Lifeboat Foundation

Greetings everyone, I am running a very unique digital conference time-slotted for participants in Asia, AUS, NZ etc on April 9, 5pm Sydney time, see details below, with 2 very well known Futurist colleagues, Ross Dawson and Shara Evans, on the Future of Work. We are using the Zoom platform again, and have room for up to 500 people; right now we’re at 280 signups but it’s filling up quickly so please sign up soonest:)

Please review the event details here, or here.

Some more related resources:

Archives of previous online shows

Continue reading “Invitation: The Future of Work — PostCorona Futures, Free Digital Conference April 9 5pm Sydney time” »

O„,.o yeah what about unauthorized clones o„,.o.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg never leaves a trace of herself anywhere. An artist and activist, Hagborg wants people to understand the hidden secrets in the DNA they leave behind everywhere they go — and what people can do with them. She developed a spray that can mask your DNA wherever it’s left. Hagborg understands that her spray could be used by criminals too, but she’s convinced that as technology develops, it will be an essential tool to preserving our safety and privacy.

Continue reading “Erasing Your DNA | Freethink Coded” »

Science fiction has always been a medium for futuristic imagination and while different colored aliens and intergalactic travel are yet to be discovered, there is an array of technologies that are no longer figments of the imagination thanks to the world of science fiction. Some of the creative inventions that have appeared in family-favorite movies like “Back to the Future” and “Total Recall,” are now at the forefront of modern technology. Here are a few of our favorite technologies that went from science fiction to reality.

These modern-day technologies appeared in science fiction decades before their time.

Circa 2016

Joins Play-Doh and champagne as the world’s best unintended innovations.

Electric dipole propulsion bigsmile

One reason we look so often at sail technologies in these pages is that they offer us ways of leaving the propellant behind. But even as we enter the early days of solar sail experimentation in space, we look toward ways of improving them by somehow getting around their need for solar photons. Robert Zubrin’s work with Dana Andrews has helped us see how so-called magnetic sails (magsails) could be used to decelerate a craft as it moved into a destination system. Now Zubrin looks at moving beyond both this and solar wind-deflecting electric sails toward an ingenious propellantless solution. Zubrin presented the work at last April’s Breakthrough Discuss meeting, and today he fills us in on its principles and advantages. Read on for a look at a form of enhanced electric sail the author has christened the Dipole Drive.

by Robert Zubrin

Continue reading “The Dipole Drive: A New Concept for Space Propulsion” »

Ever wonder what’s under the hood of your favorite electronic device? The transistor is the engine that powers every Intel processor. To build a modern computer chip, our engineers place billions of these tiny switches into an area no larger than a fingernail. It’s one of mankind’s most complex feats, and it’s happening every day across Intel’s global network of chip manufacturing facilities. Check out this video to learn more about how we turn sand into the silicon chips that power the world.

Subscribe now to Intel on YouTube: http://bit.ly/1BZDtpf

Continue reading “From Sand to Silicon: The Making of a Microchip | Intel” »

A team led by Prof. Guo Guangcan from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and collaborators first realized distribution of high-dimensional orbital angular momentum entanglement over a 1 km few-mode fiber. The result is published in Optica.

Increasing the channel capacity and tolerance to noise in quantum communications is a strong practical motivation for encoding quantum information in multilevel systems, qudits as opposed to qubits. From a foundational perspective, entanglement in higher dimensions exhibits more complex structures and stronger non-classical correlations. High-dimensional entanglement has demonstrated its potential for increasing channel capacity and resistance to noise in quantum information processing. Despite these benefits, the distribution of high-dimensional entanglement is relatively new and remains challenging.

The orbital angular momentum of photon is a high dimensional system which has been paid much attention to in recent years. However, orbital angular momentum entanglement is susceptible to atmospheric turbulence or mode crosstalk and mode dispersion in optical fibers. It can only transmit a few meters, and is limited to two-dimensional entanglement distribution.

Solid-state batteries could deliver a range approaching 500 miles, according to Korean tech giant Samsung.

Hope on the horizon:

1. Researcher make a breakthrough: Professor Katherine Kedzierska leads research at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity that discovers how the human body overcomes coronavirus.

Melbourne researchers have mapped immune responses from one of Australia’s first novel coronavirus (COVID-19) patients, showing the body’s ability to fight the virus and recover from the infection.

Continue reading “COVID-19: the immune system can fight back” »