Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: government

HOUSTON – (July 12, 2017) – Rice University engineers are building a flat microscope, called FlatScope TM, and developing software that can decode and trigger neurons on the surface of the brain.

Their goal as part of a new government initiative is to provide an alternate path for sight and sound to be delivered directly to the brain.

The project is part of a $65 million effort announced this week by the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a high-resolution neural interface. Among many long-term goals, the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) program hopes to compensate for a person’s loss of vision or hearing by delivering digital information directly to parts of the brain that can process it.

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Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a trip to Homer, Alaska, this weekend to do characteristically Alaskan things, like catching fish, cutting fish, watching other people catch fish, oh, and thinking hard about the concept of basic income.

Zuckerberg visited Homer as part of his personal challenge to visit every state in America in 2017. While there, he took some time out of fishing to write a blog post about Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, a state-sponsored form of basic income that redistributes profits from the state’s natural resources to its residents once a year, usually handing them around $1,000 per person (some years as much as $2,000).

“This is a novel approach to basic income in a few ways. First, it’s funded by natural resources rather than raising taxes,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Second, it comes from conservative principles of smaller government, rather than progressive principles of a larger safety net. This shows basic income is a bipartisan idea.

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Quantum theory says that stuff doesn’t exist when we’re not looking at it. But weirder-than-weird experiments are resurrecting a long-derided alternative.

By Anil Ananthaswamy

IN OCTOBER 1951, physicist David Bohm left the US for Brazil. Branded a communist sympathiser, he had been arrested for refusing to testify to the US Congress. Acquitted, he was still stripped of his Princeton professorship. His departure began an exile that would last until his death, as a naturalised British citizen, four decades later.

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While France needs to lure more international investors and further ease rules for entrepreneurs, the country, backed by government officials and tech leaders, has started to inject new energy into the start-up scene. France has already become one of Europe’s top destinations for start-up investment; venture capital and funding deals last year surpassed that activity in Germany, making it second only to Britain in Europe.

A new start-up incubator in Paris symbolizes France’s tech ambitions, but can the land of the 35-hour workweek overcome its cultural and regulatory barriers to surpass London and other tech hubs?

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How will we send humans to the moon, Mars and other destinations in space? The chances are good that electric propulsion will play a role, and a company called MSNW is at the cutting edge of that technology.

The director of propulsion research for Redmond, Wash.-based MSNW, Anthony Pancotti, will take a share of Capitol Hill’s spotlight on Thursday during a hearing organized by the House Subcommittee on Space. And he expects to learn as much from his encounter with lawmakers as they’ll learn from him.

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The government’s mission to put the UK at the forefront of commercial spaceflight has been given a big boost after plans were announced to build the world’s first private space research centre in Bedfordshire. The £120 million Blue Abyss facility will be constructed at RAF Henlow, providing domestic and international companies with access to the world’s biggest 50 metre deep pool, a 120 room hotel, an astronaut training centre and a “human performance centre” that will help divers, astronauts and athletes train at the very top level.

The base, which is set to fully close in 2020, already houses some of the facilities that paid-for astronauts need to acclimatise to the rigours of space. Its centrifuge base, for example, will expose space-goers to extreme G forces as part of their commercial astronaut training programme. The idea is to provide the necessary services needed by private spaceflight providers to get their passengers launch ready.

The pool, which will be three times deeper than NASA’s 12 metre Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL), won’t just be used for space projects. Offshore oil, gas and renewable companies will be invited to test their equipment in Blue Abyss’ waters. Submersibles will also be welcome, allowing companies to test underwater vehicles in “extreme environments.”

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For decades, space exploration and experimentation has been the playground for world governments and wealthy academics. Exposure to space was limited to sci-fi, the odd government broadcast, and conspiracy theories. Normal people could only buy their loved ones stars or plots of cosmic land as a sentimental gift.

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Another LEAF interview from the International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit in Madrid with Didier Coeurnelle of Heales.

LEAF director Elena Milova was recently at the International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit in Madrid. During the conference she caught up with life extension advocate Didier Coeurnelle.

In this interview Didier discusses his projects and shares advice to the community regarding what kind of activities can help foster progress in the development of rejuvenation biotechnology.

Didier is one of the most active members of the European life extension community, co-president of HEALES (Healthy Life Extension Society), vice-president of French Transhumanist Association Technoprog, and a founding member of the International Longevity Alliance. He is also a long-term member of the local ecology movement. Didier is currently a lawyer in a Belgian federal government agency for social security. Didier is the main organizer of the biennial scientific conference Eurosymposium on Healthy Ageing, held in Brussels, Belgium.

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France launched a technology visa on Thursday which aims to attract international talent, with newly-elected President Emmanuel Macron talking about the need to strip out regulation to become a “country of unicorns”.

Speaking at the Viva Tech conference in Paris, France, Macron outlined how his government would slash complex regulation, make it easier for foreign talent to work, and support start-ups with money, in order to create world-leading companies.

The visa is open to start-up founders, employees and investors and is a fast-track procedure to obtain a residence permit in France known as the “Talent Passport”. It’s valid for four years and extended to immediate family members.

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