Lifeboat Foundation

Pentagon research agency DARPA wants to develop a system that’s capable of countering a swarm of attack drones.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vxEBJ91xoqs

I love investing. Every investor who strives to understand their craft to the fullest, ends up at the undeniable conclusion that time is the most valuable asset, bar none. Without it, nothing else of value can exist, it’s the magic ingredient. We can leave value behind for our loved ones, but on an individual level, this intangible asset is a requirement to value and enjoyment as a life form.

Technological innovation and growth can be compared to a snowball rolling down a mountainside, growing faster with each rotation, while speeding up simultaneously. Moore’s Law has held for decades, some say we will hit a wall in silicon transistor shrinking, but the advent of graphene has recently given new light on how this can continue on. New materials, will keep the acceleration of processing power and shrinking of those technologies, intact.

Continue reading “Immortality Through Technology, Exploring the Singularity with Ray Kurzweil” »

Ok, which country will have a Darth Vader leading the command?

HUMANITY’S next war will move away from Earth and be a brutal battle for control of the stars, experts predict.

One more of these; we may see government step in at the consumer’s urging.

Nobody was killed or even injured. But a minor accident involving a Tesla Model S running on Autopilot in China is again raising questions about exactly how the feature works.

The electric car company said Wednesday that it is investigating the Aug. 2 incident. The driver’s Tesla sideswiped a Volkswagen that was parked halfway in the lane of a busy Beijing highway. The company said Autopilot was engaged and the driver was not holding the steering wheel.

Continue reading “Another Tesla Autopilot Crash, This Time in China” »

We have seen the beauty of DNA in medical advancements, tech for storage, and even in designer fashion, Now, lets play with Art and art expression.

Tiny computers, microscopic art, bringing back the dodo—the future uses of the double helix.

This is a new one on me. I will admit that some of us often have folks trying to figure out how we come up with the stuff that we share as our vision of the future.

As scientists suggest humans may be descendants of alien civilizations, see which extraterrestrial race you most connect with.

Nice.

Software can tell chemists how to make new molecules from scratch and its inventors claim it has already mapped out a cheaper route to a blockbuster drug.

Continue reading “Revolutionary computer program could change chemistry forever” »

Something that I have shared many times as an issue/ gap with robotics and other AI technology.

Lack of diversity is more than a public relations issue, people.

By Kevin Kang

A recent article in ScienceDaily reviews a new approach in Synthetic Biology that allows cells to respond to a series of input stimuli and simultaneously remember the order of these stimuli over many generations. As noted by the senior investigator, Timothy Lu from MIT, combining computation with memory creates complex cellular circuits that can perform logic functions and store memories of events by encoding them in their DNA (1,2). In their current work, Dr. Lu and his colleagues created cells that can remember and respond to three different inputs, including chemical signals in a particular order, and in the future may be able to incorporate even more inputs (1,2,3). The cellular machines thus created are referred to as biological “state machines” because they exist in different states depending on the identity and order of inputs that they receive. The state machines rely on enzymes called recombinases. When activated by a specific input, recombinases either delete or invert a particular segment of DNA depending on the orientation of two DNA target sequences known as recognition sites. The segment of DNA between these sites may have recognition sites for other recombinases that respond to different inputs. Flipping or deleting these sites permanently changes what will happen if a second or third recombinase is later activated. Therefore, a cell’s history is determined by sequencing its DNA. In a version of this system with just two inputs, there are five possible states for this circuit: states corresponding to no input, input A alone, input B alone, A followed by B, and B followed by A. Dr. Lu’s team in MIT has designed and built circuits that record up to three inputs, in which sixteen states are possible (1,2).

Besides creating circuits that record events in a cell’s life and then transmit these memories to future generations, the researchers from MIT also placed genes into the array of recombinase binding sites along with genetic regulatory elements. In these circuits, when recombinases rearrange the DNA, the circuits record the information as well as control which genes get turned on and off. Lu’s lab tested this work in bacteria by color coding the identity and order of input stimuli, so input A followed by B would would lead to bacteria fluorescing red and green, but input B followed by A would lead to red and blue fluorescence. Hence, these techniques can be used not only to record the states that the cells experience over time, but also to deploy in state-dependent gene expression programs (1,2).

Continue reading “Novel Approach to Biological Circuit Design Allows Scientists to Track Cell Lineages” »