Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: finance

Cardiovascular disease is a major cause of death worldwide, and treating it isn’t easy. The disease wreaks havoc on patients’ blood vessels and can require complex bypass surgery.

Scientists at the Morgridge Institute for Research are working toward a dream of creating artery banks—similar to banks common today—with readily-available material to replace diseased arteries during surgery.

The latest work in the lab of Morgridge regenerative biologist James Thomson puts the science one step closer to that goal.

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Longevity companies have often risen and fallen with little ado. But if these financial experts are correct that biotech companies are poised to start “bringing unprecedented increases to the quality and length of human lifespans,” per CNBC, then we may start seeing serious results out of the industry.

“New Frontier”

Bank of America’s predictions would mean a six-fold increase in the amount of money in longevity companies. In a report to clients reviewed by CNBC, analysts wrote that the human lifespan may soon extend to 100 years.

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A new type of money that allows users to make decisions based on information arriving at different locations and times, and that could also protect against attacks from quantum computers, has been proposed by a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

The , dubbed ‘S–’, could ensure completely unforgeable and secure authentication, and allow faster and more flexible responses than any existing financial technology, harnessing the combined power of quantum theory and relativity. In fact, it could conceivably make it possible to conduct commerce across the Solar System and beyond, without long time lags, although commerce on a galactic scale is a fanciful notion at this point.

Researchers aim to begin testing its practicality on a smaller, Earth-bound scale later this year. S-money requires very fast computations, but may be feasible with current computing technology. Details are published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

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“If we don’t study the mistakes of the future, we’re doomed to repeat them the first time :(” — Ken M, comedian.

[Editor’s Note: Today’s blog post is an excerpt from Mr. Robert J. Hranek’s short story entitled “Angry Engineer,” submitted to the 2019 Mad Scientist Science Fiction Writing Contest. The underlying premise of this contest was that, following months of strained relations and covert hostility with its neighbor Otso, Donovia launched offensive combat operations against Otso on 17 March 2030. Donovia is a wealthy nation that is a near-peer strategic competitor of the United States. The U.S. is a close ally of Otso and is compelled to intervene due to treaty obligations and historical ties. Among the many future innovations addressed in his short story, Mr. Hranek includes a “pre-mortem” in the form of two dozen lessons learned, identifying potential “mistakes of the future” regarding the Battle for Otso, so that we’re not “doomed to repeat them the first time!” Enjoy!]

The U.S. responded to Donovia’s invasion of Otso by initiating combat operations against the aggressors on 1 April 2030 — April Fools’ Day. Thousands of combatants died on both sides, mostly on ships; hundreds more were wounded, primarily from the land battle, and an unverifiable number of casualties occurred worldwide due to the sabotage of power grids and other infrastructure. An accurate civilian count was impossible in the chaos of reestablishing power, computer, and financial systems worldwide.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkpMPKcEHFs

Concord, the fastest-growing contract management platform company, today announced accelerated market adoption of its cloud-based contract management platform and 2.5x revenue growth over the last 12 months. There are now 260,000 companies on the Concord Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. The Concord SaaS platform drives horizontal adoption by providing all key stakeholders collaborative access to the contract drafting, negotiation, signing and renewal processes within a single cloud-based platform.

Concord also announced a new pricing model. Unlike other contract management solutions that charge per seat regardless of usage, Concord pricing reflects the actual functionality needed by different stakeholders. Pricing is now based on Creator, Collaborator and Viewer usage options. For example, legal teams need Creator usage comprising full platform functionality including contract creation, editing and negotiation rights. Procurement, HR and sales teams typically only require Collaborator rights such as contract requests and the ability to select from previously approved form fields. Finance teams often only need Viewer rights to have visibility to track contract status, time to revenue and renewals. DevOps teams simply need API access to connect and integrate with other enterprise tools. By pricing and providing access according to need, the Concord platform is seamless and economical to adopt throughout an organization.

The cross-functional and external stakeholder proliferation capability is unique to Concord and a key factor to Concord’s platform adoption dramatically outpacing that of its competitors. For example, 64 new customers from vertical industries including e-commerce, logistics and healthcare have joined the Concord platform in the past two quarters. The horizontal approach Concord takes to the contracting process creates a powerful network effect which has resulted in 60,000 new users to the platform in the past two quarters.

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Jose Cordeiro is promoting the development of rejuvenation biotechnologies in Spain and the integration of Latin American immigrants into Spain’s aging society to maintain the country’s productivity. He was at the recent Undoing aging conference in Berlin and gave us an interview about his political goals.

At Undoing Aging 2019, jointly organized by SENS Research Foundation and Forever Healthy Foundation, there was a session focused on the ways to make healthy life extension and medical progress a greater part of the global agenda. Among the speakers there was Jose Cordeiro, the vice chair of Humanity Plus, director of The Millennium Project, fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, and board member of the Lifeboat Foundation.

Jose earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His thesis was focused on the modeling of the International Space Station. Jose has also studied International Economics and Comparative Politics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and received his MBA in France at INSEAD, where he focused on Finance and Globalization.

Last year, Jose decided to begin his political activities in order to foster the development of rejuvenation biotechnologies in Spain and to work on the integration of Latin American immigrants into Spain’s aging society and thus maintain the country’s productivity. He kindly agreed to give me an interview to discuss more about his ambitious initiative.

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Scientists believe that time is continuous, not discrete—roughly speaking, they believe that it does not progress in “chunks,” but rather “flows,” smoothly and continuously. So they often model the dynamics of physical systems as continuous-time “Markov processes,” named after mathematician Andrey Markov. Indeed, scientists have used these processes to investigate a range of real-world processes from folding proteins, to evolving ecosystems, to shifting financial markets, with astonishing success.

However, invariably a scientist can only observe the state of a system at discrete times, separated by some gap, rather than continually. For example, a stock market analyst might repeatedly observe how the state of the market at the beginning of one day is related to the state of the market at the beginning of the next day, building up a conditional probability distribution of what the state of the second day is given the state at the first day.

In a pair of papers, one appearing in this week’s Nature Communications and one appearing recently in the New Journal of Physics, physicists at the Santa Fe Institute and MIT have shown that in order for such two– dynamics over a set of “visible states” to arise from a continuous-time Markov process, that Markov process must actually unfold over a larger space, one that includes hidden states in addition to the visible ones. They further prove that the evolution between such a pair of times must proceed in a finite number of “hidden timesteps”, subdividing the interval between those two times. (Strictly speaking, this proof holds whenever that evolution from the earlier time to the later time is noise-free—see paper for technical details.)

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