Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: nanotechnology

This post is a status update on one of the most powerful tools humanity will ever create: nanotechnology (or nanotech).

My goal here is to give you a quick overview of the work going on in labs around the world, and the potential applications this nanotech work will have in health, energy, the environment, materials science, data storage and processing.

As artificial intelligence has been getting a lot of the attention lately, I believe we’re going to start to see and hear about incredible breakthroughs in the nanotech world very soon.

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This blog is a status update on one of the most powerful tools humanity will ever create: Nanotechnology (or nanotech).

My goal here is to give you a quick overview of the work going on in labs around the world, and the potential applications this nanotech work will have in health, energy, the environment, material sciences, data storage and processing.

As artificial intelligence has been getting a lot of the attention lately, I believe we’re going to start to see and hear about incredible breakthroughs in the nanotech world very soon.

Read more

Today’s emergence of nano-micro hybrid structures with almost biological complexity is of fundamental interest. Our ability to adapt intelligently to the challenges has ramifications all the way from fundamentally changing research itself, over applications critical to future survival, to posing small and medium as well as truly globally existential dangers.

In this article I publish suppressed information that has been actually officially published, but is effectively kept unavailable (after being rejected from all higher impact factor journals in the relevant fields because the text is too critical, it was officially published [1], but the title, corresponding author list and text was altered, no proof copy having been given to the actual author, and it can also not be as normally downloaded, even for researchers who should have access. Since this text is highly interesting and relevant far beyond the narrow engineering sciences, I allow myself to actually publish the most interesting and critical parts (slightly edited) in a series of short posts. If citing, please cite [1] anyway in order to support the author.)

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Abstract: Physicists at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the University of Basel have succeeded in measuring the very weak van der Waals forces between individual atoms for the first time. To do this, they fixed individual noble gas atoms within a molecular network and determined the interactions with a single xenon atom that they had positioned at the tip of an atomic force microscope. As expected, the forces varied according to the distance between the two atoms; but, in some cases, the forces were several times larger than theoretically calculated. These findings are reported by the international team of researchers in Nature Communications.

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Making Holographic Apps more secured and efficient.

Since its birth, holograms have been extensively used to serve security systems and related purposes. The making of a hologram, dissecting it to pieces and again rejoining the blocks involves a steady orientation of lenses which encodes the information with depth perception that could be deciphered later according to requirement.

It’s hard to imagine a 21st century city running smooth without an immense use of holograms, small or big sized 2D cards with 3D engraved pictures that are present in credit cards, grocery objects, books, biomedical devices and in other objects requiring retrievable information to be stored.

In terms of concealing product information, these sticker based fancy stuffs were up to the mark, until technology escalated beyond imagination. Even a previously measured safe encryption suffered from threat and these tools became fragile. Researchers initialized various approaches to hit the safest and complex path, among which nanotechnology had an answer in store for them. A research team from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences had recently forced polarization to concise holograms, comprising of tiny light-polarization sensitive nanostructures to generate numerous ones depending upon the polarization configuration of light.

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Holograms are a ubiquitous part of our lives. They are in our wallets—protecting credit cards, cash and driver’s licenses from fraud—in grocery store scanners and biomedical devices.

Even though holographic technology has been around for decades, researchers still struggle to make compact holograms more efficient, complex and secure.

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have programmed into compact holograms. These holograms use nanostructures that are sensitive to polarization (the direction in which light vibrates) to produce different images depending on the polarization of . This advancement, which works across the spectrum of light, may improvement anti-fraud holograms as well as those used in entertainment displays.

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The fabrication of a prototype tissue with functional properties close to natural tissues is crucial for effective transplantation. Tissue engineering scaffolds are typically used as supports that allow cells to form tissue-like structures essentially required for the correct functioning of the cells under the conditions close to the three-dimensional tissue.

Scientists of the Bionanotechnology Lab at Kazan Federal University combined biopolymers chitosan and agarose (polysaccharides) and gelatine protein to produce tissue engineering scaffolds and demonstrated the enhancement of mechanical strength, higher and thermal properties in chitosan-gelatine-agarose hydrogels doped with halloysite.

Chitosan, a natural biodegradable and chemically versatile biopolymer, has been effectively used in antibacterial, antifungal, anti-tumour and immunostimulating formulations. To overcome the disadvantages of pure chitosan scaffolds such as mechanical fragility and low biological resistance, chitosan scaffolds are typically doped with other supporting compounds that allow for mechanical strengthening, thus yielding composite biologically resistant scaffolds.

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KITCHENER — Big jumps in life expectancy will begin in as little as 10 years thanks to advances in nanotechnology and 3D printing that will also enable wireless connections among human brains and cloud computers, a leading futurist said Thursday.

“In 10 or 15 years from now we will be adding more than a year, every year, to your life expectancy,” Ray Kurzweil told an audience of 800 people at Communtech’s annual Tech Leadership conference.

Kurzweil, a futurist, inventor and author, as well as a director of engineering at Google, calls this “radical life extension.”

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While CRISPR, nanobots and head transplants are making headlines as medical breakthroughs, a number of new technologies are also making progress tackling some of the toughest age-old diseases still plaguing millions of people in the poorest parts of the world.

In low income countries, over 75% of the population dies before the age of 70 due to infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS, lung infections, tuberculosis, diarrheal diseases, malaria, and increasingly, cardiovascular diseases. Over a third of deaths in low income countries are among children under age 14 primarily due to pneumonia, diarrheal diseases, malaria and neonatal complications. In the developed world, those living in extreme poverty, such as homeless populations, also die on average at age 48.

Over the last year, artificial intelligence, robotics and biotechnology have all generated a number of new solutions that have the potential to dramatically reduce these problems.

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A documentary film just had its premiere at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto. How To Build A Time Machine, the work of filmmaker Jay Cheel, is a strange and incoherent little document of two middle-aged men with loosely related obsessions: One of them wants to build a perfect recreation of a movie prop – the machine from the 1960 movie The Time Machine, based on the H.G. Wells novel – and the other is a theoretical physicist who thinks he may have effected a kind of time travel in a lab, on a microscopic scale, using lasers that push particles around. The weak connection between the two men is that they both regret a death in their past – a best friend, a father – and are preoccupied with what they might have done to prevent the death; they both wonder if time travel to the past might have been a remedy for death itself. (Compared to the protagonist of Zero K who seeks immortality as a way of avoiding the loss of a loved one.) The 80s synthpop song Forever Young by Alphaville booms symbolically at one point.

Why this sudden ascendancy of yearning for immortality now? Is it simply because immortality of a medical sort might be imminent, a result of technological advances, such as nanobots, that will fight disease in our bloodstream? Or is it because, as Ray Kurzweil implies, digital technology is now so advanced that we have already left our bodies behind? We already live outside them, and our digital selves will outlive them. (“I mean,” says Kurzweil, “this little Android phone I’m carrying on my belt is not yet inside my physical body, but that’s an arbitrary distinction.”)

The frequently quoted axiom of Arthur C. Clarke – “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – is pertinent to this current fascination with life without end. We are now perceiving technology as not just magic but as god-like, as life-giving, as representing an entirely new plane of being.

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