Lifeboat Foundation

I spoke on transhumanism for a few minutes in this BBC America show about the future that aired last night. Some of you can watch it if you have access to your cable/satellite providers.

Siblings Poppy and Georgie are on a mission to find out what the future holds for the human race, starting with a simulated trip to Mars. Next up they meet people who are hoping to survive the apocalypse before meeting a hopeful political candidate.

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“Later this year, during what passes for summer in Antarctica, a group of Chicago scientists will arrive at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole research station to install a new and enhanced instrument designed to plumb the earliest history of the cosmos.”

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Meet the world’s first cultured meatball.

Continue reading “The World’s First Cultured Meatball” »

NASA is developing a first-if-its-kind modem that incorporates light-based technology to help enable dramatically faster communications between spacecraft and ground stations.

The device, which is scheduled to be tested on board the International Space Station in 2020, is part of a broader NASA project called the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD). This laser system, which the space agency says could dramatically overhaul today’s radio frequency (RF) communications, will enable data transmissions at rates 10 to 100 times faster than what’s currently possible.

It’s not the first time NASA has experimented with laser communications in place of radio signals. In 2013, the agency achieved record-breaking download and upload speeds to and from lunar orbit – at 622 megabits per second (Mbps) and 20 Mbps respectively – with its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE).

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The year is 2021. You’re driving down the highway on your daily commute. You approach a car that’s stubbornly driving at the max speed limit. You decide to pass this overly law-abiding driver, except when you do, you discover there’s no one in the front seat.

As we learned in the first part of our Future of Transportation series, self-driving cars will become publicly available in only a few short years. But due to their component parts, they will likely be far too expensive for the average consumer. Does this mark self-driving cars as an innovation that’s dead in the water? Who’s going to buy these things?

Most articles about autonomous vehicles (AVs) fail to mention that the initial target market for these vehicles won’t be the average consumer—it will be big business. Specifically, taxi and car sharing services. Why? Let’s look at the opportunity self-driving cars represent to one of the biggest taxi/rideshare services on the planet: Uber.

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UT RESEARCHERS DEVELOP ®EVOLUTIONARY CIRCUITS

Researchers of the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology and the CTIT Institute for ICT Research at the University of Twente in The Netherlands have demonstrated working electronic circuits that have been produced in a radically new way, using methods that resemble Darwinian evolution. The size of these circuits is comparable to the size of their conventional counterparts, but they are much closer to natural networks like the human brain. The findings promise a new generation of powerful, energy-efficient electronics, and have been published in the leading British journal Nature Nanotechnology.

One of the greatest successes of the 20th century has been the development of digital computers. During the last decades these computers have become more and more powerful by integrating ever smaller components on silicon chips. However, it is becoming increasingly hard and extremely expensive to continue this miniaturisation. Current transistors consist of only a handful of atoms. It is a major challenge to produce chips in which the millions of transistors have the same characteristics, and thus to make the chips operate properly. Another drawback is that their energy consumption is reaching unacceptable levels. It is obvious that one has to look for alternative directions, and it is interesting to see what we can learn from nature. Natural evolution has led to powerful ‘computers’ like the human brain, which can solve complex problems in an energy-efficient way. Nature exploits complex networks that can execute many tasks in parallel.

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When DARPA ran a competition to find Twitter bots designed to influence online debates, it inspired a new generation of anti-bot strategies.

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NEW YORK, Jan. 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — This BCC Research report provides an in-depth study of the liquid biopsy diagnostics industry. The global market is analyzed by application, biomarker type, analysis platform, analysis purpose and geographic region. The market sizes are given for the years 2014, 2015 and 2020.

Use this report to: Analyze the market for liquid biopsy diagnostics in depth. Gain information on liquid biopsy technologies, clinical applications, industry structure, important liquid biopsy funding initiatives, global markets, patent status and companies. Learn about some of the top research initiatives that are contributing to liquid biopsy development. Gain information on various liquid biopsy diagnostics markets, including for reproductive health, cancer and transplant diagnostics

Highlights.

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NGS — news flash; gene editing corrects genetically linked liver disease.

For the first time, researchers have treated an animal model of a genetic disorder using a viral vector to deliver genome-editing components in which the disease- causing mutation has been corrected. Delivery of the vector to newborn mice improved their survival while treatment of adult animals, unexpectedly, made them worse, according to a new study by investigators from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania The team published their findings in Nature Biotechnology.

“Correcting a disease-causing mutation following birth in this animal model brings us one step closer to realizing the potential of personalized medicine,” said senior author James Wilson, MD, PhD, a professor of Medicine and director of the Orphan Disease Center at Penn. “Nevertheless, my 35-year career in gene therapy has taught me how difficult translating mouse studies to successful human treatments can be. From this study, we are now adjusting the gene-editing system in the next phases of our investigation to address the unforeseen complications seen in adult animals.” Wilson is also director of the Penn Gene Therapy Program.

Continue reading “Penn study has implications for developing safe therapies for an array of rare diseases via new gene cut-and-paste methods” »