Lifeboat Foundation

Moscow (AFP) — The hunters searching for mammoth tusks were drawn to the steep riverbank by a deposit of ancient bones. To their astonishment, they discovered an Ice Age puppy’s snout peeking out from the permafrost.

Five years later, a pair of puppies perfectly preserved in Russia’s far northeast region of Yakutia and dating back 12,460 years has mobilised scientists across the world.

“To find a carnivorous mammal intact with skin, fur and internal organs — this has never happened before in history,” said Sergei Fyodorov, head of exhibitions at the Mammoth Museum of the North-Eastern Federal University in the regional capital of Yakutsk.

Continue reading “Caveman’s best friends? Preserved Ice Age puppies awe scientists” »

Despite all our advances in cancer research, our best strategy of fighting the disease is still brute force, with only a fraction of the drugs administered actually reaching the tumour cells, and most being absorbed into healthy tissue. When cancer spreads, the likelihood of medication reaching it gets even lower, which is why secondary, or metastatic, tumours can be so deadly.

But now, researchers have used cancer’s own tricks against it, by developing dissolvable nanoparticles that target the heart of metastatic tumours directly. And they’ve already seen unprecedented success in mouse studies, with 40–50 percent of the animals being “functionally cured”, and tumour-free after eight months — the equivalent of about 24 years for a human patient. The team is so excited by these results, they hope to fast-track the research and begin human trails in 2017.

“I would never want to overpromise to the thousands of cancer patients looking for a cure, but the data is astounding,” said one of the researchers, Mauro Ferrari, from the Houston Methodist Research Institute. “We’re talking about changing the landscape of curing metastatic disease, so it’s no longer a death sentence.”

Continue reading “Silicon ‘nano-balls’ have wiped out metastatic breast cancer in mice” »

When rock band Queen asked us “Who wants to live forever?” back in 1986, we interpreted it as standard lyrical rhetoric. But now, three decades and what feels like light years in technological, medical, and scientific advances later, the answer to that age-old question may have changed. And according to Ray Kurzweil, the famous American inventor who has been described as the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” we’re nearing immortality.

As the man responsible for the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer, and much more, Kurzweil has a knack for spotting trends and anticipating the future. And if history is any indication (and his word stays true), we may be in for a long, long lifetime.

In an episode of PBS’s News Hour last week, Kurzweil noted that death, which he describes as “a great robber of meaning, of relationships, of knowledge,” will soon be conquered. Indeed, the futurist notes, our species will soon be able to defeat disease and degeneration, and live “indefinitely.”

Continue reading “Want to live forever? Ray Kurzweil thinks that may be possible very soon” »

Chinese company Boyalife Group is set to start cloning cows later this year, but they say that they have the technology to do even more.

The Boyalife Group, responsible for building the world’s largest cloning factory, says that it already has the technology needed for human replication, and that it is only holding back due to public perception.

Continue reading “Chinese Scientists Say They Have the Ability To Clone Humans” »

The is a Space Technology Conference and Exhibition, taking place in London on 7–8 April 2016. It is set to showcase the most cutting edge technologies and uses of Space Technology providing insight from over 50 speakers sharing their unparalleled industry knowledge and real-life experiences.

This year’s Space Innovation Congress will be highlighting the most innovative advancements in Space technology and will look at how these are being applied to many industry verticals from farming to banking, and the practical case studies that are coming out of these projects.

With user cases with dedicated tracks covering the entire Space exploration and Earth observation ecosystems: Satellites, Big data, Crop monitoring, Space debris, Maritime surveillance, Space weather and its impact on banking systems, Biomedical, Commercial space collaboration and Telecoms.

This new gripper can be revolutionary for everything from food manufacturing to prosthetic hands.

At the recent RSA Conference it was virtually impossible to find a vendor that was not claiming to use machine learning. Both new and established companies are now touting “machine learning” as a major component of the data science being used in their products. What the heck is machine learning anyway? And is it really going to reshape cyber security in 2016?

For brevity’s sake, I’ll define machine learning as the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. Over the past decade, machine learning has enabled self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and has vastly improved our understanding of the human genome. Machine learning is so pervasive today that we use it dozens of times a day without knowing it. Many researchers also think machine learning is the best way to make progress towards human-level Artificial Intelligence.

[ MORE MACHINE LEARNING: Machine learning: Cybersecurity dream-come-true or pipe dream? ].

Continue reading “Machine learning is reshaping security” »

Researchers at the ASU School of Life Sciences may have found a way to improve crop performance and yield with the help of some new biotechnology. They’ve discovered a method to enhance a plant’s tolerance to stress, which could help them survive inclement conditions and still produce food.

The world’s population is currently exploding. There is already well over 7 billion people on Earth, and that number is expected to grow even larger in the next few years. This means that feeding the human race will become more of a challenge in the coming decades.

As the human population grows, climate change is taking its toll. Weather conditions are shifting in areas that are usually used to grow crops, which means that plants in those areas may not produce as much as they normally would. Drought, abnormal heat and other conditions could cause farms to lose production.

Continue reading “New Biotechnology Improves Crop Tolerance To Stress And Absorption Of Nutrients” »

Washington D.C.: A new study has revealed that fruit flies, who have similar sleeping habits like humans, can tell a lot about the connection between sleep deprivation and metabolic disorders like diabetes, obesity, and blood glucose levels.

The study conducted by the Florida Atlantic University is the first to identify that a conserved gene called translin works as a modulator of sleep in response to metabolic changes.

The study establishes that translin is an essential integrator of sleep and metabolic state, with important implications for understanding the neural mechanism underlying sleep deprivation in response to environmental challenges.

Continue reading “Gene responsible for sleep deprivation discovered” »