Lifeboat Foundation

Last year, OpenBCI burst onto the scene with a Kickstarter campaign to fund development of an open source brain-computer interface for makers. The company more than doubled its goal of raising $100,000 for its EEG platform and, as I write this, OpenBCI is preparing to ship its first run of finished products. Conor does a demo of the technology in the link below:

OpenBCI Demo by Conor Russomano

Recently, I had a chance to talk with OpenBCI co-founder Conor Russomanno to get his thoughts on how open source has changed the brain-computer interface (BCI) landscape and opened new opportunities in the present, and how it might affect future development opportunities as well.

“The one thing that we’re hoping to achieve with OpenBCI is to really lower the barrier of entry – both in terms of educational materials but also cost,” Russomanno said. “I think one really awesome implication is that, in a classroom or laboratory, where one research grade EEG system was used by a number students, now the same amount of money could be used to outfit every student with their own device. And we’ve seen that in our customer base, as a huge proportion of our customers are students, graduate-level researchers and professors who want to use OpenBCI as a learning tool.”

Continue reading “OpenBCI and the Future of EEG Technology” »

“The White House has asked whether Zipline’s drones, pioneered in Rwanda, could fly much-needed drugs and blood to Americans.”

Read more

Thinking about Eugen Sänger’s photon rocket concept inevitably calls to mind his Silbervogel design. The ‘Silverbird’ had nothing to do with antimatter but was a demonstration of the immense imaginative power of this man, who envisioned a bomber that would be launched by a rocket-powered sled into a sub-orbital trajectory. There it would skip off the upper atmosphere enroute to its target. The Silbervogel project was cancelled by the German government in 1942, but if you want to see a vividly realized alternate world where it flew, have a look at Allen Steele’s 2014 novel V-S Day, a page-turner if there ever was one.

I almost said that it was a shame we don’t have a fictionalized version of the photon rocket, but as we saw yesterday, there were powerful reasons why the design wouldn’t work, even if we could somehow ramp up antimatter production to fantastic levels (by today’s standards) and store and manipulate it efficiently. Energetic gamma rays could not be directed into an exhaust stream by the kind of ‘electron gas mirror’ that Sänger envisioned, although antimatter itself maintained its hold on generations of science fiction writers and scientists alike.

Enter the Antiproton

Continue reading “The Evolution of Antimatter Propulsion” »

Tempus fugit. I’m just about old enough to remember a time in which 2020 was the distant future of science fiction novels, too far away to be thinking about in concrete terms, a foreign and fantastical land in which anything might happen. Several anythings did in fact happen, such as the internet, and the ongoing revolution in biotechnology that has transformed the laboratory world but leaks into clinics only all too slowly. Here we are, however, close enough to be making plans and figuring out what we expect to be doing when the third decade of the 21st century gets underway. The fantastical becomes the mundane. We don’t yet have regeneration of organs and limbs, or therapies to greatly extend life, but for these and many other staples of golden age science fiction, the scientific community has come close enough to be able to talk in detail about the roads to achieving these goals.

Of all the things that researchers might achieve with biotechnology in the near future, control over aging is by far the most important. Aging is the greatest cause of death and suffering in the world, and none of us are getting any younger. That may change, however. SENS, the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, is a synthesis of the scientific view of aging as an accumulation of specific forms of cell and tissue damage, pulling in a century of evidence from many diverse areas of medical science to support this conclusion. Aging happens because the normal operation of our cellular biochemistry produces damage, wear and tear at the level of molecules and molecular structures, and some of that damage accumulates to cause failure of tissues and organs, and ultimately death.

Tethers Unlimited, Inc. (TUI) announced that it has signed a Public-Private Partnership with NASA to deliver a HYDROS™ propulsion system for a CubeSat mission. Concurrently, TUI has signed an associated contract to provide three HYDROS thrusters sized for Millennium Space Systems’ (MSS) ALTAIR™ class microsatellites to support three different flight missions. Total contract value for the two efforts is $2.2M.

The HYDROS propulsion system uses in-space electrolysis of water to generate hydrogen and oxygen gas, which it then burns in a bipropellant thruster. This water-electrolysis method allows small satellites to carry a propellant that is non-explosive, non-toxic, and unpressurized. The hydrogen and oxygen generated on-orbit will enable high-thrust and high-fuel-efficiency propulsion so these small satellites can perform missions requiring orbital agility and long-duration station-keeping.

The partnership with NASA is a cost-sharing program funded under NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate’s “Utilizing Public-Private Partnerships to Advance Tipping Point Technologies” Program. In this effort, TUI will conduct lifetime and environmental testing of prototypes of HYDROS systems sized for CubeSats and microsatellites and then deliver a flight unit HYDROS thruster intended for testing on a CubeSat mission as part of NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstration Program, at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.

Continue reading “Tethers Unlimited Signs Contracts with NASA and Millennium Space Systems to Deliver HYDROS™ Water-Propelled Thrusters” »

Philadelphia, PA, USA / Mexico City, Mexico — Bioquark, Inc., (www.bioquark.com) a life sciences company focused on the development of novel bioproducts for complex regeneration, disease reversion, and aging, and RegenerAge SAPI de CV, (www.regenerage.clinic/en/) a clinical company focused on translational therapeutic applications of a range of regenerative and rejuvenation healthcare interventions, have announced a collaboration to focus on novel combinatorial approaches in human disease and wellness. SGR-Especializada (http://www.sgr-especializada.com/), regulatory experts in the Latin American healthcare market, assisted in the relationship.

“We are very excited about this collaboration with RegenerAge SAPI de CV,” said Ira S. Pastor, CEO, Bioquark Inc. “The natural synergy of our cellular and biologic to applications of regenerative and rejuvenative medicine will make for novel and transformational opportunities in a range of degenerative disorders.”

As we close in on $7 trillion in total annual health care expenditures around the globe ($1 trillion spent on pharmaceutical products; $200 billion on new R&D), we are simultaneously witnessing a paradoxical rise in the prevalence of all chronic degenerative diseases responsible for human suffering and death.

Continue reading “Bioquark Inc. and RegenerAge SAPI de CV to Collaborate on Clinical Regenerative Healthcare” »

China and the US; tensions are mounting and China’s new Quantum Satellite is aiding more fuel to the flames.

By: James Holbrooks (UndergroundReporter) Beijing — Only days after completing production of the largest amphibious aircraft ever built, China has just revealed plans to launch the world’s first satellite designed to conduct quantum experiments in space — a move that could one day lead to a highly secure “orbital internet.”

Assuming the initial satellite performs well, as many as 20 additional craft would follow in the effort to create a new category of communications network. Chinese researchers believe their work could ignite a space race as other nations move to refine the technology.

Continue reading “Warning Shots Fired: China Releases Video of Missile Launch, Amps Up Tensions with U.S” »

An elliptical light beam in a nonlinear optical medium pumped by “twisted light” can rotate like an electron around a magnetic field.

Magnetism and rotation have a lot in common. The effect of a magnetic field on a moving charge, the Lorentz force, is formally equivalent to the fictitious force felt by a moving mass in a rotating reference frame, the Coriolis force. For this reason, atomic quantum gases under rotation can be used as quantum simulators of exotic magnetic phenomena for electrons, such as the fractional quantum Hall effect. But there is no direct equivalent of magnetism for photons, which are massless and chargeless. Now, Niclas Westerberg and co-workers at Heriot-Watt University, UK, have shown how to make synthetic magnetic fields for light [1]. They developed a theory that predicts how a light beam in a nonlinear optical medium pumped by “twisted light” will rotate as it propagates, just as an electron will whirl around in a magnetic field. More than that, the light will expand as it goes, demonstrating fluid-like behavior.

Lateral photonic integration of oxide-confined leaky vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers enables their application in data communications and sensing.

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) that operate at 850nm and are based on oxide-confined apertures are widely used in optical interconnects in data centers, supercomputers, wireless backbone networks, and consumer applications.¹ As the processor productivity in these applications increases, it is necessary to continuously improve performance and scale transmission speeds accordingly. In recent years, developers have produced a generation of devices capable of transmitting 40Gb/s at moderate current densities,^{2, 3} and they have recently demonstrated 54Gb/s non-return-to-zero transmission through 2.2km of multimode fiber.⁴ Now, 108Gb/s per wavelength transmission can be realized over 100–300m of multimode fiber through the use of advanced modulation formats: discrete multi-tone,⁵ multiCAP,⁶ and PAM4.

Continue reading “Oxide-confined leaky vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers for single-mode operation” »