Lifeboat Foundation

“After decades of piecemeal progress, the science of cryogenically storing human organs is warming up”

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“The distinctive troughs and crests of the human brain are not present in most animals; highly folded brains are seen only in a handful of species, including some primates, dolphins, elephants, and pigs. In humans, folding begins in fetal brains around the 20th week of gestation and is completed only when the child is about 18 months old.”

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“Later this year, during what passes for summer in Antarctica, a group of Chicago scientists will arrive at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole research station to install a new and enhanced instrument designed to plumb the earliest history of the cosmos.”

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“Quantum mechanics, a new experiment suggests, requires that multiple adventures occur simultaneously to create a consistent account of history.”

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The astrophysics project Space Warps offers a compelling example of why citizen science has become such a popular tool and how valuable it can be. In a roundtable discussion with the Kavli Foundation, citizen science leaders and astrophysicists Chris Lintott, Anupreeta More and Aprajita Verma discuss the tremendous impact these enthusiastic volunteers are having.

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DNA is similar to a hard drive or storage device, in that contains the memory of each cell of every living, and has the instructions on how to make that cell. DNA is four molecules combined in any order to make a chain of one larger molecule. And if you can read that chain of four molecules, then you have a sequence of characters, like a digital code. Over the years the price of sequencing a human genome has dropped significantly, much to the delight of scientists. And since DNA is a sequence of four letters, and if we can manipulate DNA, we could insert a message and use DNA as the storage device.

At this point in time, we are at the height of the information age. And computers have had an enormous impact on all of our lives. Any information is able to be represented as a collection of bits. And with Moore’s law, which states that computing power doubles every 18 months, our ability to manipulate and store these bits has continued to grow and grow. Moore’s law has been driven by scientists being able to make transistors and integrated circuits continuously smaller and smaller, but there eventually comes a point we reach in which these transistors and integrated circuits cannot be made any smaller than they already are, since some are already at the size of a single atom. This inevitably leads us into the quantum world. Quantum mechanics has rules which are, in many ways, hard for us to truly comprehend, yet are nevertheless tested. Quantum computing looks to make use of these strange rules of quantum physics, and process information in a totally different way. Quantum computing looks to replace the classical bits which are either a 0 or a 1, with quantum bits, or qubits, which can be both a 0 and a 1 at the same time. This ability to be two different things at the same time is referred to as a superposition. 200 qubits hold more bits of information than there are particles in the universe. A useful quantum computer will require thousands or even millions of physical qubits. Anything such as an atom can serve as a quantum bit for making a quantum computer, then you can use a superconducting circuit to build two artificial atoms. So at this point in time we have a few working quantum transistors, but scientists are working on developing the quantum integrated circuit. Quantum error correction is the biggest problem encountered in development of the quantum computer. Quantum computer science is a field that right now is in its very early stages, since scientists have yet been able to develop any quantum hardware.

Continue reading “Science Documentary: DNA Hard Drives, Quantum Computing, Moore’s Law” »

“Clive Cookson introduces a special issue looking at the places where science and photography meet, from the intimate observation of illness to the quiet machinery of surveillance”

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“Do some people have a special talent for serendipity? And if so, why?”

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Image credit: iDigitalTrends

While the “Ice Bucket Challenge” raised millions to fuel research toward a cure for
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), there are a number of assistive technologies already at work to help those currently affected by the disease. According to Alisa Brownlee, a clinical manager for the ALS Association, more assistive technologies and brain-computer-interfaces are on the way. At present, the largest hurdle is access.

Brownlee noted that the loss of communication is often the hardest part of ALS for someone to endure. As ALS is a progressive disease, there are several forms of assistive technology that are used based on a given patient’s physical status. Each form of that technology will work for awhile, but then patients will have to move on to something else as the disease progresses, she says.

Using computer access as one way to help maintain an ALS patient’s communication skills, ALS patients can transition to a track-ball mouse and on-screen keyboard in lieu of a standard computer mouse. From there, a person can use a head-mount, eye-gaze system, and even a tablet computer with a switch scanner.

Continue reading “How Assistive Technology Is Opening New Doors for ALS Patients” »