Lifeboat Foundation

While many futures are generalists, there is a need for foresight professionals centered on specific fields, as well. Perhaps no area is more in need of innovative outlooks for the future than healthcare. With rising costs, aging populations and personnel shortages, the challenges are many. But so are the opportunities to employ emerging technologies. In the first part of a two part series, host Mark Sackler discusses these challenge with two nursing Ph.D.’s, Oriana Beaudet and Dan Pesut. Part One addresses the need for foresight both in nursing specifically and healthcare in general, as well as the global challenges of an aging population. Part two will drill down to individual ssues, including automation, robotics and artificial intelligence as caregiving tools for the future.

The televised gala, broadcast on the National Geographic Channel as well as YouTube and China’s Tencent, whose founder Ma Huateng is also a sponsor, played heavily on a theme that’s become somewhat tarnished in Silicon Valley in recent years—that scientific and technological progress will solve humanity’s biggest problems. For the past two years, Facebook and Google have both been battered by lawmakers and the public for how they’ve failed to eliminate the spread of fake news, conspiracy theories (sometimes about science) and content that connects violent extremists. Both Zuckerberg and Pichai have also countered rising complaints from the tech giants’ workforces.

Some of the top scientists who accepted Breakthrough Prize awards used the nationally broadcast ceremony to decry the spread of misinformation, problems that continue to dog the tech giants whose leaders, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, celebrated at the glitzy Silicon Valley gala Sunday evening.

“Science is a rock of truth in a sea of fake news,” said physicist Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, who with collaborators Sergio Ferrara and Daniel Freedman accepted an award Sunday evening for their work around the theory of supergravity.

Continue reading “At Gala Held” »

Holon-based cancer immunotherapy company Compugen disclosed encouraging preliminary results on Tuesday from its Phase 1 clinical trial for an antibody acting against a novel cancer drug target (PVRIG) in patients with advanced solid tumors.

The Nasdaq and Tel Aviv-listed company, a pioneer in predictive drug target discovery, has developed innovative computational discovery platforms to identify new drug targets and subsequently produce first-in-class therapeutics. The clinical trial of the anti-PVRIG antibody, called COM701, aimed to assess the safety of escalating doses of the therapy in patients with advanced solid tumors, but also demonstrated initial signals of anti-tumor activity in the heavily pre-treated patient population enrolled in the study.

“We are encouraged by the emerging safety profile and initial signals of anti-tumor activity of COM701,” said Compugen president and CEO Dr. Anat Cohen-Dayan.

Liz Parish, CEO of BioViva and Bill Faloon, Co-Founder of Life Extension talk about new breakthroughs in age reversal.

This interview was conducted, by Richard Peritz during RAADfest 2019, to be included in a broadcast on ABC TV-25 in Palm Beach Florida, and other networks nationwide.

Very interesting.

Numerous vaccines, from flu shots to those those that help thwart chickenpox and measles, are widely used to guard against contagion, but researchers in France are proposing a breakthrough role for rotavirus vaccines: deploying them in cancer treatment.

Scientists from throughout France—Paris, Lyon, Villejuif and beyond—are part of a large research team that has asked a tantalizing question: Can rotavirus vaccines be repurposed to overcome resistance in cancer immunotherapy? The team is focusing on resistance that emerges to the form of cancer treatment known as checkpoint blockade immunotherapy.

Continue reading “Rotavirus vaccine: A potential new role as an anticancer agent” »

This is yet another glaring example of the innovative spirit of Silicon Valley. The startup has been successfully testing the novel idea on its El Camino Real spacecraft — launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket in July 2019. Momentus will continue to perform simulations on its spacecraft for the next few months to gather enough data to compare it with the results of the ground tests to validate the proper functioning of the new system.

It’s spacecraft, El Camino Real, is a 16-unit CubeSat integrated by Astro Digital — a spacecraft manufacturer and geospatial data analysis company based out of California as well. Momentus has already secured funding of $34 million funding to develop two shuttles, Vigoride and Vigoride Extended, which will maneuver satellites between orbits.

The most prominent application for this is when new satellites are deployed in orbits via rockets. When the former is dropped off in orbits, they can be moved to optimal positions using this technology in a cheap & efficient manner. Momentus originally started off in 2018 as a transportation service for small satellites seeking rides to medium Earth, geostationary or low lunar orbit.

Residents of El Talento, a small town in Colombia adjacent to the city of Cúcuta, have been introduced to the GEN-M, Watergen’s medium-scale atmospheric generator that produces water out of air, October 2019. Photo: Courtesy.

JNS.org – Residents of El Talento, a small town in Colombia adjacent to the city of Cúcuta, have been introduced to the GEN-M, Watergen’s medium-scale atmospheric generator (AWG) that produces water out of air.

The machine, a technological innovation of the Israel-based company, arrived in Cúcuta at the beginning of October thanks to Andrés Suárez, pastor of the Christian Center and general manager of the alliance project with the State of Israel in Colombia.

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We face complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty about the future consequences of cryptocurrency use. There are doubts about the positive and negative impacts of the use of cryptocurrencies in the financial systems. In order to address better and deeper the contradictions and the consequences of the use of cryptocurrencies and also informing the key stakeholders about known and unknown emerging issues in new payment systems, we apply two helpful futures studies tools known as the “Future Wheel”, to identify the key factors, and “System Dynamics Conceptual Mapping”, to understand the relationships among such factors. Two key scenarios will be addressed. In on them, systemic feedback loops might be identified such as a) terrorism, the Achilles’ heel of the cryptocurrencies, b) hackers, the barrier against development, and c) information technology security professionals, a gap in the future job market. Also, in the other scenario, systemic feedback loops might be identified such as a) acceleration of technological entrepreneurship enabled by new payment systems, b) decentralization of financial ecosystem with some friction against it, c) blockchain and shift of banking business model, d) easy international payments triggering structural reforms, and e) the decline of the US and the end of dollar dominance in the global economy. In addition to the feedback loops, we can also identify chained links of consequences that impact productivity and economic growth on the one hand, and shift of energy sources and consumption on the other hand.

Watch the full length presentation at Victor V. Motti YouTube Channel