Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 10670

We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Robert Shmookler Reis has joined the LEAF scientific advisory board. He studied at Harvard University (B.A.) and Sussex University (D.Phil.). He joined the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in 1980, where he holds the Udupa Chair of Gerontologic Research; he also serves as Affiliate Professor of Pathology at the Univ. of Washington in Seattle WA.

Dr. Robert Shmookler Reis is an expert in genetics whose work focuses on the molecular genetics of longevity and age-associated diseases and his team holds the world record for life extension in C. elegans (roundworms) making them live ten times their normal lifespan.

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Introducing: GPS attacks. “By creating a false signal it is possible to fool a system into thinking it’s in a different place.” Russian oligarchs undertaking piracy? Check.

“Spoofing is currently used in Russia. Around the Kremlin, GPS devices typically show the location 20 miles away,” says Nathan Brubaker, head of the cyber-physical intelligence unit at FireEye.

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Most of America is deteriorating economically.

Economic prosperity is concentrated in America’s elite ZIP Codes, but economic stability outside of those communities is rapidly deteriorating.

That’s the stark conclusion by Axios tech editor Kim Hart, in one of the most sobering pieces we have run in the eight months since we launched.

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THE numbers are stark. Cancer claimed the lives of 8.8m people in 2015; only heart disease caused more deaths. Around 40% of Americans will be told they have cancer during their lifetimes. It is now a bigger killer of Africans than malaria. But the statistics do not begin to capture the fear inspired by cancer’s silent and implacable cellular mutiny. Only Alzheimer’s exerts a similar grip on the imagination.

Confronted with this sort of enemy, people understandably focus on the potential for scientific breakthroughs that will deliver a cure. Their hope is not misplaced. Cancer has become more and more survivable over recent decades owing to a host of advances, from genetic sequencing to targeted therapies. The five-year survival rate for leukemia in America has almost doubled, from 34% in the mid-1970s to 63% in 2006-12. America is home to about 15.5m cancer survivors, a number that will grow to 20m in the next ten years. Developing countries have made big gains, too: in parts of Central and South America, survival rates for prostate and breast cancer have jumped by as much as a fifth in only a decade.

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