Lifeboat Foundation

As the world’s political and business leaders gathered at Davos, it fell to a professor from the University of Bristol to reveal to them the full implications of a ‘fourth industrial revolution’.

Professor Jeremy O’Brien, director of the Centre for Quantum Photonics at the University of Bristol, addressed some of the most powerful people in the world yesterday at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland – to tell them just how rapidly quantum computers could change the world.

Part of the European Research Council (ERC) Ideas Lab delegation, Professor O’Brien has been actively involved with the WEF over the past few years and recently took on the role of co-chair of the Global Future Council on Computing. Last year he presented a talk on working towards a quantum computer discussing the future of computing and how new fields of computer sciences are paving the way for the next digital revolution.

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Synthetic chemicals commonly found in insecticides and garden products bind to the receptors that govern our biological clocks, University at Buffalo researchers have found. The research suggests that exposure to these insecticides adversely affects melatonin receptor signaling, creating a higher risk for metabolic diseases such as diabetes.

Published online on Dec. 27 in Chemical Research in Toxicology, the research combined a big data approach, using computer modeling on millions of chemicals, with standard wet-laboratory experiments. It was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Disruptions in human circadian rhythms are known to put people at higher risk for diabetes and other metabolic diseases but the mechanism involved is not well-understood.

The graphene temporary tattoo seen here is the thinnest epidermal electronic device ever and according to the University of Texas at Austin researchers who developed it, the device can take some medical measurements as accurately as bulky wearable sensors like EKG monitors. From IEEE Spectrum:

Graphene’s conformity to the skin might be what enables the high-quality measurements. Air gaps between the skin and the relatively large, rigid electrodes used in conventional medical devices degrade these instruments’ signal quality. Newer sensors that stick to the skin and stretch and wrinkle with it have fewer airgaps, but because they’re still a few micrometers thick, and use gold electrodes hundreds of nanometers thick, they can lose contact with the skin when it wrinkles. The graphene in the Texas researchers’ device is 0.3-nm thick. Most of the tattoo’s bulk comes from the 463-nm-thick polymer support.

The next step is to add an antenna to the design so that signals can be beamed off the device to a phone or computer, says (electrical engineer Deji) Akinwande.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=0Hlssbyc49o

A sixteen-year-old student from Terenure College has created a highly-encrypted solution that is resistant against quantum computers.

Smart dust; himm I see many uses for this some good and some truly bad when in the wrong hands.

Pedro Aquila, Staff Writer Waking Times

Smart dust is a name given to extremely small computing particles, RFID chips, or other very small technologies.

Continue reading “Smart Dust – The Future of Involuntary Treatment of the Public” »

Se in Si —

Back to the future: Silicon may work for quantum computing.

The qualities of hydrogen and skill with silicon make for bright qubit future.

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A quick look at synthetic biology and its potential for health and treating age-related diseases.

All living organisms contain an instruction set that determines what they look like and what they do. These instructions are encoded in the organism’s DNA within every cell, this is an organism’s genetic code (or “genome”).

Mankind has been altering the genetic code of plants and animals for thousands of years, by selectively breeding individuals with desired features. Over time we have become experts at viewing and manipulating this code, and we can now take genetic information associated with the desired features from one organism, and add it into another one. This is the basis of genetic engineering, which has allowed us to speed up the process of developing new breeds of plants and animals.

Continue reading “Will synthetic biology help us to eliminate age-related diseases?” »

Researchers have been able to create tiny structures for conducting electricity by using DNA and gold plating. This new nanostructure could be the foundation of future electronics as soon as improvements are made on this breakthrough development.

The emerging discipline of synthetic biology sits at the crux of the intersection between design, biology, computing and manufacturing…[I]t appears more and more probable that we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift, where…biology is adopted as the next big manufacturing technology.

[The objective of Ginkgo Bioworks, an “organism design” company,] is to take synthetic biology techniques to an industrial level, machine-injecting DNA sequences into baker’s yeast creating “living organism” products like perfumes, sweeteners, cosmetics and other things that are typically extracted from plants.

There are two main potential benefits from the technology. Replacing consumption of finite natural resources with lab-grown alternatives, and the potential to replicate actual genes to produce authentic fragrances replacing chemical synthetic scented products that currently dominate the marketplace.

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