Lifeboat Foundation

CellAge, the synthetic biology company are going from strength to strength thanks to the support of the community last year during their fundraiser at Lifespan.io.

CellAge is featured in Startup Lithuania. As many of you will recall, CellAge hosted a successful project with us at Lifespan.io and they are busy developing a new aging biomarker for researchers thanks to the support of the community.

Now they are going from strength to strength having just secured a seed round backed by Michael Greve’s Kizoo Technology Capital and other investors.

Continue reading “CellAge Has Secured a Seed Fundraising Round” »

My theory, alien life will either be nearly impossible to find and we will spend centuries just looking for microbes. Or aliens will turn out to be so common that they could care less who we are and where we came from, and we will just be a new backwards species that turns up at the alien bar.

The world was electrified last year when it was suggested that scientists had spotted an “alien megastructure” orbiting a distant star.

Now a space boffin has suggested huge extraterrestrial constructions could be relatively easy to spot, so long as we look in the right place using the correct tools.

Continue reading “Gigantic ‘alien megastructures’ built by an advanced civilisation could be orbiting dozens of nearby stars, boffin says” »

Biological systems don’t completely freeze up when they encounter a new situation, but computers often do.

Biological organisms are pretty good at navigating life’s unpredictability, but computers are embarrassingly bad at it.

That’s the crux of a new military research program that aims to model artificially intelligent systems after the brains of living creatures. When an organism encounters a new environment or situation, it relies on past experience to help it make a decision. Current artificial intelligence technology, on the other hand, relies on extensive training on various data sets, and if it hasn’t encountered a specific situation, it can’t select a next step.

Continue reading “DARPA Wants Artificial Intelligence That Doesn’t Forget Everything It Knows” »

Robert Freitas wrote the ultimate guide to alien biology, culture, and more. The renowned researchers shares the story behind ‘Xenology.’

RELATED: Building Blocks for Life Found in Rosetta’s Comet

“Understanding the origin of molecular oxygen in space is important for the evolution of the Universe and the origin of life on Earth,” the researchers wrote.

The finding muddies the waters in how detecting oxygen in the atmospheres of exoplanets might not necessarily point to life, as this abiotic process means that oxygen can be produced in space without the need for life. The researchers say this finding might influence how researchers search for signs of life on exoplanets in the future.

Continue reading “Comet 67P Found to Be Producing Its Own Oxygen in Deep Space” »

A new story out on #transhumanism:

In the Basic Income America Facebook group, Zoltan Istvan, a transhumanist who recently ran for president, shared his Wired article, Capitalism 2.0: the economy of the future will be powered by neural lace. He (along with many others) argues Wall Street, law offices, engineering firms, and more will soon be mostly void of humans.

I think I mostly agree with him. Algorithms will far surpass human ability to achieve the best possible outcomes (Nash equilibrium). Having read Super Intelligence, the Master Algorithm, The Age of Em, books on evolution, lectures, interviews, etc… I think we’re approaching an important moment in human history where we have to figure out morality so we can build it into the proto-AI children we are giving birth to. I’ve even toyed around with a fun idea related to the simulation hypothesis. Maybe we exist as a simulation, repeating the birth of AI over and over again until we figure out a way to do it without destroying ourselves or turning the universe into computonium.

Continue reading “Are You Drinking the Transhumanist Kool-Aid?” »

“Sirtuins are kind of like an orchestra working together to produce a symphony, but each piece, each section, has its own role. Together you get a unified outcome, which we think is improved health.”

— Dr. Leonard Guarente

Dr. Leonard Guarente’s office in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Koch Biology Building is, at first glance, a modest room filled with the artifacts of a decades-long career as a professor and researcher: archives of important journals including Cell, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Nature; framed covers of his most important papers (he’s published more than 250); achievement awards recognizing his work in genetics and molecular biology; photos of his family; and odds and ends like a dagger presented to him by a student from Thailand and a faded bottle of The Macallan single malt scotch from 1980.

Continue reading “The Scientist Who Discovered a Master Gene to Control Aging” »

Another futurist, Dave Evans, founder and CTO of Silicon Valley stealth startup Stringify, gave his thoughts about Kurzweil’s nanobot idea in an interview with James Bedsole on February.

Evans explained that he thinks such a merging of technology and biology isn’t at all farfetched. In fact, he described three stages as to how this will occur: the wearable phase (where we are today), the embeddable phase (where we’re headed, with neural implants and such), and the replaceable phase.

Continue reading “Kurzweil: By 2030, Nanobots Will Flow Throughout Our Bodies” »

Men and women differ in obvious and less obvious ways—for example, in the prevalence of certain diseases or reactions to drugs. How are these connected to one’s sex? Weizmann Institute of Science researchers recently uncovered thousands of human genes that are expressed—copied out to make proteins—differently in the two sexes. Their findings showed that harmful mutations in these particular genes tend to accumulate in the population in relatively high frequencies, and the study explains why. The detailed map of these genes, reported in BMC Biology, provides evidence that males and females undergo a sort of separate, but interconnected evolution.

Several years ago, Prof. Shmuel Pietrokovski and Dr. Moran Gershoni of the Weizmann Institute’s Molecular Genetics Department asked why the prevalence of certain human diseases is common. Specifically, about 15% of couples trying to conceive are defined as infertile, which suggested that mutations that impair fertility are relatively widespread. This seems paradoxical: Common sense says that these mutations, which directly affect the survival of the species by reducing the number of offspring, should have been quickly weeded out by natural selection. Pietrokovski and Gershoni showed that mutations in genes specific to sperm formation persist precisely because the genes are expressed only in men. A mutation that is problematic for only half the population, no matter how detrimental, is freely passed on to the next generation by the other half.

In the present study, the researchers expanded their analyses to include genes that, though not necessary for fertility, are still expressed differently in the two sexes. To identify these genes, the scientists turned to the GTEx project—a very large study of human gene expression recorded for numerous organs and tissues in the bodies of close to 550 adult donors. That project enabled, for the first time, the comprehensive mapping of the human sex-differential genetic architecture.

Continue reading “Researchers identify 6,500 genes that are expressed differently in men and women” »