Evidence is emerging that some widely used drugs can prolong lifespan for well people – and insiders have started taking them off-label. Millions of people are taking anti-ageing drugs every day – they just don’t know it. Drugs to slow ageing sound futuristic but they already exist in the form of relatively cheap medicines that …
To vigorously advance the goals of the BRAIN Initiative, there was a detailed recommendation to invest $400 million per year over the next five years (FY16-20), and continues at $500 million per year subsequently (FY21-25) by the NIH. A sustained, decade-long commitment at this level will attract talented scientists from multiple fields to the interdisciplinary …
Randal Koene is an expert on brain emulation. He gave a talk in 2013 and discussed 100,000 neuron fruit fly brain emulation. If we see the same sort of development in getting activity data from the brain as we saw with the structure, then perhaps by 2018 it would be acceptable to, say, come up …
European Union (EU)’s Human Brain Project provided a 32 page report on their progress toward an artificial brain by 2023. The 10-year-long $1 billion euro (US$1.3 billion) Human Brain Project aims to simulate the entire human brain on supercomputers first, then build a special hardware emulator that will reproduce its functions so accurately that diseases …
Arxiv – On the role of GRBs on life extinction in the Universe As a copious source of gamma-rays, a nearby Galactic Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) can be a threat to life. Using recent determinations of the rate of GRBs, their luminosity function and properties of their host galaxies, we estimate the probability that a life-threatening …
With foreign sales of $7.4 billion over the past five years, China overtook France in 2013 to become the world’s fourth-largest arms exporter, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Besides Norinco, the country’s arms makers include Aviation Industry Corporation of China, Poly Technologies Inc. and China South Industries Group Corp. Norinco is the biggest …
A research team from the University of Texas and German nanotechnology company Aixtron have worked out a way to make wafer-scale graphene measuring between 100 and 300mm. The research offers the prospect of integrating carbon-based graphene, which is just one atom thick, with silicon on a semi-industrial scale. Until now, graphene has proved difficult to …
The Center for Strategic and Budgetary assessments has provided an estimated cost for the airwar in Iraq and Syria at between $2.4 to 22 billion per year. The cost of U.S. military operations against ISIL through September 24 is likely between $780 and $930 million. The cost of future operations depends primarily on how long …