Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Grow-your-own organs could be available for desperately ill patients within five years, after scientists successfully transplanted bioengineered lungs into pigs for the first time.

The team at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) showed that lab-grown organs were quickly accepted by the animals, and within just two weeks had developed a network of blood vessels.

Previous attempts have failed with several hours of transplantation because the organs did not establish the complicated web of vessels needed for proper oxygen and blood flow.

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Scientists have identified a group of planets outside our solar system where the same chemical conditions that may have led to life on Earth exist.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC LMB), found that the chances for life to develop on the surface of a rocky planet like Earth are connected to the type and strength of light given off by its .

Their study, published in the journal Science Advances, proposes that stars which give off sufficient ultraviolet (UV) light could kick-start life on their orbiting in the same way it likely developed on Earth, where the UV light powers a series of chemical reactions that produce the of life.

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“We should not start from steam and railways, or the old technologies—that is already done,” Assefa argues.

That makes sense to academics like Singh — though he also cautions that political forces are often slow to see the bigger picture. There is definitely an opportunity for developing countries, he says. “But any time we have a technological revolution, the political institutions have to catch up.”

A 2017 report (pdf) by the World Wide Web Foundation suggested that Ethiopian “intelligence services are using machine intelligence techniques to break encryption and find patterns in social media posts that can be used to identify dissidents.” And while mobile phone and internet penetration in Ethiopia is comparatively poor—a situation made worst amid widespread anti-government protests, which prompted an internet crackdown in February — the report added that government surveillance and oppression could increase as the use of smartphones expands.

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Long lead time

This timeline represents quite a long lead-up for the engines and the fifth flight. Nominally, NASA now plans to make the first SLS launch in June 2020, although that date may slip into 2021 or later if further technical or hardware problems arise with the new rocket. Eventually, NASA wants to get to a cadence of one flight every year of the rocket, but that is unlikely to happen right away. Therefore, the fifth flight of the SLS rocket is unlikely before the second half of the 2020s.

There is also some question as to whether the rocket will actually make multiple flights. By the mid-2020s, Blue Origin’s large New Glenn booster should be flying. Additionally, SpaceX’s larger Big Falcon Rocket may also have begun making test flights by then. Both of these boosters would offer NASA significant lift with privately developed, reusable rockets at a fraction of the cost of the SLS rocket.

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Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University reversed hair whitening and loss associated with a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet by using an experimental compound in a mouse model [1].

The compound

The experimental compound used by the researchers, called D-threo-1-phenyl-2-decanoylamino-3-morpholino-1-propanol (D–PDMP) acts by blocking the production of glucosphingolipids (GSL), which are lipids that are abundant in the uppermost layer of the skin and in keratinocytes, which are pigment cells that are responsible for the coloration of hair, eyes, and skin.

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