Lifeboat Foundation

FeaturedRead our 3 books at https://lifeboat.com/ex/books.

The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards the Singularity.

Lifeboat Foundation is pursuing a variety of options, including helping to accelerate the development of technologies to defend humanity, such as new methods to combat viruses, effective nanotechnological defensive strategies, and even self-sustaining space colonies in case the other defensive strategies fail.

Continue reading “HumanityMars NEW YEAR 2030 PARTY IN MARS CITY!” »

“It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,” said Bennett.

The heart was provided by Revivicor, a company based in Virginia that has been engineering pig organs for roughly two decades. In several experiments for pig-to-baboon transplants, the organs survived up to nine months, until the animals passed away due to a lung infection unrelated to the transplant.

Overall, the heart had 10 hefty genetic edits. Three of them wiped out sugar molecules on the outside of cells that provoke an immune response. Six bolstered the chance of the human host accepting the heart—amping up an anti-inflammatory response, preventing blood vessel damage, and dampening any antibodies against the organ. Finally, the last edit limited the pig heart’s size. Although it generally matched the size of a human heart, the team wanted to prevent the pig organ from overgrowth inside Bennett’s chest once it was transplanted—something they previously noticed happened in baboons.

And it took less than a full workday. Stanford Medicine scientists and their collaborators have engineered a new genome sequencing technique that can diagnose rare genetic diseases in an average of eight hours. This is a record-breaking time frame that is leap and bounds ahead of other current advanced technologies.

Gene sequencing is crucial to advancing science! Check out why cutting time and cost is key.

Innovating Life-Saving Therapeutic Devices — Dr. Amy Throckmorton, PhD — BioCirc Research Laboratory, Drexel University School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems.

Dr. Amy Throckmorton, Ph.D. (https://drexel.edu/biomed/faculty/core/ThrockmortonAmy/) is Associate Professor and Director of the BioCirc Research Laboratory, in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, at Drexel University.

Continue reading “Dr. Amy Throckmorton, PhD — BioCirc / Drexel University — Innovating Life-Saving Therapeutic Devices” »

I don’t know how about you… But I’m meeting cyborgs in the streets regularly. If you observe carefully you can find people with artificial legs and arms. So next time watch more carefully. Its most common seen artificial body part. On other hand there are other parts you can’t see, like artificial joints, dental implants, breast implants, pacemakers, insulin pumps and so on. We are unable to see them but they are very common. Millions people use them. Nowadays very common trend is biohacking where people implant magnets and chips to their bodies. We think our bodies are born complete but we are wrong. We can upgrade and modify them. What if we can use brain implants to be smarter, to think and focus sharper.

One critical difference? Unlike a Mars mission’s “seven minutes of terror,” during which the entry, descent, and landing occur too fast for human operators to interfere, gene therapy delivery is completely blind. Once inside the body, the entire flight sequence rests solely on the design of the carrier “spaceship.”

In other words, for gene therapy to work efficiently, smarter carriers are imperative.

This month, a team at Harvard led by Dr. David Liu launched a new generation of molecular carriers inspired by viruses. Dubbed engineered virus-like particles (eVLPs), these bubble-like carriers can deliver CRISPR and base editing components to a myriad of organs with minimal side effects.

Bronze Age bioengineers created the earliest hybrid animal — a majestic horselike creature known as a kunga that had a donkey mom, a Syrian wild ass for a father and lived 4,500 years ago, according to new research based on the sequencing of DNA from the animal’s skeleton.

Descriptions and imagery in Mesopotamian art and texts portray a powerful animal that pulled war wagons into battle and royal vehicles in parades. Its true identity, however, had long puzzled and divided archaeologists. Domesticated horses didn’t arrive in the region, sometimes referred to as the Fertile Crescent, until 4,000 years ago.

One possible application of interest to researchers is bone healing. The idea is that the soft material, powered by the electroactive polymer, will be able to maneuver in spaces of complicated bone fractures and expand. When the material hardens, it can form the basis for building new bones. In their study, the researchers demonstrate that the material can wrap itself around chicken bones, and the artificial bone that develops later grows along with the animal’s bone. The developed biohybrid variable-stiffness actuators can be used in soft (micro-)robotics and as potential tools for bone repair or bone tissue engineering.

“By controlling how the material turns, we can make the microrobot move in different ways, and also affect how the material unfurls in broken bones. We can embed these movements into the material’s structure, making complex programs for steering these robots unnecessary”, says Edwin Jager.

Tech companies continued to draw criticism for their roles in political and social scandals, most notably when whisteblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testified to lawmakers. Undeterred, Facebook rebranded itself Meta and said it would now focus on building the metaverse. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down and likewise changed the name of his company Square to Block in a not-so-subtle nod to the blockchain.

Meanwhile, volatile cryptocurrencies set new records, their prices jumping and crashing on a tweet. NFTs, a once-obscure type of cryptoasset, went on an eye-watering tear as redditors pushed meme stocks skyward. It was also the year of ever-bigger AI. Machine learning models surpassed a trillion parameters, designed computer chips, and tackled practical problems in biology, math, and chemistry. Elsewhere, billionaires went to space, regular folks bought 3D printed houses, fusion power attracted billions in investment, gene editing trials hit their stride, and “flying car” companies hit the New York Stock Exchange.

For this year’s list of fascinating stories in tech and science, we sifted our Saturday posts and selected articles that looked back to where it all began, glanced ahead to what’s coming, or otherwise stood out from the chatter to stand the test of time.