Lifeboat Foundation

Lowell interviews the always fascinating Professor George Church in this new podcast series about aging research. Lifespan.io will be appearing on the show soon too so watch this space bigsmile

Harvard & MIT Professor, author of Regenesis, methods for 1st genome sequence (1994) & 10M-fold improvements (NGS, nanopore), genome editing, writing and recording. In this episode, we get to talk about Genghis Khan, Woolly Mammoth, storing data in DNA, advice for people getting started, and more all in under one hour!

George is one of the most interesting and down to earth people you’ll read about (might be from the future or an alien, but cannot confirm). He is always working to make all of our lives better. Anytime you are looking for inspiration, do what I do, and learn about what he and his team are working on. I always feel like I can do anything after reading or listening to the current things he is working on. I hope to one day contribute like he does! As a side note: I am working on something that was inspired from our discussion, so we shall see how that goes. If anyone is inspired after listening to him talk, please email me and let me know. We can start a fan group around George and scientists in general. Scientists are the unsung superheros of our society! Also, scroll down to the bottom to see the breadth of his work. I felt like it should be put here in it’s entirety. Hyperlinked show notes will go up tonight for this episode and the previous ones that are lacking them!

Continue reading “Dr. George Church and I Discuss the Woolly Mammoth, Human Aging, DNA Data Storage, and Other Amazing Projects Coming Out of His Lab with Advice for People Getting Started” »

Rather, they looked like whirlpools in space-time. In the universe, every part of space flowed, churned, trembled between madness and horror like fiery flames that emitted only frost. The Sun and the planets and all substance and existence seemed to be only hallucinations produced by the turbulence of space-time.

Outer space will soon seem a tad smaller.

An urban utopia on Mars might be closer than you think.

For the past year, creative professionals, students, space geeks—even families—have been creating their visions for a metropolis on the fourth planet from the sun. The final winners of the HP Mars Home Planet challenge were announced today by HP and unveiled in a VR experience at SIGGRAPH 2018, an annual computer graphics convention, in Vancouver.

“The amazing entries from the HP Mars Home Planet challenge give us a virtual window into what life on Mars could be like for a million members of humanity,” says judge Dr. Darlene Lim, a geobiologist and principal investigator, NASA Biologic Analog Science. “Technological advancement is being met by a broad array of foundational space science and planetary research—a confluence that will optimistically serve to accelerate our path toward human exploration and settlement of Mars.”

Continue reading “What does a city of one million people on Mars look like?” »

In astronomy, cutting-edge technology often begins with a bunch of bulldozers, busted rocks, and dump trucks.

So it goes with the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), which will be the world’s largest and most powerful when it sees “first light” in 2024. Astronomers hope to use the huge observatory to study the ancient universe and look for signs of alien life.

Construction crews atop a Chilean mountain range broke ground for the $US1 billion project on Tuesday.

Continue reading “A $1 Billion Telescope That Will Take Pictures 10 Times Sharper Than Hubble’s Is Now Officially Under Way” »

Finding alien life on a distant planet would be amazing news — or would it? If we are not the only intelligent life in the universe, this probably means our days are numbered and doom is certain.

See the face of the new rover.

Many people believe we aren’t the only intelligent forms of life in the Universe. So why haven’t we found any yet?

We explore some of the ramifications arising from superflares on the evolutionary history of Earth, other planets in the solar system, and exoplanets. We propose that the most powerful superflares can serve as plausible drivers of extinction events, and that their periodicity corresponds to certain patterns in the terrestrial fossil diversity record. On the other hand, weaker superflares may play a positive role in enabling the origin of life through the formation of key organic compounds. Superflares could also prove to be quite detrimental to the evolution of complex life on present-day Mars and exoplanets in the habitable zone of M- and K-dwarfs. We conclude that the risk posed by superflares has not been sufficiently appreciated, and that humanity might potentially witness a superflare event in the next $\sim {10}^{3}$ years, leading to devastating economic and technological losses. In light of the many uncertainties and assumptions associated with our analysis, we recommend that these results should be viewed with due caution.