Lifeboat Foundation

We’re really excited to be working with the Toronto International Film Festival on a three-day event called POP showcasing some of the most inventive VR creations… and it’s coming up very soon — Friday, July 15th through Sunday, July 17th at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. Tickets are on sale now, and we’d love to see you there.

Let’s talk about what you’ll see when you’re there. The theme of this POP event is empathy and real-world storytelling — how VR can really impact your view of (and connections to) the world. We have more than a dozen pieces that you can try.

Continue reading “Here’s what you’ll see at TIFF and The Verge’s VR showcase this month” »

An article on transhumanism and food in Extra Crispy, Time Inc’s new food site about breakfast:

Zoltan Istvan, presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party, believes in anti-doughnut legislation and immortality.

By the 2020s, he tells Playboy, he expects medical technology to be at a point where nanobots will help out our immune system.

Prepare for a brave new world of hot robot love.

Ray Kurzweil is a celebrity technologist, well known both for his work as an inventor and for his relatively accurate predictions of technological change. Among his predictions is that of an imminent biotech revolution, which may enable people to restore and maintain healthy life for much longer periods of time than those humans have enjoyed historically. In the meantime, Ray says he takes 250 dietary supplements each day, in addition to receiving half a dozen intravenous therapies each week.

“Although my program may seem extreme, it is actually conservative – and optimal (based on my current knowledge). [My doctor] and I have extensively researched each of the several hundred therapies that I use for safety and efficacy. I stay away from ideas that are unproven or appear to be risky (the use of human-growth hormone, for example).” – Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near (pages 211–212)

Some of Ray’s dietary supplements are nootropics, intended to maintain and improve brain health. He lists them in his book, Transcend (pages 15 and 22). I’ve compared the nootropics he recommends to reviews on Examine.com, an independent and unbiased encyclopedia on supplementation and nutrition that is not affiliated in any way with any supplement company. Below is a table that summarizes what I found, followed by some observations.

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil’s Nootropic Dietary Supplement Stack” »

Scientists have created a synthetic stingray that’s propelled by living muscle cells and controlled by light, a team reports Thursday in the journal Science.

And it should be possible to build an artificial heart using some of the same techniques, the researchers say.

Continue reading “Video: Scientists Create Artificial Stingray From Rat Cells” »

This is from 2014 but is getting posted around the past couple of days.

““It’s estimated that we’re born with around 20,000 blood stem cells, and at any one time, around 1000 are simultaneously active to replenish blood,” says Holstege. During life, the number of active stem cells shrinks, she says, and their telomeres shorten to the point at which they die –”

She lived to 115, but a study of Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper’s blood hints at factors limiting lifespan.

Continue reading “Blood of world’s oldest woman hints at limits of life” »

Amazing!! More time to learn, evolve, love, & explore the world…

A sprawling facility called Timeship in Texas will host 50,000 frozen dead people with one goal — to become the human race’s first immortals.

Activist Saul Kent — one of the minds behind it — is such a passionate believer in ‘cryogenics’ that he froze his own mother’s head in 1988 after her death.

Continue reading “How To Become Immortal — By The People Who Think You Can” »

Micron sized onchip making printing and communication faster.

Researchers designed subwavelength micro-disk lasers (MDLs) as small as 1μm in diameter on exact (001) silicon, using colloidal lithography (dispersing silica colloidal beads as hard masks before etching the prepared QD material layers). Micron sized lasers are 1,000 times shorter in length, and 1 million times smaller than current onchip lasers.

A group of scientists from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; the University of California, Santa Barbara; Sandia National Laboratories and Harvard University were able to fabricate tiny lasers directly on silicon — a huge breakthrough for the semiconductor industry and well beyond.

Continue reading “Micron sized onchip quantum dot lasers will enable faster communication and computing” »