Lifeboat Foundation

Some of the tech world’s brightest luminaries hope to postpone the unpleasantness of death, or avoid it entirely. Calico, a secretive company founded by Google, is looking for ways to lengthen human lifespans. Billionaires Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos have all contributed huge sums for research into anti-aging treatments. Ray Kurzweil, one of the tech industry’s leading futurists, has described three scientific and technological “bridges” that might lead to radically longer life.

Devotees of many religions believe in a soul that lives forever. In transhumanism, techies have found their own version of eternal life — and it’s finding unlikely fans.

Warm on top, cool on bottom.

Yes, here’s the story of the dark matter hurricane — a cosmic event that may provide our first glimpse of the mysterious, invisible particle.

by

• Jackson Ryan

Scientists are now closer than ever to being able to use graphene as a superconductor – to conduct electricity with zero resistance – making it useful for developing energy efficient gadgets, improving medical research, upgrading power grids, and much more besides.

The key to the new approach is heating a silicon carbide (SiC) crystal, itself a superconductor, until the silicon atoms have all evaporated. This leaves two graphene layers on top of each other in a way that, in certain conditions, offers no resistance to electrical current.

A similar dual-layer approach was also successfully used to turn graphene into a superconductor earlier this year. The difference here is the layers don’t have to be carefully angled on top of each other, which should make it easier to reproduce at scale.

Continue reading “We Just Got Closer Than Ever to Unlocking Graphene’s Superconducting Powers” »

Sealed in a vault beneath a duke’s former pleasure palace among the sycamore-streaked forests west of Paris sits an object the size of an apple that determines the weight of the world.

Forged against a backdrop of scientific and political upheaval following the French Revolution, a single, small cylinder of platinum-iridium alloy has laid largely undisturbed for nearly 130 years as the world’s benchmark for what, precisely, is a kilogramme.

The international prototype of the kilogramme, or “Le Grand K” as it is tenderly known, is one of science’s most hallowed relics, an analogue against which all other weights are compared and a totem of the metric system that accompanied the epoch of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Continue reading “Quantum leap for mass as science redefines the kilogramme” »

This deadly fire season continues.

Microchips could be implanted into employees of UK firms to track worker efficiencies.

Business.

The tiny, repeating structure could reveal weird behavior of electrons in fractional dimensions.