Lifeboat Foundation

Deep-seated fears, like the memory of a death or war-time trauma, can be crippling. They’re also notoriously hard to study and treat, says neuroscientist Ossama Khalaf, Ph.D. But finally, we’re making progress: In a Science paper published Thursday, Khalaf and his team show new evidence suggesting that fearful memories that dwell deep in the brain’s neural circuitry don’t have to be a burden forever. It’s possible, the paper suggests, that they can be rewired.

The paper is rooted in the science of engrams — the idea that memories leave a physical trace in the brain. In this case, Khalaf, a researcher at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and his team traced deep-seated fear memories in rats back to the activity of specific neurons. They found that the way those neurons fire — and thus the fearful memory they encode — can be reprogrammed.

“In our study, we are providing the first experimental evidence that fear memory attenuation is mediated by the re-engagement of the original fear re-writing it towards safety,” Khalaf tells Inverse via email.

Hawking is being interred at Westminster Abbey on Friday, with a thousand members of the public (selected through a lottery system) present for the ceremony. The physicist’s remains will be placed between those of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

His voice will be broadcast into space after the service honoring his life.

Hawking’s words “have been set to an original score by composer Vangelis, most famous for his Chariots of Fire film theme,” the BBC reports.

Continue reading “Stephen Hawking’s Voice Will Be Broadcast Into Space” »

SpinLaunch Inc. has closed a $35 million Series A funding round with a powerhouse syndicate of investors. Investors include Airbus Ventures, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Kleiner Perkins. This syndicate joins institutional investors including Lauder Partners, ATW Partners, Bolt, and Starlight Ventures to total $40 million. Investment funds will be used to scale the team and technology, through first launch by 2022.

SpinLaunch is revolutionizing access to space by developing a kinetic energy launch system designed to provide the world’s lowest-cost orbital launch service for the rapidly growing small satellite industry. Their environmentally responsible approach is unmatched in the industry. SpinLaunch is currently considering four different states for potential launch sites within the United States.

Spinlaunch use large centrifuges to store energy and will then rapidly transfer that momentum into a catapult to send a payload to space at up to 4,800 kilometers per hour (3,000 mph). If successful, the acceleration architecture is projected to be both lower cost and use much less power, with the price of a single space launch reduced to under US$500,000.

Continue reading “Spinlaunch has $40 million to fund development to first centrifuge space launch by 2022” »

Intel researchers are taking new steps toward quantum computers by testing a tiny new “spin qubit” chip. The new chip was created in Intel’s D1D Fab in Oregon using the same silicon manufacturing techniques that the company has perfected for creating billions of traditional computer chips. Smaller than a pencil’s eraser, it is the tiniest quantum computing chip Intel has made.

The new spin qubit chip runs at the extremely low temperatures required for quantum computing: roughly 460 degrees below zero Fahrenheit – 250 times colder than space.

The spin qubit chip does not contain transistors – the on/off switches that form the basis of today’s computing devices – but qubits (short for “quantum bits”) that can hold a single electron. The behavior of that single electron, which can be in multiple spin states simultaneously, offers vastly greater computing power than today’s transistors, and is the basis of quantum computing.

Continue reading “Starts Testing Smallest ‘Spin Qubit’ Chip for Quantum Computing” »

Almost anywhere in the world, an HIV-infected woman who has an uninfected partner and wants to have a baby would be first in line to receive ARVs. The challenges Katia faced in getting treatment amid Russia’s epidemic highlight the country’s faltering response, which critics have blasted as misguided, lackadaisical, and downright dismissive. Some federal health officials even question the term epidemic. “This is a very large and very serious epidemic, and certainly one of the few epidemics in the world that continues to get worse rather than get better,” says Vinay Saldanha, the Moscow-based regional director for the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. “This is a public health crisis.”

The government has begun to confront its shortcomings, but critics want more aggressive change.

Be prepared to freak out.

Once you see them side by side, the resemblance is so obvious. Put an aggregated vision of what God looks like next to a head shot of Elon Musk and prepare to be freaked out.

The history of Area 51 stretches back to the 1950s.

Area 51 has been the focal point of alien conspiracy theories in America for decades. The remote military base in the Nevada desert has a lot of history, and has been associated with aliens almost since its inception. Here’s why. Following is a transcript of the video:

In the early 1950s, US planes were conducting low-flying recon missions over the USSR. But there were constant worries of them being spotted and shot down.

Continue reading “How Area 51 became the center of alien conspiracy theories” »

A Silicon Valley startup has devised an ingenious way of sending rockets into space.

Dubbed SpinLaunch, the firm wants to blast tiny payloads into orbit atop miniature rockets.

Continue reading “Space catapult startup gets $40 MILLION investment” »

July 12th sees us launch our first conference in New York City dedicated to the field of rejuvenation biotechnology, the science that seeks to end age-related diseases forever.

At the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, Cooper Union in New York City, we will be hosting a special one-day conference focused on aging research and biotech investment. Developing therapies from initial concepts, through clinical testing, and ultimately to market takes a pipeline, and right now, that p…