Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: food – Page 253

A team of researchers at York University has warned that the American bumblebee is facing imminent extinction from Canada, and this could lead to “cascading impacts” throughout the country.

The imminent extinction classification is considered the highest and most at-risk classification before extinction.

About 42 of the more than 850 species of bees in Canada are bumblebees — important pollinators needed to grow crops, including apples, tomatoes, blueberries and legumes, as well as trees, shrubs and wildflowers.

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In a proof-of-principle study in mice, scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine report the creation of a specialized gel that acts like a lymph node to successfully activate and multiply cancer-fighting immune system T-cells. The work puts scientists a step closer, they say, to injecting such artificial lymph nodes into people and sparking T-cells to fight disease.

In the past few years, a wave of discoveries has advanced new techniques to use T-cells – a type of white blood cell – in cancer treatment. To be successful, the cells must be primed, or taught, to spot and react to molecular flags that dot the surfaces of cancer cells. The job of educating T-cells this way typically happens in lymph nodes, small, bean-shaped glands found all over the body that house T-cells. But in patients with cancer and immune system disorders, that learning process is faulty, or doesn’t happen.

To address such defects, current T-cell booster therapy requires physicians to remove T-cells from the blood of a patient with cancer and inject the cells back into the patient after either genetically engineering or activating the cells in a laboratory so they recognize cancer-linked molecular flags.

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We usually think of microwaves as waves that heat things up, usually leftover food, but did you know that they can also cool things down? For example, physicists recently decided to use them to freeze atoms, and attempts have been very successful: They managed to cool them down to within a millionth of a degree of absolute zero (–273.15°C or −459.67°F).

The University of Sussex team, led by Winifried Hensinger, had their results published in Physical Review Letters.

“The use of long-wavelength radiation instead of laser technology to cool ions can tremendously simplify the construction of practical quantum technology devices enabling us to build real devices much faster,” said Professor Hensinger.

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Environmentalism and climate change are increasingly being pushed on us everywhere, and I wanted to write the transhumanism and life extension counter argument on why I prefer new technology over nature and sustainability. Here’s my new article:

On a warming planet bearing scars of significant environmental destruction, you’d think one of the 21st Century’s most notable emerging social groups—transhumanists—would be concerned. Many are not. Transhumanists first and foremost want to live indefinitely, and they are outraged at the fact their bodies age and are destined to die. They blame their biological nature, and dream of a day when DNA is replaced with silicon and data.

Their enmity of biology goes further than just their bodies. They see Mother Earth as a hostile space where every living creature—be it a tree, insect, mammal, or virus—is out for itself. Everything is part of the food chain, and subject to natural law: consumption by violent murder in the preponderance of cases. Life is vicious. It makes me think of pet dogs and cats, and how it’s reported they sometimes start eating their owner after they’ve died.

Many transhumanists want to change all this. They want to rid their worlds of biology. They favor concrete, steel, and code. Where once biological evolution was necessary to create primates and then modern humans, conscious and directed evolution has replaced it. Planet Earth doesn’t need iniquitous natural selection. It needs premeditated moral algorithms conceived by logic that do the most good for the largest number of people. This is something that an AI will probably be better at than humans in less than two decade’s time.

Ironically, fighting the makings of utopia is a coup a half century in the making. Starting with the good-intentioned people at Greenpeace in the 1970s but overtaken recently with enviro-socialists who often seem to want to control every aspect of our lives, environmentalism has taken over political and philosophical discourse and direction at the most powerful levels of society. Green believers want to make you think humans are destroying our only home, Planet Earth—and that this terrible action of ours is the most important issue of our time. They have sounded a call to “save the earth” by trying to stomp out capitalism and dramatically downsizing our carbon footprint.

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This post has been updated.

We’ve all just barely forgotten about the great American lettuce contamination of 2018, in which we were forced to forgo romaine over Thanksgiving, and another E. coli outbreak has already hit. The Centers for Disease Control released a notice of an ongoing outbreak centralized around Kentucky earlier this month, but at the time they weren’t sure what foods were to blame for the 72 illnesses and eight hospitalizations. Nearly half of those infections were in Kentucky, with the rest in Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio, and Virginia.

On April 12 the CDC posted an update: 109 people have been sickened by E. coli so far (that the CDC is aware of), and cases have cropped up in a sixth state (Indiana). Seventeen people have gone to the hospital, but no deaths are reported at this time.

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