Lifeboat Foundation

Featured Stories

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  Kerstin Dautenhahn joins our Robotics/AI Board. She coedited Imitation and Social Learning in Robots, Humans and Animals: Behavioral, Social, and Communicative Dimensions.

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  Gemma Calvert, who established the world’s first applied neuroimaging group, joins our Neuroscience Board.

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  Watch Productive Nanosystems: From molecules to superproducts on our Videos page.

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  Watch our new Lifeboat Foundation Introduction Video!

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  Our David Pearce has authored the special report Utopian Surgery: Early Arguments Against Anesthesia in Surgery, Dentistry, and Childbirth.
   
  Before the advent of anesthesia, medical surgery was a terrifying prospect. Its victims could suffer indescribable agony. The utopian prospect of surgery without pain was a nameless fantasy — a notion as fanciful as the abolitionist project of life without suffering still seems today. The introduction of diethyl ether CH₃CH₂OCH₂CH₃ (1846) and chloroform CHCl₃ (1847) as general anesthetics in surgery and delivery rooms from the mid-19th century offered patients hope of merciful relief. Surgeons were grateful as well: within a few decades, controllable anesthesia would at last give them the chance to perform long, delicate operations.
   
  So it might be supposed that the adoption of painless surgery would have been uniformly welcomed too by theologians, moral philosophers and medical scientists alike. Yet this was not always the case. Advocates of the “healing power of pain” put up fierce if disorganized resistance.

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  Our Scientific Advisory Board completes our BioShield program. The BioShield goals have been endorsed by U.S. Senator Bill Frist, Sun Cofounder Bill Joy, and Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil!

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  We would like to congratulate our Alan Stern for his accomplishment of New Horizons traveling 4 billion miles from Earth in the farthest flyby ever. Alan is Principal Investigator of NASA’s New Horizons probe which rang in the new year by swinging by Ultima Thule — “beyond the known world” — an object in the Kuiper asteroid belt.

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  IBM, Microsoft, and Sun employees — learn how you can get your membership fees and donations to Lifeboat Foundation matched by your employer! (This includes retired IBM employees as well!)

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  Our World News page has information about CIA Says Hackers Have Cut Power Grid: Several cities outside the U.S. have sustained attacks on utility systems and extortion demands.
   
  Read our InternetShield program for solutions!

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  The Human Race to the Future: What Could Happen — and What to Do, the first book published by the Lifeboat Foundation, has been awarded the “Peer Reviewed & Approved for Science” seal of approval by the Washington Academy of Sciences.

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  Read SHOUTING AT THE COSMOS…Or How SETI has Taken a Worrisome Turn Into Dangerous Territory by David Brin.

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  We now have a quote by Garry Kasparov on our Quotes page.

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  Dante S. Lauretta joins our Space Settlement Board.
   
  Dante is Principal Investigator of OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer), a NASA asteroid study and sample return mission.

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  Ed Begley Jr., actor, environmentalist, and founder of Begley’s Best, joins our Sustainability Board.

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  Watch a magnificent space compilation on our Videos page.