Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,570

Axiom will soon finalize contract for first Space Tourist flight aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon

SpaceX launched its first crewed mission to ISS in May this year. The company demonstrated its spacecraft is safe and reliable to carry humans to space and back. Axiom’s space tourist mission with SpaceX is scheduled to be a 10-day journey that will launch civilians aboard Crew Dragon to the space station atop a Falcon 9 rocket. The space tourists will stay at ISS for 8 days, where they will experience microgravity and amazing views of our planet.

SpaceX’s first private civilian flight will carry three Axiom customers who will fly alongside former NASA Astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, he will be commander during the mission. Earlier this year, NASA and SpaceX announced Hollywood actor Tom Cruise will film a movie at the space station and fly aboard Crew Dragon. Then, reports surfaced about Cruise and his film production agency working with Axiom is responsible for providing ‘training, mission planning, hardware development, life support, medical support, crew provisions, hardware and safety certifications, on-orbit operations and overall mission management.’ However, Axiom has not officially disclosed who their private passengers will be on their first mission in collaboration with SpaceX.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink is neuroscience theater

Rock-climb without fear. Play a symphony in your head. See radar with superhuman vision. Discover the nature of consciousness. Cure blindness, paralysis, deafness, and mental illness. Those are just a few of the applications that Elon Musk and employees at his four-year-old neuroscience company Neuralink believe electronic brain-computer interfaces will one day bring about.

None of these advances are close at hand, and some are unlikely to ever come about. But in a “product update” streamed over YouTube on Friday, Musk, also the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, joined staffers wearing black masks to discuss the company’s work toward an affordable, reliable brain implant that Musk believes billions of consumers will clamor for in the future.

“In a lot of ways,” Musk said, “It’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires.”

French Court Asks Microsoft for Safeguards Against U.S. Surveillance of Health Data

U.S. company can keep hosting vast coronavirus-related project but must protect French citizens’ health data from American government, court rules.

A French court has ruled that Microsoft Corp. can continue hosting a government-run project aggregating citizens’ anonymous health data to use for AI-based research, but must guarantee no data will be sent to the U.S. or be shared with American intelligence authorities.

The ruling, handed down last week, contradicts the stance of France’s data protection authority, which told the court this month that any U.S. cloud provider could be forced to comply with U.S. surveillance laws and should therefore not be allowed to host sensitive health data. The regulator’s opinion could provide clues for other companies handling such data, legal experts say.

Companies are wrestling with tricky decisions about moving their data from the European Union to the U.S., following a court decision this summer that required personal data transferred there to include special guarantees against surveillance by the American government.

The Elysium effect: The coming backlash to the billionaire ‘NewSpace’ revolution

In the 2013 science fiction film “Elysium” starring Matt Damon, Earth’s wealthiest 0.01% move to the ultimate gated community, a luxurious orbiting space colony, leaving a poverty-stricken humanity to fend for themselves on a ravaged planet.

Interestingly, it is indeed some of today’s 0.1% who are leading the way into space to build communities beyond Earth. However, quite the opposite of the movie, their goals are of the highest order, from democratizing access to space by lowering costs, to creating new products and ideas, to helping save the planet and opening space to future generations.

Yet, given the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, social justice and green movements, even as entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson spend billions to support a human breakout into space, there is a backlash building that holds these projects as icons of extravagance — even as their work may help save the Earth. This is the “Elysium effect.”

New CRISPR-Based Imaging Tool Is Going to Be HiUGE

A team of researchers at Duke University have developed an imaging technology for tagging structures at a cellular level that overcomes the shortcomings of existing antibody-based techniques. Immunofluorescence imaging is a key part of the cell biologist’s toolbox, in which a fluorescent ‘flare’ attached to an antibody allows them to visualize the presence of specific target proteins in cell or tissue samples. The issue is that this specificity isn’t always 100 percent — sometimes the antibodies bind to other closely related proteins as well, making it difficult to interpret the results.

Duke’s cell biology chair Scott Soderling has led a team that developed Homology-independent Universal Genome Engineering (HiUGE), an innovation that uses gene-editing technology to rise above the shortcomings of traditional commercial antibodies for imaging.

“We had this idea that CRISPR could be a really amazing tool to address the pressing problem of trying to identify and label these hundreds of proteins,” said Soderling.

Happiness and the Evolution of Brain Size

Summary: Study reveals a new role for serotonin in the development of the human neocortex. Serotonin acts cell-extrinsically as a growth factor for basal progenitors in the developing neocortex. Researchers report placenta-driven serotonin likely contributed to the evolutionary expansion of the neocortex in humans.

Source: Max Planck Society

During human evolution, the size of the brain increased, especially in a particular part called the neocortex. The neocortex enables us to speak, dream and think. In search of the causes underlying neocortex expansion, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, together with colleagues at the University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus Dresden, previously identified a number of molecular players. These players typically act cell-intrinsically in the so-called basal progenitors, the stem cells in the developing neocortex with a pivotal role in its expansion.

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