Lifeboat Foundation

As of this month, over 4,000 Americans are on the waiting list to receive a heart transplant. With failing hearts, these patients have no other options; heart tissue, unlike other parts of the body, is unable to heal itself once it is damaged. Fortunately, recent work by a group at Carnegie Mellon could one day lead to a world in which transplants are no longer necessary to repair damaged organs.

“We’ve been able to take MRI images of coronary arteries and 3-D images of embryonic hearts and 3-D bioprint them with unprecedented resolution and quality out of very soft materials like collagens, alginates and fibrins,” said Adam Feinberg, an associate professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Feinberg leads the Regenerative Biomaterials and Therapeutics Group, and the group’s study was published in the October 23 issue of the journal Science Advances. A demonstration of the technology can be seen below.

“As excellently demonstrated by Professor Feinberg’s work in bioprinting, our CMU researchers continue to develop novel solutions like this for problems that can have a transformational effect on society,” said Jim Garrett, Dean of Carnegie Mellon’s College of Engineering. “We should expect to see 3-D bioprinting continue to grow as an important tool for a large number of medical applications.”

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How cool is this!

Rendering of a virus used in the MIT experiments. The light-collecting centers, called chromophores, are in red, and chromophores that just absorbed a photon of light are glowing white. After the virus is modified to adjust the spacing between the chromophores, energy can jump from one set of chromophores to the next faster and more efficiently. (credit: the researchers and Lauren Alexa Kaye)

Continue reading “Engineered viruses provide quantum-based enhancement of energy transport” »

First Gene-Edited Dogs Reported in China.

An extra-muscular beagle has been created through genome engineering. Are we on our way to customizing the DNA of our pets?

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If you think the image above looks frightening, you’re right. The crazy contraption pictured in the image is the first portable railgun, a futuristic projectile launcher associated most commonly with the military or NASA. The man in the image above isn’t in the military, and he’s not a NASA engineer. Instead, he’s a civilian who used some engineering smarts, some widely available parts and a 3D printer to create a functioning weapon that can fire graphite, aluminum, tungsten and even plasma projectiles at speeds of more than 560 mph.

And then there’s the best part: There are videos of this homemade railgun in action.

Continue reading “3D printing used to make first real handheld railgun, which fires plasma projectiles at 560 mph” »

A team from Stanford University might have made a breakthrough that could change the lives of people with missing limbs. Researchers have developed an artificial substitute for skin that is capable of sensing when it is being touched and sending that data to the nervous system. It’s hoped that technology like this could be used to build futuristic prostheses that could be wired into the nervous systems of amputees. In addition, not only will these people be able to know if they’re touching something, they’ll also know how much pressure is being used.

Put very simply, the skin is comprised of two layers of rubbery plastic skin with a flexible circuit printed on, courtesy of the folks at Xerox Parc. Sandwiched between the two is a run of carbon nanotubes, which conduct electricity when they’re pushed closer together. The harder the compression, the more current passes between them, which is how the skin can understand differences in pressure.

That, however, isn’t enough, since that data would still have to be transmitted somehow into the user’s brain. In the end, the team opted to harness a field of science called optogenetics, which involves genetically-engineering cells so that they react to specific frequencies of light. By creating optogenetic neurons that are capable of sensing light patterns, the team proved that it’s possible to make this technology work in a person.

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My take on the MIT study.

Routine human missions to Mars would be much more efficient if they first swung by Earth’s Moon to pick up fuel for the trip, a new MIT strategic engineering study concludes. NASA’s 90’s-era mantra of “Back to the Moon and on to Mars” really does make sense, a new paper published in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets notes.

The idea is that a crewed mission to Mars would greatly save on fuel and launch costs if it first made an interplanetary pit stop at a space-based depot to pick up its needed fuel. In this case, such a depot would optimally be placed at the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 2 (EML2), a point of gravitational equilibrium lying beyond the Moon’s far side.

Continue reading “Why An Interplanetary Fuel Stop Makes Sense For Human Missions To Mars” »

NASA has announced the continuation of a two-phase $750,000 research award to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and project partner Honeybee Robotics to develop a small integrated autonomous robotic spacecraft system to support the exploration and mining of asteroids and other planetary bodies and moons.

Dr. Hever Moncayo and Dr. Richard Prazenica, both Assistant Professors of Aerospace Engineering in the College of Engineering are leading the effort at the Daytona Beach Campus. Also collaborating on this project is Dr. Sergey Drakunov, Professor of Engineering Physics in the Physical Sciences Department and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Kris Zacny is the team lead for Honeybee Robotics.

The Embry-Riddle team includes Aerospace Engineering master’s degree students Diego Garcia, Chirag Jain, Andres Chavez, Wai Leuk Law, Aerospace Engineering Ph.D. student Andres Perez and Engineering Physics Ph.D. student Samuel Kitchen-McKinley. The researchers are focusing on an innovative concept based on autonomous small free-flyer prospector spacecraft that can leave from, return and recharge from a mothership on the planet’s or asteroid’s surface.

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I consider Ray Kurzweil a very close friend and a very smart person. Ray is a brilliant technologist, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google focused on AI and language processing. He has also made more correct (and documented) technology predictions about the future than anyone:

As reported, “of the 147 predictions that Kurzweil has made since the 1990s, fully 115 of them have turned out to be correct, and another 12 have turned out to be “essentially correct” (off by a year or two), giving his predictions a stunning 86% accuracy rate.”

Two weeks ago, Ray and I held an hour-long webinar with my Abundance 360 CEOs about predicting the future. During our session, there was one of Ray’s specific predictions that really blew my mind.

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“Celebrating the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths”

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