Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 10842

Remember the 1980s movie Brewster’s Millions, in which a minor league baseball pitcher (played by Richard Pryor) must spend $30 million in 30 days to inherit $300 million? Pryor goes on an epic spending spree for a bigger payoff down the road.

One of the world’s biggest public companies is making that film look like a weekend in the Hamptons. Japan’s SoftBank Group, led by its indefatigable CEO Masayoshi Son, is shooting to invest $100 billion over the next five years toward what the company calls the information revolution.

The newly-created SoftBank Vision Fund, with a handful of key investors, appears ready to almost single-handedly hack the technology revolution. Announced only last year, the fund had its first major close in May with $93 billion in committed capital. The rest of the money is expected to be raised this year.

Read more

As part of its support for the application 3D printing technology to deep space exploration, NASA has awarded a $250,000 prize to a joint team consisting of members from Foster+Partners California and Branch Technology (based in Chattanooga, Tennessee).

NASA’s competition, which has now reached level three of its second phase, aims to “advance construction technology needed to create sustainable housing solutions for Earth and beyond”, most notably with the aim of accommodating astronauts on Mars and building human colonies in outer space.

Read more

It is important to note that none of the embryos were allowed to develop for more than a few days, and that the team never had any intention of implanting them into a womb. However, it seems that this is largely due to ongoing regulatory issues, as opposed to issues with the technology itself.

In the United States, all efforts to turn edited embryos into a baby — to bring the embryo to full term — have been blocked by Congress, which added language to the Department of Health and Human Services funding bill that forbids it from approving any such clinical trials.

Related: CRISPR-CAS9: The Future of Genetic Engineering (Infographic)

Read more

The cabinet also approved a slew of measures to support the development of robotics and other targeted industries to keep up with the Thailand 4.0 policy.

Industry Minister Uttama Savanayana said the measures are aimed at encouraging the manufacturing and service sectors to increase productivity through the use of robotics and automation systems.

Read more

A Chicagoland hospital system has added something new to its patients’ annual checkups: the option to get a genetic test.

Until now, DNA tests have tended to live either in the consumer realm or through referrals to specialists when a patient brings it up.

NorthShore University HealthSystem wants to bring that conversation about genetics into every doctor’s office during annual checkups.

Read more

The first time and only time I’ve been to the United States was when I carried out a summer placement at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. To get there, I had to have an interview at the U.S. embassy, where when asked what I was going to do in the U.S. I said that I’d be making diamonds. My interviewer laughed at me. But it was true, that was the experiment I was going to help out with. And now, a research collaboration of scientists from all over the world have, for the first time, created “diamond rain” in the laboratory to mimic the conditions of the interiors of icy giant planets. Dominik Kraus, scientist at Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, described this work as “one of the best moments of my scientific career.”

Icy giant planets like Neptune and Uranus in our solar system, are planets with a gaseous atmosphere and a rocky core surrounded by a dense slush of different ices. The ices are generally hydrocarbons made of heavier elements including oxygen, carbon, sulfur and nitrogen bonded to hydrogen. Under extremely high pressures, diamond rain can be seen deep inside their interiors. This occurs when the hydrogen and carbon are squeezed by extreme pressures to form solid diamonds. They then slowly sink towards the center of the icy giant forming a layer around the rocky core, just like rain sinks in our atmosphere towards the surface of Earth.

Read more