Lifeboat Foundation

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As fusion becomes more technically viable, it’s time to assess whether it’s worth the money because breakthroughs in the lab don’t guarantee success in the marketplace.

#Chicago friends, I’m honored to be speaking at the University of Chicago via the Chicago Society on Thursday, April 19, at 6PM CDT, Cobb 106. The Chicago Society has hosted speakers like Bill Gates, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Join me for a free talk and Q & A—and ask me all questions about #transhumanism and our coming wild tech future!

Imagine a single particle, only one-tenth the diameter of a bacterium, whose miniscule jiggles induce sustained vibrations in an entire mechanical device some 50 times larger. By taking clever advantage of the interplay between light, electrons on the surface of metals, and heat, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have for the first time created a plasmomechanical oscillator (PMO), so named because it tightly couples plasmons—the collective oscillations of electrons at the surface of a metal nanoparticle—to the mechanical vibrations of the much larger device it’s embedded in.

The entire system, no bigger than a red blood cell, has myriad technological applications. It offers new ways to miniaturize mechanical oscillators, improve communication systems that depend on the modulation of light, dramatically amplify extremely weak mechanical and electrical signals and create exquisitely sensitive sensors for the tiny motions of nanoparticles.

NIST researchers Brian Roxworthy and Vladimir Aksyuk described their work in a recent issue of Optica.

Sperm in space!!!

For the first time (officially), NASA will set loose some human sperm in outer space.

“If you went to bed last night as an industrial company, you’re going to wake up this morning as a software and analytics company.” Jeff Immelt, former CEO of General Electric

The second wave of digitization is set to disrupt all spheres of economic life. As venture capital investor Marc Andreesen pointed out, “software is eating the world.” Yet, despite the unprecedented scope and momentum of digitization, many decision makers remain unsure how to cope, and turn to scholars for guidance on how to approach disruption.

The first thing they should know is that not all technological change is “disruptive.” It’s important to distinguish between different types of innovation, and the responses they require by firms. In a recent publication in the Journal of Product Innovation, we undertook a systematic review of 40 years (1975 to 2016) of innovation research. Using a natural language processing approach, we analyzed and organized 1,078 articles published on the topics of disruptive, architectural, breakthrough, competence-destroying, discontinuous, and radical innovation. We used a topic-modeling algorithm that attempts to determine the topics in a set of text documents. We quantitatively compared different models, which led us to select the model that best described the underlying text data. This model clustered text into 84 distinct topics. It performs best at explaining the variability of the data in assigning words to topics and topics to documents, minimizing noise in the data.

Continue reading “What 40 Years of Research Reveals About the Difference Between Disruptive and Radical Innovation” »

Researchers have made a potentially vital breakthrough in the search for renewable energy storage.

Seek will also tell you which species you are most likely to see in your area, based on wildlife observations recorded and uploaded to iNaturalist. You will be given maps and charts to help you track down nearby flora and fauna — but if you prefer to explore on your own, Seek is happy to tell you about any random plant or insect that catches your eye.

INaturalist encourages all users to take photos of everything they see – even if it’s not on the list – to develop the AI’s ability to recognize wildlife. As co-founder Scott Loarie told My Modern Met, “The only way we can improve our modeling of species is to get more data, and to do that we need more people outside taking pictures.”

Seek is currently available on the App Store and is in beta testing for Android.

Continue reading “This new app will help you identify the plants and animals you see in nature” »

S cientists have claimed an important breakthrough in the battle against Alzheimer’s after neutralising the most significant gene responsible for the disease for the first time.

A team in California successfully identified the protein associated with the high-risk apoE4 gene and then manage to prevent it damaging human neuron cells.

The study could open the door to a potential new drug capable of halting the disease, however the researchers have urged caution because so far their compound has only been tried on collections of cells in a laboratory.

Continue reading “Alzheimer’s gene neutralised in human brain cells for the first time” »