Lifeboat Foundation

Waiting on research advances is the rationale behind cryopreservation, and more broadly, a worldview known as transhumanism. A person killed by cancer or heart disease could reasonably be revived in a future when such ailments no longer exist. “They believe in the advance of technology,” says Giuseppe Nucci, an Italian photographer who visited with transhumanists and toured the facilities of Russia-based cryonics company KrioRus. “They hope that someone will wake them up.”

This hope, that the future will vanquish the ills of the present, is as old as the first civilisations that realized that with each passing year life got a little better. The Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov helped create an early 20th-century movement known as cosmism that was rooted in the idea that, given enough time, humans could defeat evil and death. If the human life span was too short, then the simple solution was to extend it, even after death, and suspend its decomposition until the world caught up.

Employees of a liquid nitrogen and dry ice factory on the outskirts of Moscow are shrouded in fog while refilling their liquid nitrogen tanks. Founded by former KrioRus employees, the company now supplies them. PHOTOGRAPH BY GIUSEPPE NUCCI

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Researchers have achieved a new kind of chimeric first, producing sheep-human hybrid embryos that could one day represent the future of organ donation – by using body parts grown inside unnatural, engineered animals.

With that end goal in mind, scientists have created the first interspecies sheep-human chimera, introducing human stem cells into sheep embryos, resulting in a hybrid creature that’s more than 99 percent sheep – but also a tiny, little bit like you and me.

Admittedly, the human portion of the embryos created in the experiment – before they were destroyed after 28 days – is exceedingly small, but the fact it exists at all is what generates considerable controversy in this field of research.

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Oganesson (Og) is the heaviest chemical element in the periodic table, but its properties have proved difficult to measure since it was first synthesised in 2002.

Now an advanced computer simulation has filled in some of the gaps, and it turns out the element is even weirder than many expected.

At the atomic level, oganesson behaves remarkably differently to lighter elements in several key ways – and that could provide some fundamental insights into the basics of how these superheavy elements work.

Continue reading “We Just Measured The World’s Heaviest Atom, And It’s Even Weirder Than Expected” »

Why redesigning the humble yeast could kick off the next industrial revolution.

These house plants would make a lovely addition to your home and would filter the toxins out of your air.

The study of exoplanets has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past few decades. Between ground-based observatories and spacecraft like the Kepler mission, a total of 3,726 exoplanets have been confirmed in 2,792 systems, with 622 systems having more than one planet (as of Jan. 1st, 2018). And in the coming years, scientists expect that many more discoveries will be possible thanks to the deployment of next-generation missions.

These include NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and several next-generation ground based observatories. With their advanced instruments, these and other observatories are not only expected to find many more exoplanets, but to reveal new and fascinating things about them. For instance, a recent study from Columbia University indicated that it will be possible, using the Transit Method, to study surface elevations on exoplanets.

Entrepreneur Juan Enriquez describes a future in which we will be able to hack evolution and even alter our memories thanks to DNA manipulation.

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