — regulation and technology — are to blame. In the past decade, trillions of dollars moved from active to passive strategies such as index funds, while quants and high-speed firms have taken over more volumes in daily trading.

‘Algo wheels’ and the rise of the machines: How stock trading became Wall Street’s winner-take-all battleground.

ISN research is organized into three Strategic Research Areas (SRAs), representing the most fundamental subject areas for scientific inquiry at the Institute. SRAs are designed to address broad strategic challenges facing the Soldier, and are subdivided into specific Projects.

Get your Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind references ready, because scientists have just figured out a way to erase bad memories using—you guessed it—electroshock therapy. Get ready for on-demand forgetting. It’s a real thing now.

A team of Dutch neuroscientists recently devised an electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to “target and disrupt patients’ memory of a disturbing episode.” Nature explains how patients were showed two traumatic narratives in a slideshow and then subjected to the new technique:

The team later prompted patients to recall only one of the stories by replaying part of that slide show. Immediately afterwards, when the reactivated memory is thought to be vulnerable, the patients received electroconvulsive therapy.

Continue reading “Finally, a Real-Life Memory-Erasing Technique for Humans” »

The government would never target innocent citizens much less whistleblowers, journalists or activists who are “inconvenient”, right? No history of heinous wrong-doing — right?

Imagine trying to film an event that was over and done within a mere 125 trillionths of a second. It’s something that molecular physicists have long been dreaming of, and at last it seems they’ve achieved their goal.

Using precisely tuned pulses of laser light, an international team of scientists from four different institutions has managed to film the ultrafast rotation of a molecule.

“We recorded a high-resolution molecular movie of the ultrafast rotation of carbonyl sulphide as a pilot project,” said molecular physicist Evangelos Karamatskos from DESY, Germany’s largest accelerator centre.