A superconductor that deflects cosmic radiation away from interplanetary spacecraft sounds like science fiction, but it’s on its way to becoming reality. Tim Dean reports.
Shields up ready for Mars shot
Posted in space
Entanglement between distant quantum objects is an important ingredient for future information technologies. Researchers at the ETH have now developed a method with which such states can be created a thousand times faster than before.
Engineer Robert Grass says that though we believe information is here forever, it’s actually fragile. Hard drives and physical sources of information, like books, decay over time. In a video for the BBC, Grass describes his quest to find a method of preserving information that could be stable for millions of years. The secret is DNA.
In 2012, research showed that you could translate a megabyte (MB) of information into DNA and then read it back again. DNA has a language of its own, and is written in sequences of nucleotides (A, C, T, and G). Think of it as similar to binary, which breaks information down into ones and zeros.
And DNA has the advantage of being able to put an enormous amount of information in a tiny space. Theoretically, one gram of DNA could hold 455 exabytes of information. That’s “enough for all the data held by Google, Facebook and every other major tech company, with room to spare”, according to New Scientist.
West Yorkshire couple Laura Jacques and Richard Remde enlisted South Korean firm offering dog-cloning service for £67,000.
A U.S. science satellite slated to launch to Mars in March has been grounded due to a leak in a key research instrument, NASA said on Tuesday, creating uncertainty about the future of a widely anticipated effort to study the interior of the planet.
The spacecraft, known as InSight, was designed to help scientists learn more about the formation of rocky planets, including Earth.
The cancellation raises questions about the future of the research effort, as it will be another two years before Earth and Mars are favourably aligned for a launch. NASA has not said if it will have funding for the program, which was capped at $425 million US.
If a time traveler went back in time and stopped their own grandparents from meeting, would they prevent their own birth?
That’s the crux of an infamous theory known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, which is often said to mean time travel is impossible — but some researchers think otherwise. A group of scientists have simulated how time-travelling photons might behave, suggesting that, at the quantum level, the grandfather paradox could be resolved.
The research was carried out by a team of researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia and their results are published in the journal Nature Communications. The study used photons — single particles of light — to simulate quantum particles travelling back through time. By studying their behavior, the scientists revealed possible bizarre aspects of modern physics.
In the simulation, the researchers examined two possible outcomes for a time-travelling photon. In the simulation, the researchers examined the behavior of a photon traveling through time and interacting with its older self.
In their experiment they made use of the closely related, fictitious, case where the photon travels through normal space-time and interacts with another photon that is stuck in a time-travelling loop through a wormhole, known as a closed timelike curve (CTC).
Part 3 in this video series on transhumanism. I talk about the #1 concern I hear about when advocating for overcoming death:
Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan from the Transhumanist Party speaks to Ellie Zolfagharifard from DailyMail.com.
Major Mouse Testing Program
Posted in life extension
An interesting solution to testing combinations of compounds for longevity effects. As we move into implementing multiple approach therapies eg, SENS, which need several interventions we will need ways to measure their efficacy. Good to see people are thinking about this problem already.
Combination testing can it work? One of the MMTP collaborators Josh Mitteldorf suggests a way we might make it work.
Scientists have developed a way to produce soft, flexible and stretchy electronic circuits and radio antennas by hand, simply by writing on specially designed sheets of material.
This technique could help people draw electronic devices into existence on demand for customized devices, researchers said in a new study describing the method.
Whereas conventional electronics are stiff, new soft electronics are flexible and potentially stretchable and foldable. Researchers around the world are investigating soft electronics for applications such as wearable and implantable devices. [5 Crazy Technologies That Are Revolutionizing Biotech].
Rollins, who has a Ph.D. in veterinary medicine, took some time to talk about genetic engineering, the future of humanity and the ethical limits of science.
(This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.)
Live Science: A quote from “The Bone Labyrinth” reads, “Research today has become more about seeing if something can be done versus judging if it should. It’s knowledge for the sake of knowledge, regardless of the impact on the world.” Is that you speaking? Is that what you personally believe?
James Rollins: Yes, I believe that. I think sometimes, the reach of science is faster than its capacity to grasp. Genetic engineering is changing the world so fast right now. The CRISPR-Cas9 technique can allow us to pluck a single DNA unit out and replace it with great precision. And one of the people I interviewed in the research for this book told me that we now have the ability to do germline editing, where anyone with a basic biology degree and familiarity with embryos can alter an embryo pretty easily. And that’s something that’s relatively new. It’s just in the last five to 10 years that that’s been developed.