Lifeboat Foundation

Our muscles start to shrink and weaken when we reach our 50s and 60s in a process called sarcopenia, but new research in mice from the University of Michigan offers new insights into why this loss may occur, and how we might begin to prevent it.

Sarcopenia is the progressive loss of muscle mass in aging, and it’s linked to other age-related pathologies such as osteoarthritis, cardiovascular disease and cancer, as well as an overall reduction in function and independence.

The research, led by Carlos Aguilar, a U-M assistant professor of biomedical engineering, focused on muscle stem cells since they are dedicated solely to keeping muscles healthy. And to better understand stem cell function during aging, testing was conducted on two sets of mice, one “young” and one “old,” before and after muscle injury.

The world’s fastest data transmission rate has been achieved by a team of University College London engineers who achieved internet transmission speed a fifth faster than the previous record.

Working with two companies, Xtera and KDDI Research, the research team led by Dr. Lidia Galdino (UCL Electronic & Electrical Engineering), achieved a data transmission rate of 178 terabits a second (178,000,000 megabits a second) – a speed at which it would be possible to download the entire Netflix library in less than a second.

The record, which is double the capacity of any system currently deployed in the world, was achieved by transmitting data through a much wider range of colors of light, or wavelengths, than is typically used in optical fiber. (Current infrastructure uses a limited spectrum bandwidth of 4.5THz, with 9THz commercial bandwidth systems entering the market, whereas the researchers used a bandwidth of 16.8THz.)

Michigan State University researchers have created for the first time a miniature human heart model in the laboratory, complete with all primary heart cell types and a functioning structure of chambers and vascular tissue.

In the United States, heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death. “These minihearts constitute incredibly powerful models in which to study all kinds of cardiac disorders with a degree of precision unseen before,” said Aitor Aguirre, the study’s senior author and assistant professor of biomedical engineering at MSU’s Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering.

Continue reading “Scientists grow the first functioning mini human heart model” »

WASHINGTON — The Blue Origin-led team that is one of three working on lunar lander concepts for NASA’s Artemis program has delivered a full-sized mockup of that lander to the agency for testing by engineers and astronauts.

Blue Origin announced Aug. 20 that its “National Team” has installed an engineering model of the lander in the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at the Johnson Space Center. The full-sized, but low-fidelity, mockup includes both the descent element, developed by Blue Origin, and ascent element, built by Lockheed Martin, and stands more than 12 meters high.

Continue reading “Blue Origin team delivers lunar lander mockup to NASA” »

“A neuron in the human brain can never equate the human mind, but this analogy doesn’t hold true for a digital mind, by virtue of its mathematical structure, it may – through evolutionary progression and provided there are no insurmountable evolvability constraints – transcend to the higher-order Syntellect. A mind is a web of patterns fully integrated as a coherent intelligent system; it is a self-generating, self-reflective, self-governing network of sentient components… that evolves, as a rule, by propagating through dimensionality and ascension to ever-higher hierarchical levels of emergent complexity. In this book, the Syntellect emergence is hypothesized to be the next meta-system transition, developmental stage for the human mind – becoming one global mind – that would constitute the quintessence of the looming Cybernetic Singularity.” –Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis https://www.ecstadelic.net/e_news/gearing-for-the-2020-visio…ss-release

#SyntellectHypothesis

Continue reading “Gearing for the 20/20 Vision of Our Cybernetic Future — The Syntellect Hypothesis, Expanded Edition | Press Release” »

If we can harness it, quantum technology promises fantastic new possibilities. But first, scientists need to coax quantum systems to stay yoked for longer than a few millionths of a second.

A team of scientists at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering announced the discovery of a simple modification that allows quantum systems to stay operational—or “coherent”—10,000 times longer than before. Though the scientists tested their technique on a particular class of quantum systems called solid-state qubits, they think it should be applicable to many other kinds of quantum systems and could thus revolutionize quantum communication, computing and sensing.

The study was published Aug. 13 in Science.

Energy solutions company Hanwha Energy has completed its $212m hydrogen fuel cell power plant, located at the Daesan Industrial Complex in Seosan, South Korea.

Built by Hanwha Engineering & Construction, the plant is thought to be the largest industrial hydrogen fuel cell power plant globally, and the first to only use hydrogen recycled from petrochemical manufacturing.

The recycled hydrogen is supplied by the Hanwha Total Petrochemical plant located within the same Daesan Industrial Complex. Hanwha Total Petrochemical pumps the recycled hydrogen into the new power plant via underground pipes and feeds it directly into the fuel cells.

Starship lifts off and a terraformed Mars map is published. How will Mars astronauts reach the surface? It’s Musk Reads: SpaceX Edition #193.

A version of this article appeared in the “Musk Reads” newsletter. Sign up for free here.

Physicists have long sought to understand the irreversibility of the surrounding world and have credited its emergence to the time-symmetric, fundamental laws of physics. According to quantum mechanics, the final irreversibility of conceptual time reversal requires extremely intricate and implausible scenarios that are unlikely to spontaneously occur in nature. Physicists had previously shown that while time-reversibility is exponentially improbable in a natural environment—it is possible to design an algorithm to artificially reverse a time arrow to a known or given state within an IBM quantum computer. However, this version of the reversed arrow-of-time only embraced a known quantum state and is therefore compared to the quantum version of pressing rewind on a video to “reverse the flow of time.”

In a new report now published in Communications Physics, Physicists A.V. Lebedev and V.M. Vinokur and colleagues in materials, physics and advanced engineering in the U.S. and Russia, built on their previous work to develop a technical method to reverse the temporal evolution of an arbitrary unknown quantum state. The technical work will open new routes for general universal algorithms to send the temporal evolution of an arbitrary system backward in time. This work only outlined the mathematical process of time reversal without experimental implementations.