Lifeboat Foundation

— longer synthetic DNA accelerates customer discoveries —

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – January 10, 2017 – Twist Bioscience, a company accelerating science and innovation through rapid, high-quality DNA synthesis on silicon, today announced that it is now shipping genes up to 3,200 base pairs (3.2 kilobase or kB) in length to Ginkgo Bioworks under their existing supply agreement.

“Twist Bioscience continues to deliver record volumes of the highest-quality DNA to advance our organism engineering efforts, meeting or exceeding our aggressive timelines,” said Jason Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks. “With the availability of synthetic genes up to 3.2kB from Twist, we are able to expedite the rapid prototyping of organism designs to generate cosmetics, nutritional ingredients, flavors, fragrances and other important ingredients.”

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Within the next fifty years, scientists at BAE Systems believe that battlefield commanders could deploy a new type of directed energy laser and lens system, called a Laser Developed Atmospheric Lens which is capable of enhancing commanders’ ability to observe adversaries’ activities over much greater distances than existing sensors.

At the same time, the lens could be used as a form of ‘deflector shield’ to protect friendly aircraft, ships, land vehicles and troops from incoming attacks by high power laser weapons that could also become a reality in the same time period.

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If the economic and environmental impact studies clear the project, construction of the world’s first floating city could commence as soon as 2019.

Nine space-age designs have been revealed as the winners of the Moontopia competition, which asked architects and designers to visualise life on the moon.

Entrants to the Moontopia competition were asked to draw up plans for a self-sufficient lunar colony for living, working, researching and space tourism.

One winner and eight runners up were selected from hundreds of proposals submitted to the competition, which was organised by architecture and design magazine Eleven, and ran from August to November 2016.

Continue reading “Moontopia competition-winners show nine visions for lunar architecture” »

Exercise is one of the best ways to slow down aging and its free too!

(Boston) — Older adults who experience good cardiac fitness may be also keeping their brains in good shape as well.

In what is believed to be the first study of its kind, older adults who scored high on cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) tests performed better on memory tasks than those who had low CRF. Further, the more fit older adults were, the more active their brain was during learning. These findings appear in the journal Cortex. Difficulty remembering new information represents one of the most common complaints in aging and decreased memory performance is one of the hallmark impairments in Alzheimer’s disease.

Continue reading “Older, fitter adults experience greater brain activity while learning” »

Turn old water bottles into filament.

Every time there’s a new technology, criminals immediately take advantage of it, explains Steven Kotler. It’s only a matter of time before they find new, nefarious uses for 3D printing and synthetic biology.

Livin’ la vida laser.

The TeraStructure algorithm can analyze genome sets much larger than current systems can efficiently handle, including those as big as 100,000 or 1 million genomes. Finding an efficient way to analyze genome databases would allow for personalized healthcare that takes into account any genetic mutations that could exist in a person’s DNA.