Lifeboat Foundation

The significant advance, by a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney appears today in the international journal Nature.

“What we have is a game changer,” said team leader Andrew Dzurak, Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW.

“We’ve demonstrated a two-qubit logic gate — the central building block of a quantum computer — and, significantly, done it in silicon. Because we use essentially the same device technology as existing computer chips, we believe it will be much easier to manufacture a full-scale processor chip than for any of the leading designs, which rely on more exotic technologies.

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Computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, founder of the California-based Singularity University, claims that by 2030s humans could be using nanobots to connect our brains to the cloud.

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“Here’s a collection of ideas and resources to encourage the next generation of women into Stem, just in time for Ada Lovelace Day.”

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My presidential campaign and health care ideas gets a nice mention in this popular article by Vox Editor-in-Chief Ezra Klein, considered a top political journalist in America. It’s nice to see young people like Ezra challenging the entire system. We must move beyond old, dysfunctional ways.

The most important problem in health care, in other words, is health.

Continue reading “The point of a health-care system isn’t to spend as little money as possible on it” »

Ray Kurzweil’s singularity of human superintelligence is a polar opposite of the singularity described by Vinge, Hawking, and Bostrom:

“The singularity will be a merger of our bodies and minds with our technology. The world will still be human, but transcend our biological roots. There will be no distinction between human and machine, nor between physical and virtual reality.”

Dear readers,

Continue reading “Celebrating the 10 Year Anniversary of book The Singularity Is Near” »

What is ideally needed is a bulk electricity storage device which is scalable to gig watt, which is reliable, efficient and economically viable, but more importantly, it should be environmentally friendly. One such promising technology on the horizon with a capability to compete with pumped hydro and gas turbines for peaking and immediate power generation is storing energy by gravity.

A gravity storage system consist of a pair of two deep shafts one large, and the other smaller in diameter connected at the top and bottom, forming a closed formed circuit via a reversible pumpturbine, as seen in Figure 1. The shafts are filled with water, which acts as a medium for energy transfer, and the bigger shaft is fitted with a huge steel piston filled with reinforced rock and concrete. The whole device operates on the simple action of vertical motion of piston.

Continue reading “Storing Energy” »

A self-driving lorry takes to Germany’s motorways.
Would you feel safe driving next to one?

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Bringing Internet.org’s mission to fruition.

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Warning that rapid advances in genetics make “designer babies” an increasing possibility, a United Nations panel today called for a moratorium on “editing” the human genome, pending wider public debate lest changes in DNA be transmitted to future generations or foster eugenics.

While acknowledging the therapeutic value of genetic interventions, the panel stressed that the process raises serious concerns, especially if the editing of the human genome should be applied to the germline, thereby introducing hereditary modifications.

“Gene therapy could be a watershed in the history of medicine and genome editing is unquestionably one of the most promising undertakings of science for the sake of all humankind,” the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) said in a news release on a report by its International Bioethics Committee (IBC).

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