Lifeboat Foundation

Year 2023 face_with_colon_three

If humanity is ever to consider substantial, long-term colonization of Mars, the resources needed are going to be extensive. For a long-term human presence on Mars to be established, serious thought would need to be given to terraforming the planet. One major requirement for such terraforming is having the protection of a planetary magnetic field — which Mars currently does not have. The Earth’s magnetosphere helps protect the planet from the potential sterilizing effects of cosmic rays and also helps retain the atmosphere, which would otherwise by stripped by large solar storms as they pass over the planet. Mars does have small patches of remnant surface magnetic field, but these are localized in the southern hemisphere and are not of sufficient size or magnitude to protect the planet or a colony.

In this article we explore comprehensively for the first time, the practical and engineering challenges that affect the feasibility of creating an artificial magnetic field capable of encompassing Mars. This includes the concerns that define the design, where to locate the magnetic field generator and possible construction strategies. The rationale here is not to justify the need for a planetary magnetosphere but to put figures on the practicalities so as to be able to weigh the pros and cons of the different engineering approaches.

Continue reading “How to create an artificial magnetosphere for Mars” »

Proteins are involved in every biological process, and use the energy in the body to alter their structure via mechanical movements. They are considered biological ‘nanomachines’ because the smallest structural change in a protein has a significant effect on biological processes. The development of nanomachines that mimic proteins has received much attention to implement movement in the cellular environment. However, there are various mechanisms by which cells attempt to protect themselves from the action of these nanomachines. This limits the realization of any relevant mechanical movement of nanomachines that could be applied for medical purposes.

The research team led by Dr. Youngdo Jeong from the Center for Advanced Biomolecular Recognition at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST, President Seok-Jin Yoon) has reported the development of a novel biochemical nanomachine that penetrates the cell membrane and kills the cell via the molecular movements of folding and unfolding in specific cellular environments, such as cancer cells, as a result of a collaboration with the teams of Prof. Sang Kyu Kwak from the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering and Prof. Ja-Hyoung Ryu from the Department of Chemistry at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST, President Yong Hoon Lee), and Dr. Chaekyu Kim of Fusion Biotechnology, Inc.

The joint research team focused on the hierarchical structure of proteins, in which the axis of the large structure and the mobile units are hierarchically separated. Therefore, only specific parts can move around the axis. Most existing nanomachines have been designed so that the mobile components and axis of the large structure are present on the same layer. Thus, these components undergo simultaneous movement, which complicates the desired control of a specific part.

Dr. H. Rusty Harris, an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, has discovered a novel circuit element referred to as a meminductor.

A circuit element refers to an electrical component utilized to regulate and guide the flow of electricity within an electrical circuit. The traditional three circuit elements are the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. Recently, within the past 15 years, two additional circuit elements, the memristor, and the memcapacitor, have been discovered. These newer circuit components are referred to as the “mem-” versions of their classical counterparts and exhibit unique current and voltage properties that depend on previous values of current or voltage in time, acting like a memory.

“Those two discoveries set the world a little bit on its head as far as electrical engineering,” Harris said. “All of a sudden, we thought we had three, but now we found these two others. And so that led us to think, ‘OK, there’s got to be more then, but how do we understand what they are? How do we map all of these things relative to each other?’ And it turns out, there is a relationship between each of the resistors and its family and each of the capacitors and its family.”

😗year 2022

Bigger isn’t always better, but when the Looking Glass Factory announces a beast of a holographic display, it tickles our rods, cones and curiosity equally. The screen doesn’t require glasses or other tech to view the effects. Viewable by groups of 50 people, the display generates up to 100 different perspectives of 3D content from 100 million points of light every 60th of a second.

The company claims its 8K-resolution, 65-inch display is five times larger than any other 3D holo display ever shown off. The new display is “group viewable,” meaning that it differs from a lot of the other offerings out there that can be seen by only one person at a time. The company highlights marketing, engineering and design-forward applications as possible uses. The new display is the fourth display in Looking Glass Factory’s growing (geddit?!) lineup.

Continue reading “The world’s largest holographic display is here” »

This paper aims to promote a quantum framework that analyzes Industry 4.0 cyber-physical systems more efficiently than traditional simulations used to represent integrated systems. The paper proposes a novel configuration of distributed quantum circuits in multilayered complex networks that enable the evaluation of industrial value creation chains. In particular, two different mechanisms for the integration of information between circuits operating at different layers are proposed, where their behavior is analyzed and compared with the classical conditional probability tables linked to the Bayesian networks. With the proposed method, both linear and nonlinear behaviors become possible while the complexity remains bounded. Applications in the case of Industry 4.0 are discussed when a component’s health is under consideration, where the effect of integration between different quantum cyber-physical digital twin models appears as a relevant implication.

Subject terms: Quantum simulation, Qubits.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are integrations of computational and physical components that can interact with humans through new and different modalities. A key to future technological development is precisely this new and different capacity of interaction together with the new possibilies that these systems pose for expanding the capabilities of the physical world through computation, communication and control¹. When CPS are understood within the industrial practice fueled by additional technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), people refer to the Industry 4.0 paradigm². The design of many industrial engineering systems has been performed by separately considering the control system design from the hardware and/or software implementation details.

^c Department of Chemical Biology, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361,005, China.

The concept of xeno-nucleic acids (XNAs) was first proposed in 2009 in a theoretical paper, referring to additional types of nucleic acids, whose sugar moieties would differ from those in DNA and RNA. However, with the rising popularity of XNAs, the definition of XNAs has been extended to unnatural nucleic acids with chemically modified sugar, nucleobase, or phosphate moieties that are distinct from those found in DNA and RNA. The discovery and engineering of both polymerases and reverse transcriptases to synthesize, replicate and evolve a diverse range of XNAs has attracted significant attention and has enabled the discovery of XNA ligands (aptamers) and XNA catalysts (XNAzymes) as well as the synthesis of XNA nanostructures with potential as novel therapeutics. The field of XNAs continues to grow rapidly towards realizing the potential of XNAs in biotechnology and molecular medicine. This themed issue unites a collection of articles attesting to the rapid progress in the field.

One of the key advantages of XNAs is their generally enhanced resistance to nuclease degradation. This biostability, the affinity and specificity towards a target, and the general lack of immunogenicity of modified nucleic acids are critical for their potential application as therapeutics. Modified sugar moieties such as 2′-modified analogs, conformationally locked analogs, and threose-replaced analogs in particular contribute to the increased biological stability of XNAs against enzymatic degradation. Replacing the phosphodiester linkages with charge-neutral backbones including peptide-like backbones and triazole-linked backbones offers further opportunities to tune the stability, conformation and physicochemical properties of XNAs and enhance the affinity to their targets.

A quantum computational solution for engineering materials. Researchers at Argonne explore the possibility of solving the electronic structures of complex molecules using a quantum computer. If you know the atoms that compose a particular molecule or solid material, the interactions between those atoms can be determined computationally, by solving quantum mechanical equations — at least, if the molecule is small and simple. However, solving these equations, critical for fields from materials engineering to drug design, requires a prohibitively long computational time for complex molecules and materials.

The resulting materials could be used for capturing greenhouse gases.

MIT researchers have used a computational model to identify about 10,000 possible metal-organic framework MOF structures that they classify as “ultrastable.” These states make them good candidates for applications such as converting methane gas to methanol.

“When people come up with hypothetical MOF materials, they don’t necessarily know beforehand how stable that material is,” said in a statement published on Tuesday Heather Kulik, an MIT associate professor of chemistry and chemical engineering and the senior author of the study.

In this episode, learn the art of prompt engineering to enhance your ChatGPT interactions. Discover tips for crafting effective prompts, interpreting results, and fine-tuning inputs. Ideal for both beginners and experienced users. Like, comment, and subscribe for more Singularity Syndicate episodes!