Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: computing

IBM and Sony have successfully developed a magnetic tape storage cartridge capable of containing more than 300 terabytes of data. This device, which comes in the smallest format there is, could revolutionize data storage even in cloud platforms.

Magnetic tape drives have been around for more than six decades now. It’s commercial use has been mostly for storing data, such as tax documents and health care records, from mainframe computers. From the first 2-megabyte tape drives in the 1950s, today’s versions are now capable of storing up to 15 terabytes. IBM has been pushing it further.

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In a new world record, scientists at IBM have captured 330 terabytes of uncompressed data, or the equivalent of 330 million books, into a cartridge that can fit into the palm of your hand. The record of 201 gigabits per square inch on prototype sputtered magnetic tape is more than 20 times the areal density currently used in commercial tape drives. Areal recording density is the amount of information that can be stored on a given area of surface.

Tape drives were invented over 60 years ago and were traditionally used for archiving tax documents and health care records. IBM’s first tape unit used reels of half-inch-wide tape that could only hold about 2 megabytes.

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Many of you will likely already know who Professor George Church is and that he is an important and senior member of the research community engaged in treating the aging processes to prevent or reverse age-related diseases, not to mention all kinds of other applications for genetic engineering. For those who are not familiar with him a short bio follows.

George Church is a professor at Harvard & MIT, the co-author of over 425 papers, 95 patent publications and the book Regenesis. He developed the methods used for the first genome sequence back in 1994 and he was instrumental in reducing the costs since then using next generation sequencing and nanopores plus barcoding, DNA assembly from chips, genome editing, writing and re-coding.

He co-initiated the Genome projects in 1984 and 2005 to create and interpret the world’s only open-access personal precision medicine datasets. He was also involved in launching the BRAIN Initiative in 2011.

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Theoretical physicist Lucien Hardy is pushing wants to push the boundaries of quantum physics by performing a Bell test using humans as links. This could potentially shed light on the existence of human consciousness and just what it is made of.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing and interesting phenomena in quantum physics is what Einstein referred to as a “spooky action at a distance” — also known as quantum entanglement. This quantum effect is behind what makes quantum computers work, as quantum bits (qubits) generally rely on entanglement to process data and information. It’s also the working theory behind the possibility of quantum teleportation.

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Researchers turn living cells into biological sensing and computing platforms.

The preferred term is “ribocomputing.” Take a molecule of RNA, the “messenger” chemical that carries instructions from a cell’s DNA to the rest of the cell, and basically rewire it. By hacking the RNA, it’s thus possible to take command of the processes of the cell, particularly that of protein synthesis. It’s also possible to rewire the RNA to respond to specific stimuli, offering an engineered microbiological system that reacts to inputs in the same way that an embedded computer might respond to a temperature sensor of accelerometer.

Synthetic biology or “hacked” biology is a quickly growing field, but the term ribocomputing is scarce, mostly limited to a single 2016 study. That was the case at least until this week and the publication of a paper in Nature describing RNA-based synthetic biological circuits that are capable of implementing just what I described above: sensing external signals and directing cellular machinery to respond to those signals in programmed ways. It’s fascinating but also a bit spooky.

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Imagine a world in which you’re 90 years old and nowhere near middle-aged. An app on your phone has hacked your DNA code, so you know exactly when to go to the doctor to receive gene therapy to prevent all the diseases you don’t yet have. A microchip in your skin sends out a signal if you’re at risk of developing a wrinkle — so you step out of the sun and hotfoot it to your dermatologist. Every evening you sync your brain-mapping device with The Cloud, so even if you were caught up in a fatal accident you’d still be able to cheat death — every detail of your life would simply be downloaded to one of the perfect silicon versions you’d had made of yourself, ensuring you last until at least your 1,000th birthday.

This may sound like science fiction but it could be your fate — provided you can afford it. If current research develops into medicine, in the London of the future the super-rich won’t simply be able to buy the best things in life, they’ll be able to buy life itself by transforming themselves into a bio-engineered super-race, capable of living, if not forever, then for vastly longer than the current UK life expectancy of 81 years.

The science of turning back the clock has never been more advanced. In Boston, a drug capable of reversing half a lifetime of ageing in mice is about to be tested on humans in a medical trial monitored by NASA. NMN is a compound found naturally in broccoli which boosts levels of NAD, a protein involved in energy production that depletes as we get older. Professor David Sinclair, who headed up the initial research at Australia’s University of New South Wales, doses himself with 500mg daily, and claims that he has already become more youthful. According to blood tests analysing the state of the 48-year-old’s cells, prior to taking the pills Sinclair was in the same physical shape as a 57-year-old, but now he’s ‘31.4’.

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