Lifeboat Foundation

This new breed of city takes various different forms, from government initiatives, to public-private partnerships, to entirely private enterprises. Many are being used to jump-start economies in the developing world, with masterplans carefully calibrated to attract foreign investors and treasuries looking to sink their funds into something concrete. They provide a powerful means for wealthy countries to expand their strategic influence abroad, with the construction of new cities acting as a form of “debt-trap diplomacy”, tying host nations into impossibly burdensome deals. They are billed as a panacea for the world’s urban ills, solving overcrowding, congestion and pollution; yet, more often than not, they turn out to be catalysts for land dispossession, environmental degradation and social inequality.

The feature Kim enjoys most is a small touchscreen display on his kitchen wall that allows him to keep track of his and his wife’s consumption of electricity, water and gas and, most important, compare it against the average statistics for the building. Flicking between the screens of bar charts and graphs, a broad grin spreads across his face: for yet another day running, they are more energy-efficient than all their neighbours.

From their living room window at the top of one of the city’s new residential towers, a panorama of downtown Songdo unfolds. Across an eight-lane highway lies Central Park, a broad swath of trees surrounding an ornamental lake, flanked by rows of glass towers with vaguely jaunty silhouettes. Armies of identikit concrete apartment blocks march into the hazy distance beyond, terminating at a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course. It looks a lot like many other modern Asian cities, a place of generic towers rising above a car-dominated grid. Public life is mostly confined to the air-conditioned environments of malls and private leisure clubs.

Continue reading “‘The next era of human progress’: what lies behind the global new cities epidemic?” »

SAN FRANCISCO—( BUSINESS WIRE )—Twist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ: TWST), a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of high-quality synthetic DNA using its silicon platform, today announced that it has entered into an agreement with Imagene SA, where Imagene will provide Twist with an encapsulation service to store DNA through its DNAshell® technology to store digital data encoded in DNA for thousands of years.

“We are happy to be partnering with Twist and providing them with our disruptive DNAshell® technology to safely store DNA with digital data encoded.” Tweet this

“This agreement with Imagene provides the next step in the continuum on DNA digital data storage and fits within our strategy to cover all aspects of the process efficiently to enable the development of DNA as a digital storage medium,” commented Emily Leproust, Ph.D., CEO of Twist Bioscience. “We believe the DNAshell ® technology allows us to encapsulate the DNA-stored digital data securely, protecting it for eternity from any elements including radiation, and eliminating the need for continued copying of digital data due to degradation experienced in other forms of storage today.”

We hear it daily — “Launch your drone program!” Uninspired marketing campaigns littered across social media, websites and emails. A detrimental circle of brands mirroring brands, unwittingly stalling the rise of drones. The problem is, as an industry, they’re missing the damn point. Take for example a use case we see all too often — construction. When handheld drills started showing up on jobsites, we didn’t hear Black + Decker say, “launch your drill program!” Why not? Drills are just enablers. They allow workers to do what they were already doing — except better, faster and more efficiently. The breakthrough had little to do with the actual tool itself, and more the new ability to enable faster holes. Drones are no different.

The goal isn’t to “put a drone on every construction site.” Drones are promising new vehicles that have the potential to transform industry, but they also inherently introduce new costs and complexities. The thought of adding new tools, new responsibilities, new certifications and permits, and new burdens to an already complex operation is the exact opposite of what most project managers consider helpful. This might begin to explain why drone service providers today are collectively struggling to grow at any meaningful velocity. We’re creating “launch your drone programs” solutions that make it easier for businesses to own and operate drones, when we should be making the drone invisible, and become laser-focused on the data drones generate and an infrastructure that supports rapid spatial insights.

We need to stop putting drones on construction sites, and start giving the industry the very thing that drones enable — insight. Drones will be on every job site in the next few years, but not as another tool on the tool belt. The project manager isn’t adopting a drone program. They’re adopting a visual insights program that captures a new, historical perspective across their sites. They’re providing situational awareness holistically throughout their organization. They’re making decisions based on the actual state of projects, and the insights affordable by new perspectives and sensors.

For the first time, a gas station has converted its business model to 100% electric vehicle charging. The Takoma Park, Maryland, gas station conversion was funded by the Electric Vehicle Institute and Maryland government.

After debuting just shy of two years ago, Boston Dynamics has finally made its Spot robotic dog available for sale, but don’t expect to find a great Black Friday deal on this bot at Best Buy come Thanksgiving. The company hasn’t made them available to the average consumer just yet—only businesses that can promise an interesting application for the technology.

D-Wave today announced its next generation “Advantage” quantum computer system. It’ll pack a whopping 5,000 qubits and myriad improvements to processing speed and power. And the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will be among the first to have access.

According to a press release from D-Wave, the new Advantage system improves on the previous generation’s 2000Q model – which sports a paltry-by-comparison 2,048 qubits – in nearly every conceivable way:

Designed to speed the development of commercial quantum applications, the Advantage quantum system will power a new hardware and software platform that will accelerate and ease the delivery of quantum computing applications. Reflecting years of customer feedback, the platform captures users’ priorities and business requirements and will deliver significant performance gains and greater solution precision.

Boston Dynamics is announcing this morning that Spot, its versatile quadruped robot, is now for sale. The machine’s animal-like behavior regularly electrifies crowds at tech conferences, and like other Boston Dynamics’ robots, Spot is a YouTube sensation whose videos amass millions of views.

Now anyone interested in buying a Spot—or a pack of them—can go to the company’s website and submit an order form. But don’t pull out your credit card just yet. Spot may cost as much as a luxury car, and it is not really available to consumers. The initial sale, described as an “early adopter program,” is targeting businesses. Boston Dynamics wants to find customers in select industries and help them deploy Spots in real-world scenarios.

The real robotics revolution is not having robots take care of tasks but having them available to businesses as a service. And so another acronyms to represent the expanding world of as a service is added to today’s business vocabulary.

A unified theory of ageing, there is a vid and a paper linked within.

ALAMEDA, Calif.—( BUSINESS WIRE )—AgeX Therapeutics, Inc. (“AgeX”; NYSE American: AGE), a biotechnology company focused on therapeutics for human aging and regeneration, announced today that founder and CEO Michael D. West, Ph.D., and colleagues have authored a paper in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Regenerative Medicine on the theoretical foundation of the Company’s induced Tissue Regeneration (iTR^TM) technology. The paper presents the work of the company’s scientists in describing a unified theory of aging and regeneration that could pave the way for the development of new therapies for a variety of age-related degenerative diseases and conditions.

“The longevity sector is advancing at an accelerating pace, but for the most part, without a consensus on the fundamental root causes of aging,” commented Dr. West. “We believe that it is now possible to collate the diverse observations about aging into a unified model. In the paper titled, ‘Toward a Unified Theory of Aging and Regeneration’ we outline such a theory that underlies the technological underpinnings of the company’s induced tissue regeneration (iTR) program.”

Continue reading “AgeX Therapeutics Publishes Theoretical Basis of Human Cell Age-Reversal in the Journal Regenerative Medicine” »