Lifeboat Foundation

Not everyone is convinced. Critics point out that one of the points of exponential growth is that it cannot carry on forever. After a 50-year run, Moore’s Law is stuttering. Singularitarians retort that the laws of physics define a limit to how much computation you can cram into a given amount of matter, and that humans are nowhere near that limit. Even if Moore’s Law slows, that merely postpones the great day rather than preventing it. Others say the Singularity is just reli…gion in new clothes, reheated millenarianism with transistors and Wi-Fi instead of beards and thunderbolts. (One early proponent of Singularitarian and transhumanist ideas was Nikolai Federov, a Russian philosopher born in 1829 who was interested in resurrecting the dead through scientific means rather than divine ones.) And those virtual-reality utopias do look an awful lot like heaven. Perhaps the best way to summarise the Singularity comes from the title of a book published in 2012: the Rapture of the Nerds.

And will it lead to the extermination of all humans?

Continue reading “What is the Singularity?” »

This is important because “the go-to treatment for many cases of depression is medication…this treatment option can cause as many issues as the problem it is trying to solve. Antidepressants can put residents at greater risk of falls, negative health complications and other poor conditions…studies indicate that antidepressants may not be effective for most older Americans. (Additionally) Medication adherence is another significant challenge.”

___ Why technology — not medication — is the future of treating older adults with depression (McKnight’s Long-term Care News): “The go-to treatment for many cases of depression is medication. Unfortunately, this treatment option can cause as many issues as the problem it is trying to solve. Antidepressants can put.

DALLAS – March 29, 2018 – Researchers from UT Southwestern’s Charles and Jane Pak Center for Mineral Metabolism and Clinical Research and Internal Medicine’s Division of Nephrology recently published work in Nature that reveals the molecular structure of the so-called “anti-aging” protein alpha Klotho (a-Klotho) and how it transmits a hormonal signal that controls a variety of biologic processes. The investigation was performed in collaboration with scientists from New York University School of Medicine and Wenzhou Medical University in China.

Studies at UTSW two decades ago by Dr. Makoto Kuro-o, Professor of Pathology, demonstrated that mice lacking either a-Klotho or the hormone FGF23 suffered from premature and multiple organ failure as well as other conditions, including early onset cardiovascular disease, cancer, and cognitive decline. Because defects in a-Klotho lead to symptoms seen in aging, researchers inferred that a-Klotho suppresses aging, leading to great interest in how the a-Klotho protein might work together with the hormone FGF23 to fulfill their roles.

A-Klotho can exist on the surface of a cell or can be released from the cell and circulate in body fluids, including the blood, as soluble a-Klotho. The cell-attached form and the circulating form of a-Klotho were previously and universally believed to serve completely different functions.

Continue reading “Anti-aging protein alpha Klotho’s molecular structure revealed” »

How SETI sifts through cosmic noise to hunt for alien signals.

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Google and Amazon are on the forefront of AI innovation. But have they already gone too far?

By John Brandon Contributing editor, Inc.com

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military got is first big taste of artificial intelligence with Project Maven. An Air Force initiative, it began more than a year ago as an experiment using machine learning algorithms developed by Google to analyze full-motion video surveillance.

The project has received high praise within military circles for giving operators in the field instant access to the type of intelligence that typically would have taken a long time for geospatial data analysts to produce.

Project Maven has whetted the military’s appetite for artificial intelligence tools. And this is creating pressure on the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to jump on the AI bandwagon and start delivering Maven-like products and services.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence is changing everything, ‘We need a different mentality’” »

This image shows the bright light of a solar flare on the left side of the Sun and an eruption of solar material shooting through the Sun’s atmosphere.

Two new studies analyzing the relationship between dark energy, life, and the multiverse suggest it’s possible life exists in universes outside our own. Though the idea of the multiverse is not new, the concept of our universe being extraordinarily special might not be true.

While you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, you may be able to make your pup young again.

A Harvard startup has begun preliminary experiments on beagles and claims it can make animals ‘younger’ by adding new DNA instructions to their bodies.

Continue reading “Startup that wants you to ‘live to 130 in the body of a 22-year-old’” »