Lifeboat Foundation

The world is seeing rapid technological advancements and, with that, increasingly wealthy technology titans wanting to invest in cutting-edge ventures. But those things aren’t necessarily new, she says.

Academic Amy Fletcher says the meaning of life is that it stops. So why is Silicon Valley so stuck on subverting that?

Continue reading “Why is immortality once again big business and what does that say about us?” »

There’s a crisis brewing in the cosmos. Measurements over the past few years of the distances and velocities of faraway galaxies don’t agree with the increasingly controversial “standard model” of the cosmos that has prevailed for the past two decades. Astronomers think that a 9 percent discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number called the Hubble Constant, which describes how fast the universe is expanding, might be revealing something new and astounding about the universe.

The cosmos has been expanding for 13.8 billion years and its present rate of expansion, known as the Hubble constant, gives the time elapsed since the Big Bang. However, the two best methods used to measure the Hubble constant do not agree, suggesting our understanding of the structure and history of the universe – called the ‘standard cosmological model’ – may be wrong.

There was, writes Dennis Overbye in New York Times Science, a disturbance in the Force: “Long, long ago, when the universe was only about 100,000 years old — a buzzing, expanding mass of particles and radiation — a strange new energy field switched on. That energy suffused space with a kind of cosmic antigravity, delivering a not-so-gentle boost to the expansion of the universe.

Continue reading “‘The Phantom Universe’ --There’s a New ‘Unknown’ Messing with the Cosmos” »

This European Southern Observatory animation was created to celebrate the opening of the new ESO Supernova Planetarium in Germany. It begins from the home of the new facility in Garching and zooms our to the “End of the Universe”, according to the ESO.

Music: inspiring adventure cinematic background by maryna.

Solar system.

Twenty years ago, NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory beamed back its stunning “First Light” image of Cassiopeia A – but it’s still been checking back in every now and then.

Here’s how the supernova remnant has shifted and flowed in the two decades since go.nasa.gov/30AaeLr

Truthfully, it has been some time since Moore’s law, the propensity for processors to double in transistor count every two years, has been entirely accurate. The fundamental properties of silicon are beginning to limit development and will significantly curtail future performance gains, yet with 50 years and billions invested, it seems preposterous that any ‘beyond-silicon’ technology could power the computers of tomorrow. And yet, Nano might do just that, by harnessing its ability to be designed and built like a regular silicon wafer, while using carbon to net theoretical triple performance at one-third the power.

Nano began life much like all processors, a 150mm wafer with a pattern carved out of it by a regular chip fab. Dipped into a solution of carbon nanotubes bound together like microscopic spaghetti, it re-emerged with its semi-conductive carbon nanotubes stuck in the pattern of transistors and logic gates already etched on it. It then undergoes a process called ‘RINSE,’ removal of incubated nanotubes through selective exfoliation, by being coated with a polymer then dipped in a solvent. This has the effect of reducing the CNT layer to being just one tube, removing the large clumps of CNTs that stick together over 250 times more effectively than previous methods.

One of the challenges facing CNT processors has been difficulty in separating N-type and P-type transistors, which are “on” for 1 bit and “off” for 0 bit and the reverse, respectively. The difference is important for binary computing, and to perfect it, the researchers introduced ‘MIXED,’ metal interface engineering crossed with electrostatic doping. Occurring after RINSE, small platinum or titanium components are added to each transistor, then the wafer is coated in an oxide which acts as a sealant, improving performance. After that, Nano was just about done.

Continue reading “Existing processors could get a boost from swapping silicon for carbon nanotubes” »

By Michael Le Page

The mimivirus is so enormous it has its own kind of CRISPR-like immune system to defend against the smaller viruses that attack it. A team in France has confirmed how it works by transferring the entire system to a bacterium and tweaking it to destroy a different target.

This is a modal window. This modal can be closed by pressing the Escape key or activating the close button.

Today, Google has revealed the key details that were conspicuously missing from its March announcement of the new Stadia game streaming service. Namely, what the heck we’re going to be able to play, how much we’ll pay, and when we can get started with the exciting new service — which beams high-end console and PC games to any Chrome web browser, Chromecast Ultra TV dongle or Pixel 3 smartphone from beefy new Google servers.

The short version: Google Stadia will launch in November, in 14 different territories including the US, UK and Canada, with at least 31 games from 21 different publishers, for an initial “Founder’s Edition” price of $130 for a hardware starter kit with three months of premium service, and $10 a month afterwards. There’s a separate free tier coming in 2020.

Pre-orders for the “Founder’s Edition” are now open, and I’ll explain what it is in a tad, but there’s something important you should know first.

Continue reading “Google’s Stadia game service is officially coming November: Everything you need to know” »