Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Month: October 2018

Group Facetime. I think this means we are closer to platforms that can support Virtual Reality… #Holodeck

Apple today released iOS 12.1, the first major update to the iOS 12 operating system designed for the iPhone and the iPad. iOS 12.1 comes more than a month after the September release of iOS 12 and a few weeks after iOS 12.0.1, a bug fix update.

The update is available on all eligible devices over-the-air in the Settings app. To access the update, go to Settings — General — Software Update. As with all iOS updates, iOS 12.1 is free to download.

Read more

Rip Kepler 🕊

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s elite planet-hunting spacecraft has been declared dead, just a few months shy of its 10th anniversary.

Officials announced the Kepler Space Telescope’s demise Tuesday.

Already well past its expected lifetime, the 9 1/2-year-old Kepler had been running low on fuel for months. Its ability to point at distant stars and identify possible alien worlds worsened dramatically at the beginning of October, but flight controllers still managed to retrieve its latest observations. The telescope has now gone silent, its fuel tank empty.

Read more

The October Journal Club will be focusing on a new study in worms where a combination of compounds acted in synergy to almost double lifespan.

SUMMARY There is growing interest in pharmacological interventions directly targeting the aging process. Pharmacological interventions against aging should be efficacious when started in adults and, ideally, repurpose existing drugs. We show that dramatic lifespan extension can be achieved by targeting multiple, evolutionarily conserved aging pathways and mechanisms using drug combinations. Using this approach in C. elegans, we were able to slow aging and significantly extend healthy lifespan. To identify the mechanism of these drug synergies, we applied transcriptomics and lipidomics analysis. We found that drug interactions involved the TGF-b pathway and recruited genes related with IGF signaling. daf-2, daf-7, and sbp-1 interact upstream of changes in lipid metabolism, resulting in increased monounsaturated fatty acid content and this is required for healthy lifespan extension. These data suggest that combinations of drugs targeting distinct subsets of the aging gene regulatory network can be leveraged to cause synergistic lifespan benefits.

Read more

As multiple research groups around the world race to build a scalable quantum computer, questions remain about how the achievement of quantum supremacy will be verified.

Quantum supremacy is the term that describes a quantum ’s ability to solve a computational task that would be prohibitively difficult for any classical algorithm. It is considered a critical milestone in , but because the very nature of quantum activity defies traditional corroboration, there have been parallel efforts to find a way to prove that quantum supremacy has been achieved.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have just weighed in by giving a leading practical proposal known as random circuit sampling (RCS) a qualified seal of approval with the weight of complexity theoretic evidence behind it. Random circuit sampling is the technique Google has put forward to prove whether or not it has achieved quantum supremacy with a 72-qubit computer chip called Bristlecone, unveiled earlier this year.

Read more

One of the main methods of producing hydrogen for fuel cells is to use artificial photosynthesis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, but these devices still suffer from some efficiency issues. Now a new hybrid device may be able to recover some of the energy that would otherwise go to waste, by producing both hydrogen and electricity.

Read more

This breaks the record set by the German-American Helios 2 mission in April 1976. The spacecraft will continue to break its own records, achieving a top speed of about 430,000 miles per hour in 2024. Catch up: https://go.nasa.gov/2qjOraI

Read more