Lifeboat Foundation

You can now control and communicate drone swarms using your mind!

DARPA’s new research in brain-computer interfaces is allowing a pilot to control multiple simulated aircraft at once.

University of Birmingham scientists are paving the way to swap the lithium in lithium-ion batteries with sodium, according to research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Lithium-ion batteries (LIB) are rechargeable and are widely used in laptops, mobile phones and in hybrid and fully electric vehicles. The electric vehicle is a crucial technology for fighting pollution in cities and realising an era of clean sustainable transport.

However lithium is expensive and resources are unevenly distributed across the planet. Large amounts of drinking water are used in lithium extraction and extraction techniques are becoming more energy intensive as lithium demand rises – an ‘own goal’ in terms of sustainability.

Continue reading “New high-capacity sodium-ion could replace lithium in rechargeable batteries” »

$82 Trillion to convert a desert to land that could grow crops to help feed the world…is it worth it?

Researchers simulated the effects of around 79 terawatts of solar panels and 3 terawatts of wind turbines. Computer modeling looked at the effect of covering 20 percent of the largest desert on the planet in solar panels and installing three million wind turbines.

There would be 16X the rain in the aridest parts of the Sahara, and double that of the Sahel.

Continue reading “Using 82 Terawatts of solar and wind to Green the Sahara as a side effect would cost at least $82 trillion” »

The US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has created a brain-computer interface that enables a person to control everything from a swarm of drones to an advanced fighter jet using nothing but their thoughts and a special brain chip.

Life imitates art, in defense tech no less than in society. In the 1982 techno-thriller film “Firefox,” Clint Eastwood steals a fictional Soviet fighter jet called the “MiG-31 Firefox,” a Mach 6-capable stealth fighter he piloted with his thoughts. But now in 2018, the US military has gone even further: you can control a whole group of drones or fighter jets with your thoughts.

Continue reading “DARPA’s New Brain Chip Enables Telepathic Control of Drone Swarms” »

Think of the Sahara, with its windswept dunes shining in the sunlight. Some people might see barren land, with minimal water or life and scorching temperatures. Others see a potential solution to a looming energy crisis, and one that could potentially make it rain in one of the largest deserts in the world.

In a paper published this week in Science researchers found that by building out huge wind and solar farms across the desert, they could not only provide a stunning amount of power to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, but they could simultaneously change the climate—increasing heat, but also increasing precipitation and vegetation in areas that could sorely use the added greenery. They estimate that such a venture could double the rainfall in the region, and increase vegetation cover by about 20 percent.

How much green are we talking? The Sahara covers 3.55 million square miles (9.2 million square kilometers). In the study, the researchers ran computer models that placed wind turbines across the desert close to a mile apart, and covered 20 percent of the desert with solar panels in different configurations (sometimes the panels were spread across the desert in a checkerboard pattern, and in other cases were concentrated in quadrants). Smaller coverage produced smaller climate impacts—in this case, less precipitation—but much of it depended on the location of the turbines and panels as well. For example, installing panels in the northwest corner had a larger impact than the other three desert options.

Elon Musk smoked pot and drank whiskey on the Joe Rogan podcast and said he’s going to soon announce a new “Neuralink” product that can make anyone superhuman.

Lowell interviews the always fascinating Professor George Church in this new podcast series about aging research. Lifespan.io will be appearing on the show soon too so watch this space bigsmile

Harvard & MIT Professor, author of Regenesis, methods for 1st genome sequence (1994) & 10M-fold improvements (NGS, nanopore), genome editing, writing and recording. In this episode, we get to talk about Genghis Khan, Woolly Mammoth, storing data in DNA, advice for people getting started, and more all in under one hour!

George is one of the most interesting and down to earth people you’ll read about (might be from the future or an alien, but cannot confirm). He is always working to make all of our lives better. Anytime you are looking for inspiration, do what I do, and learn about what he and his team are working on. I always feel like I can do anything after reading or listening to the current things he is working on. I hope to one day contribute like he does! As a side note: I am working on something that was inspired from our discussion, so we shall see how that goes. If anyone is inspired after listening to him talk, please email me and let me know. We can start a fan group around George and scientists in general. Scientists are the unsung superheros of our society! Also, scroll down to the bottom to see the breadth of his work. I felt like it should be put here in it’s entirety. Hyperlinked show notes will go up tonight for this episode and the previous ones that are lacking them!

Continue reading “Dr. George Church and I Discuss the Woolly Mammoth, Human Aging, DNA Data Storage, and Other Amazing Projects Coming Out of His Lab with Advice for People Getting Started” »

Yale University researchers have demonstrated one of the key steps in building the architecture for modular quantum computers: the “teleportation” of a quantum gate between two qubits, on demand.

The findings appear online Sept. 5 in the journal Nature.

The key principle behind this new work is quantum teleportation, a unique feature of quantum mechanics that has previously been used to transmit unknown quantum states between two parties without physically sending the state itself. Using a theoretical protocol developed in the 1990s, Yale researchers experimentally demonstrated a quantum operation, or “gate,” without relying on any direct interaction. Such gates are necessary for quantum computation that relies on networks of separate quantum systems—an architecture that many researchers say can offset the errors that are inherent in quantum computing processors.

Intel Corporation’s quantum computing experts Jim Clarke and Anne Matsuura and their partners at QuTech in the Netherlands explain the promises of the emerging technology around quantum computing.

Learn more about Intel’s role in quantum computing: https://newsroom.intel.com/press-kits/quantum-computing/

Continue reading “Changing the World with Quantum Computing | Intel” »