Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,616

It is a command that led the leading atheist Richard Dawkins to claim that the God of the Old Testament was “a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser … a genocidal … megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”.

For God had ordered the Israelites to slaughter the apparently sinful Canaanites, saying: “You shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them.” And, according to the Bible, they did just that.

However, a new genetic study has found that the Canaanites actually managed to survive this purge of their traditional homeland, passing on their DNA over the centuries to their numerous descendants in modern-day Lebanon.

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In the hopes of rising above the laws and regulations of terrestrial nations, a group of Silicon Valley millionaires has bold plans to build a floating city in Tahiti, French Polynesia. It sounds like the start of a sci-fi dystopia (in fact, this is the basic premise behind the video game Bioshock), but the brains behind the project say their techno-libertarian community could become a paradise for technological entrepreneurship and scientific innovation.

The Seasteading Institute was set up in 2008 by billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel and software engineer, poker player, and political economic theorist Patri Friedman. Both ardent libertarians, their wide-eyed mission is to “establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems.”

“Seasteading will create unique opportunities for aquaculture, vertical farming, and scientific and engineering research into ecology, wave energy, medicine, nanotechnology, computer science, marine structures, biofuels, etc,” their website reads.

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Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have found that stem cells in the brain’s hypothalamus govern how fast aging occurs in the body. The finding, made in mice, could lead to new strategies for warding off age-related diseases and extending lifespan. The paper was published online today in Nature.

The was known to regulate important processes including growth, development, reproduction and metabolism. In a 2013 Nature paper, Einstein researchers made the surprising finding that the hypothalamus also regulates aging throughout the body. Now, the scientists have pinpointed the in the hypothalamus that control aging: a tiny population of adult , which were known to be responsible for forming new brain neurons.

“Our research shows that the number of hypothalamic neural stem cells naturally declines over the life of the animal, and this decline accelerates aging,” says senior author Dongsheng Cai, M.D., Ph.D., (professor of molecular pharmacology at Einstein. “But we also found that the effects of this loss are not irreversible. By replenishing these stem cells or the molecules they produce, it’s possible to slow and even reverse various aspects of aging throughout the body.”

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The unique swimming strategies of natural microorganisms have inspired recent development of magnetic micro/nanorobots powered by artificial helical or flexible flagella. However, as artificial nanoswimmers with unique geometries are being developed, it is critical to explore new potential modes for kinetic optimization. For example, the freestyle stroke is the most efficient of the competitive swimming strokes for humans. Here we report a new type of magnetic nanorobot, a symmetric multilinked two-arm nanoswimmer, capable of efficient “freestyle” swimming at low Reynolds numbers. Excellent agreement between the experimental observations and theoretical predictions indicates that the powerful “freestyle” propulsion of the two-arm nanorobot is attributed to synchronized oscillatory deformations of the nanorobot under the combined action of magnetic field and viscous forces. It is demonstrated for the first time that the nonplanar propulsion gait due to the cooperative “freestyle” stroke of the two magnetic arms can be powered by a plane oscillatory magnetic field. These two-arm nanorobots are capable of a powerful propulsion up to 12 body lengths per second, along with on-demand speed regulation and remote navigation. Furthermore, the nonplanar propulsion gait powered by the consecutive swinging of the achiral magnetic arms is more efficient than that of common chiral nanohelical swimmers. This new swimming mechanism and its attractive performance opens new possibilities in designing remotely actuated nanorobots for biomedical operation at the nanoscale.

Each bot is 5 micrometres long and has three main parts, connected together like sausage links by two silver hinges. Its gold body is flanked by two magnetic arms made of nickel, and applying a magnetic field to the tiny robot makes the arms move.

The next generation bloodstream will be made from biodegradable materials before they can be used in the bloodstream. Less complicated areas in the human body like the urinary tract or the eyeballs should see clinical trials begin within the next five to 10 years. Injecting a single swimmer into an eyeball, where it could deliver medication directly to the retina and then be removed, would be much less complicated than letting a swarm of them swim throughout the entire circulatory system.

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At Jef Boeke’s lab, you can whiff an odor that seems out of place, as if they were baking bread here.

But he and his colleagues are cooking up something else altogether: yeast that works with chunks of man-made DNA.

Scientists have long been able to make specific changes in the DNA code. Now, they’re taking the more radical step of starting over, and building redesigned life forms from scratch. Boeke, a researcher at New York University, directs an international team of 11 labs on four continents working to “rewrite” the yeast genome, following a detailed plan they published in March.

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